PART 5 - FINDING GOD IN THE DETAILS

Mongolian Wedding Tapestry

  Sometimes God is in the details.  That’s a saying I’ve heard all my life. Details are important.  I have a beautiful tapestry I bought on a mission’s trip in Mongolia. The tapestry itself, as a whole, is pretty, but not really something I would have bought for my home.  What sold me were the details.  It’s an antique tapestry traditionally made for a newly wed couple.  Each stitch in this 4 foot by 6 foot work of art has been hand stitched, the colors carefully chosen. The intricate design planned with a specific meaning. I was captivated by the purpose behind those amazing details and I had to have one.  It’s a treasure that I don’t plan on parting with.  

 When you or someone you love needs healing and healing doesn’t come right away, it’s easy to begin to think maybe God has forgotten you.  When we first started on this journey, we just believed for a miracle healing to take place in Ed’s body.  That was it.  I hoped every time he had a doctor’s appointment that they would just suddenly be unable to find anything wrong - miraculously healed- overnight. 

That’s what I wanted. 

 It seemed like the best way, to me. for God to be glorified in this situation.  But also, if I’m honest, maybe I thought it was the easiest way to get through this quickly without it interrupting or changing our lives in any significant way.  Maybe it would have lifted our faith a little, but we really wouldn’t have learned anything more than we already knew about God - we already knew he was a miracle healing God.  We’ve seen Him do it countless times.

  We began to realize that God was weaving our tapestry in different way than we would have chosen.  We needed Him to hand stitch the details of our life with a purpose that only He could create —miraculously.

  Now that we were moving towards transplant, one BIG detail was how we would manage to keep pastoring our church and give Ed time to recover.  We were in a good season at our church after coming through a difficult one.  God was doing some amazing things, but the ministry required all of both of us at that time.  It was an exciting time but an exhausting time as well and coupled with Ed’s illness only made it more exhausting for him.  He was tired.  We both were. And taking a break for surgery and recovery just didn’t seem possible. 

  It was in the middle of this detail dilemma that we got another phone call. The call came from a church on the Outer Banks of North Carolina – my hometown, They asked us to pray about and consider moving there where Ed would become the Family Life pastor.  We had received calls like this before. Actually during the difficult season I mentioned earlier, we had received three. We said no to all of them because we did not feel God was releasing us at that time.

            But this one was different…..

                                               and that caught us by surprise,

   

  As we prayed about it, we realized that God was in this and He was working out this detail in a way that only He could, This was an opportunity to do all the things we love about ministry without some of the administrative duties that we don’t love!  It was a chance to live a slower paced “beach life”.  More importantly we saw the need for this ministry and we felt God burdening our hearts to do it. 

We said yes.

Moving Day

  In the summer of 2012, we said goodbye to our church family. We loaded the moving truck and made the fifteen hour drive to our new home at The Ark Int’l Church in Nags Head, North Carolina,  We settled into a cute little beach cottage that the church had lovingly prepared for us.   

Sitting here,  over a year later, I am amazed at all the details God put into place for us. 

    - What church would actually hire a new staff member who was sick and   

       needed to take a break immediately after getting here? Yet this church 

       family welcomed us, loved us, and taken care of us through the most 

       difficult time we’ve ever faced. 

    - He placed us near my family where we could have their support.  My mom 

      and dad actually only live a few blocks away from us. My brother and his 

      family decided to move home too and their jobs were provided so quickly 

      that they actually moved before we did. For the first time in 20 years, we 

      all live near each other and it’s been so comforting to have them close by.

  

    - He placed us near Duke Hospital which is rated third in the nation for 

      kidney disease treatments.  They have been amazing and provided Ed 

      with exceptional medical care.

 God was weaving our tapestry with intricate details and with each new detail came a newer stronger level of faith. In a few months time this would all be finished and we could hang it up, see God’s handiwork, and return to our normal life or so I thought…

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PART 4 - A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN

  It was a typical Sunday afternoon, when the phone rang.  It was my parents.  There was nothing unusual about that. Since they lived in North Carolina, it was our habit to talk on Sunday afternoon and catch up.  This time however, it was just my mom, and I could tell she had something pressing to tell me.  “I want to be tested to see if I am a match for Ed’s kidney.”

  The fact my mom wanted to do this really didn’t surprise me. She is the most selfless person I know.  She’s the kind of person that would give away anything she has to some one, family or not, and she does so with a humble, quiet spirit.  She loves to serve and has a true servant’s heart and I love that about her.  But to be honest, I didn’t want her to do it.  The thought of having my husband and my mom on the operating table at the same time was just more than I could handle.  I would rather it be me. I could tell though, by the tone of her voice she had made up her mind and there was no changing it, so I agreed.  I knew there such a slim chance of her being a close enough match anyway that this door would probably close, but I loved her for wanting to make such a sacrifice.

