I hopped on my Instagram one morning a few months ago to reply to some messages and make a post. As I did, I inadvertently noticed a piece of information about my account that was rather surprising and discouraging. Huh. That’s strange, I thought to myself as I closed the app and moved on to getting ready for the day.
My body had been sounding an alarm that something was seriously off, and my symptoms were growing increasingly strange. What began as a small rash had grown into an unsettling set of problems: numbness in my toes, tingling in my hands and feet, sharp and quick bursts of nerve pain throughout my body — it felt like my nervous system had been turned up to high. While laying down, my heart would pound and I felt like I was breathing through a filter.
Eric and I spent the first ten years of our marriage speaking in churches and Christian gatherings around the country, as well as overseas. As a young Christian stepping into the excitement of full-time ministry, I had romanticized ideals about what traveling from church to church would be like. It didn’t take long before those ideals were shattered. While we did meet many truly committed and victorious Christians, we also encountered an uncomfortable amount of counterfeit leaders and hypocritical believers.
I vividly remember a particularly exhausting season when Eric and I had recently welcomed our fourth child. We were trying to maintain our sanity with four children under the age of five, two of them still in diapers.
It was the summer of 1978. The blazing summer sun beat down on the 35,000 excited people who had gathered near Salem, Oregon for the Jesus Northwest Festival. Campsites were overflowing with thousands of tents. The scene resembled a Christian version of a Woodstock hippie gathering. Excitement and chaos was in the air.
When Amy Carmichael set off for Japan on her first missionary venture as a young woman in her twenties, almost immediately she faced unexpected disaster. As her ship approached the shoreline, it was caught in the tail end of a typhoon — causing it to pitch back and forth sickeningly, making landing impossible. She had already said a heart-wrenching “forever goodbye” to her beloved friends and family in England. Now, she was completely alone on a foreign ship on the other side of the world, and caught in a deadly storm.