In My Desperation, I Found Jesus to Be More Than Enough

I climbed the front steps of our duplex, trying my best to act as if everything was fine. I didn’t want my mother to know what had just occurred; it was far too embarrassing to talk about. As we sat at the kitchen table, my mind kept wandering back to that afternoon. I had been so excited to walk home from school on my own. I was so focused on not tripping that I didn’t notice the group of boys approaching from behind until they started shouting “Cripple!” and throwing stones at my back. One of them pushed me, and I fell to the ground. The boys then ran away immediately, not even bothering to check if I was hurt. I waited for a while, hoping someone would come to my aid, but when no one did, I used a nearby rock to pull myself up and made my way home, feeling defeated.

I was only 7 years old at the time.

From that moment on, I became convinced that life was unfair. And in a way, I was right. Throughout elementary school, my classmates bullied me. They made fun of me, mimicked my obvious limp, and made me feel like an outcast. But I didn’t tell my family. I thought there was no point; they couldn’t stop the bullying anyway. I even started blaming God for it, doubting his existence.

The teasing continued until high school, when I finally started to feel accepted. People thought I was brave and kind, but they had no idea how angry I was on the inside. I pretended to have faith because I grew up going to church, but God didn’t mean anything to me. I thought everyone was just faking it, that no one actually read the Bible or prayed privately. So, I was really surprised when, in high school, I attended a Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) meeting and heard a classmate talk sincerely about her faith. Her father had just passed away, yet she felt an indescribable closeness to God. Jesus was real to her.

For months, her story stayed with me. When a close friend also became a Christian, I knew I had to reevaluate my lack of belief. But I still couldn’t help wondering, if God is so good, why am I handicapped?

Encountering Jesus

One night, as I lay in bed thinking about this, I finally said out loud, “God, if you’re real, please show me.” The next morning, I woke up and, unlike my usual self, opened the Bible. I flipped through the pages randomly until I landed on John 9 and started reading. “As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’”

This passage immediately caught my attention. The disciples’ question was similar to the ones I’d heard throughout my life. Why did I walk differently? What was wrong with me? What had I done to deserve this? Their questions combined with my own: What had I done to endure all this suffering?
Jesus’s answer to the disciples stunned me. “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Jesus recognized that the blind man’s condition wasn’t his fault. Instead of judging him, Jesus respected and honored him. The blind man’s suffering wasn’t a punishment; God was going to use his life to show his power. God’s works would be revealed through him.

I started to wonder if God could be saying the same about me. It seemed hard to believe that he would use my pain for something good, but I had a feeling he would. I knelt beside my bed and dedicated my life to a God I didn’t know well but who surely knew me.

I was 16 years old.

Didn’t God Owe Me an Easy Life?

After that, I was full of excitement for the future. I was certain that God would make my life smooth and successful. I thought I deserved it. At first, things seemed to go just as I wanted.

But when I turned 30, my life started to fall apart. My husband and I faced a serious marriage crisis, and I was afraid our marriage wouldn’t survive. After more than a year of intense counseling, just as we were starting to rebuild trust, we learned that our unborn son, Paul, had a life – threatening heart problem. I asked God why I had to go through yet another difficult thing. What had I done wrong?
Even though I had a supportive community around me, nothing could truly comfort me during that time. No distractions, no hobbies, and no other forms of relief could ease my pain. All I had was the Lord. And I discovered that he was truly sufficient.
Paul had a successful surgery right after he was born, and the doctors were pleased with his progress. When we took him for a routine check – up, he was doing so well that the substitute doctor took him off his medicine, saying he looked great. We were overjoyed as we went home, but our happiness didn’t last long. Two days later, Paul woke up in the middle of the night, let out a scream, and went limp in our arms. We rushed him to the emergency room, but the doctors couldn’t save him. Paul died when he was just 2 months old.
His death was a huge shock. Every night, I would wake up, longing to take care of him and hold him. The pain was almost too much to bear. I couldn’t understand how God could do this to me. This wasn’t the wonderful life I had expected. I wanted to distance myself from this God who now seemed unpredictable and untrustworthy.
I tried to push God away for as long as I could, but in my desperation, I turned back to him and pleaded for him to be with me. I knew I couldn’t go through this alone. And just like when I was 16, he was there for me, and I was reminded of the words in John 9. Even though I didn’t understand why, I was certain that “[this happened] that the works of God might be displayed in [Paul’s death].”

Finding Peace in God Alone

Still, I wondered how much more I could take. Next, I was diagnosed with post – polio syndrome. In the long run, it meant I would become completely paralyzed, and in the short term, it meant I had to rely on others for basic tasks.
Then, my husband of 18 years told me he was leaving me for someone else. A few weeks later, he moved to another state. We had worked so hard to build a loving and trusting marriage, and it was hard to believe it was falling apart. Now, I was a single parent with limited physical strength, taking care of two teenage daughters whose worlds were also falling apart. Our once – peaceful home now felt like a battlefield.
This loss felt even more unfair than the others because now I had no one to share the burden with. I was exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally as I homeschooled my two girls, who started to question their faith after our family broke up.
In my despair, God showed me his love. I had known about God’s love and presence for years, but now I turned to him for everything. Even with a loving community around me, nothing else could truly support me. I realized that the Lord was all I had, and he was more than enough. I found that spending time with God, reading the Bible, and talking to Jesus brought me more happiness than anything else in my life ever had.
I came to understand that he is all we truly have, even when life seems to be going well.
We’re all lost until Jesus finds us. Through the story of the man born blind, I came to know who Jesus is and why he created me. He is the Creator and the Redeemer. Through the miracle of his resurrection, Jesus brings life in the midst of death.
I’m incredibly grateful that Christ entered my life when I was 16 through the words in John 9, and I look forward to spending eternity with him. But I’m also thankful for my suffering because it has transformed me and made me love God even more. I feel the same way as Joni Eareckson Tada, who said, “I wouldn’t trade places with anyone to be this close to Jesus.”

Editors’ note:
This is an adapted excerpt from Lost and Found: How Jesus Helped Us Discover Our True Selves (The Gospel Coalition, 2019), edited by Collin Hansen.