  A few weeks later, I received the results of my antigen test. I matched 3 out of 6 antigens! Remember, there was only a 50 percent chance of this happening if I was his blood relative and a 1 in 100,000 chance of this happening as a non blood relative.   He now affectionately refers to me as “Sis”! (I know that’s kinda creepy, right?)  But here’s where it gets good.  The following week my moms test came back as well.  She also matched 3 out of 6 antigens!!

Only God!

  To say that our nephrologist was left speechless was an understatement.  He had never seen this before.  It was decided on the doctors recommendation, that my mom should be the first to donate. She would be out of the age range for donation if another transplant was needed in the future A transplanted kidney can last on average 10 years, sometimes longer, sometimes less.  That way mine would be available in the future if needed. 

  I had still had a lot of anxiety about having my mom and my husband on that operating table but little by little God was whittling down my fears and replacing them with faith.

A faith was bigger than I had ever walked out before.  A faith that required me to relinquish my grip and let go of all the “what ifs”… and just trust…no matter what.

The next few months would hold a lot more unknowns but it was clear that God wasn’t finished yet.

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PART 3: WHEN OPPOSITES ATTRACT

Our Wedding Day - 1992 (hence, the puffy sleeves!)

  The goal was always to transplant before dialysis was needed because once a patient starts dialysis it can cause more complications after transplant.  A lot of people do not have a choice but to go on dialysis due to not receiving a donor in time.  While Ed’s kidney function percentage remained low, and the deciding number that leads to the need for dialysis remained steady which was baffling to doctors.  But at the urging of our nephrologists, as Ed’s kidney function numbers began to decline, we began to prepare for transplant. 

  There are several factors involved in this, the first one being blood type.  After being tested we discovered that Ed’s blood type is AB positive.  It is one of the rarest blood types (only 3.4% have this type) and actually in this instance worked in his favor.  One factor of its rarity is that it actual means he is a “universal recipient” – meaning he has the unique ability to receive a kidney from any blood type. This was fantastic news because it meant that he would actually be moved up on the transplant waiting list from years to months (about three to be exact).    In the words of the doctor “If you have to be a transplant patient then you are the blood type everyone wants to be”. This fact made transplant before dialysis possible but it didn’t necessarily bring the success rate of the transplant up.  The doctor informed us that while this was great news, a live donor, if we could possibly find a match, would be the best. 

  In finding a good match for a kidney transplant they look at a lot of factors,  but the main indicator after blood type(which was already covered) is finding matching antigens (sort of the like the DNA that makes up your blood type, there are thousands of combinations). Blood relatives usually have a better chance of being the closest match. A good sibling match can have 3 out of 6 matching antigens.  There is only a 50 percent chance that siblings will meet that criteria.  However, because of the fact that all of Ed’s immediate family also carries this disease except one who was disqualified due to other medical issue’s a blood relative match just wasn’t available.   

  Naturally as his wife, I was the first one to be tested for a possible match (just as a side note: my blood type is 0 negative which actually makes me a universal donor who “just happens” to married to a universal recipient …opposites attract!!) 

  When I met my husband I was 19 years old, he was 23.  Most of my life, I knew that God had a call to ministry on my life.  As I grew older, that scared me to death. When I finally went to Bible College a year after graduating high school, I went determined to get my degree and get back home. I had no intentions of meeting anyone, especially someone that would be a pastor.  When I met Ed, it was by “accident”.  We were complete opposites.   

 I like spicy foods, he didn’t.  

  I love the outdoors, especially the beach, he doesn’t. 

 He likes sports, I don’t.  

  He had lived in the same state, same town, and pretty much the same house all his life.  I had lived in 4 states, several cities, and never lived on the same house for more than 5 years.  

 But there was something about “us” that we couldn’t shake.  We had a great time together and I fell in love with his heart. All the normal attractions that cause two people to fall in love were there, but we both will admit that it always felt like there was more to our “us” than just us.  It felt like we needed to be together for a purpose. 

 At the risk of sounding completely stereotypical, it felt like a “God thing”.

   Two months after we met for the first time, we were engaged and 8 months after that we were married and starting life together in ministry.  It has not always been easy and we have had to work at being compatible.  But no matter how difficult, that “purpose”, has kept us, and through the years (21yrs now) our differences have actually proven to be our strengths. 

  We had to laugh that day as we sat at the clinic and discovered our opposite blood types actually would work together because only God could take two people living in two different states and bring them together and despite their opposite personalities, cause them to fall in love, marry, and work together in ministry for 21 years.  

 He planned “us” with a purpose even down to our blood type. 

  We waited for the results of the antigen testing to come back praying it would match enough for transplant. For a non-blood relative those chances are 1 in 100,000. Sometimes God just does things that are really neat and this had already been one of those times, but what was about to unfold in the next few weeks was more amazing than we could ever have imagined…

^“Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us…”Ephesians 3:20 (ESV)

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