My Testimony of God’s Nearness in Trouble
“In the whole land, declares the Lord, two thirds shall be cut off and perish, and one third shall be left alive. And I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested. They will call upon my name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘They are my people’; and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God’”Zechariah 13: 8, 9.
My Testimony of God’s Help in Trouble
My son Sam’s cancer relapsed in September of 2003. He was 13 years old. The Lord gave me this precious promise for him on the day we got the news from the doctor that he only had one chance in three to live five years.
Click here to read the surrounding passage for context.
I used a daily promise calendar back then, and this was the promise for that very day. This is an obscure passage. It’s certainly not one you would normally think would be in this type of lightweight scripture encouragement.
A Hopeless Situation
But it addressed the one chance in three the doctor had spoken of. Because of that I had peace and freedom from anxiety much of the time.
But a month later he ended up in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit because all the intense chemo knocked out his immune system. And the one chance of three of survival to boot. Now his chances were zero.
He has gotten a strep infection in his IV line. Then he developed a fungal infection in his lung. This was more serious than even the worst bacterial infection. Because there were no good drugs for it.
Then he developed sepsis from the strep infection. Right on the heels of this he got ARDS, which at the time, there was no treatment for. Your own body has to do the work of absorbing the fluid in the lungs.
And if it can’t, you die.
Then he mysteriously sustained brain damage to his brain stem. The neurologist said this could very well prevent him from having more chemo and the bone marrow transplant, without which there would be no hope of survival.
My Testimony of God’s Nearness in Trouble
I had been battling little arrows of doubt about the Zechariah promise (at the top of the page), for a few days. How do I know Sam is the “third part”?
But the news of the brain damage put me over the edge. It sent me to me to my apartment (just off the PICU) crying out to God, “Lord, how do I know Sam is the third part and that the promise is for us?”
I was feeling all alone in my pain and fear and desperate for hope. As I prayed, I decided to read my promise for the day from the promise calendar.
The Promise is for You and Your Children
The promise was Acts 2: 39: “For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”
What are the chances that this particular verse would be my promise for the day? I don’t think there’s any other verse in the entire bible that could have addressed my concerns that day so precisely. That’s amazing!
It was as though the Lord had directly answered my question spoken only moments earlier. And, as they say, the rest is history.
Even though the doctors never did figure out what caused the brain damage, Sam did end up having his bone marrow transplant in February of 2004. It went perfectly with no complications at all.
He made it through those first critical 100 days. And he is alive and well to tell about it 20 years later! That’s my testimony of God’s help in trouble. To read another post related to this see Fighting the Giants in Canaan Then and Now.