Childhood
When I was a child my life was pretty simple. I went to a private school and attended a small Lutheran church with my mom and dad. What made it interesting was being part of one of the very few Hispanic/Caucasian families in town. Oh and my dad was 50+ years older then my mom. From the start people would always give us terrible looks and that definitely began to stir up a sense that I am not accepted. Some people of course would be kind but you could always hear others snickering in the background about how wrong and messed up our family is because of the age and racial difference in my parents. They were good parents but also fought a lot and there was a lot of racism in my dad's side of the family as well. Most of my dad's siblings would sneer and make immigration remarks toward my mom inadvertently. Between that and the feuding my parents had at home, mom crying and screaming wishing that she could go back to Costa Rica, and dad getting frustrated with her, left me in quite a confused state of belonging and what life should look like. I did become a Christian in the midst of all this though at some youth convention I ended up at. No big deal though really, or so it seemed, because my life stayed the same. Don't get me wrong, my life wasn't that bad, perhaps incredibly awkward at times but nothing like a lot of people go through and have to tolerate at home.
A New Season
Halfway through my sixth grade year of school my dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, after switching from a doctor who told him that it was simply his age that had been making his body hurt and feel different. Although his symptoms were not normal and he refused to run any sort of test. We went to Costa Rica for a month or two visiting my mom's family that summer and he was absolutely miserable reading up on how to deal with this form of cancer and what life was going to look like for him from here on out. When we returned home he was taken in for more testing and was diagnosed with multiple myloma. This is an incurable bone cancer. My dad was going to die. From that appointment in mid-summer he was given until Christmas or so to live. The stage four cancer was already brutally destroying his bones and infecting all of his bodily tissue. As we began to even then mourn his death expecting the worst wondering how mom and I would make it, Christmas rolled by and he was still here and going strong. He was then put on a new kind of chemo that was in testing. Being on that for over a year, I got to see the very worst a persons immune system can look. Understanding that someone who's normal healthy weight was around 170 was down to 129 for a while looks like death walking. As time went on mom and I become brokenhearted and running out of faith. God wasn't answering our prayers in healing him so it looked as if we were on our own.
What's next?
Those was the big question for mom and I, "how much longer can this last?" or "Are we ever going to make it through this?". You see, as time went further down the road of this digression, he began to lose who he was. His mind going from being a manufacturing engineer for Boeing, to being someone who forgets where he is and whether he had taken a pill already or not. This being said, unless you have lived with someone who has bone cancer very long it's hard to understand the kind of agony that goes with it. To wake up at four in the morning to the sound of a man with a high pain tolerance screaming in writhing pain was normal. Mom had forgotten to change his fetonal pain patches of high dosage one night and so the pain was out of control. He ingested 9 loritab painkiller pills before even getting a handle on it if that puts it in perspective. To have to sit on the floor hiding food to eat while watching him because his throat had gotten so weak that he couldn't eat most solid food because he would choke, and if he saw the food he would want it. In the midst of agony and progression toward death, I had happened upon someone who had also lost their father to cancer and experienced what I was experiencing. She was murdered by car crash, being in the hospital while suffering internal trauma, I got to talk to her all week because I was home sick with walking pneumonia and quarantined to my room. I was able to talk to her until the moment she passed away. This 19 year old death was the first of many events that would transpire that year for me. Following it was a car accident where someone hit mom and I and put our car out of commission. Our roof was leaking, the washer and dryer broke down. Our refrigerator had a blown a fuse, water was leaking into and rotting the wood in the garage. This all was leading up to potentially the worst event of it all to me.
Christmas Cheer
The Christmas of my 9th grade year, He had been sleeping through the usual practice of opening presents. This was the Christmas of a large snow storm and my mom and I were essentially trapped in the house. He woke up at about 10 in the morning hallucinating as he often did and was talking to his mom who was deceased and crying. In all of his wailing he wasn't able to get up by himself, because the cancer had made him to weak. Mom and I actually had to help him up to take him to a porta-pot he had to use. Anyway, he hated life so much at this point he was trying to get us to give him the bottles of pills so he could kill himself. He wanted to call all of his family to tell them goodbye before he said this, and so we let him. As he told all of his family I'm dying and i'll be gone soon my heart completely broke. As he was continuing to ask for the pills, he then reached the conclusion that without any pills he would also die more quickly and so he refused to take any. Mom and I knew that this would just leave him in indescribable agony, along with, extreme constipation, anxiety attacks and the like. It took several hours of trying to convince him that I was his son and that he shouldn't leave yet so that he would take the medicine which eventually he did. This raised the greatest uproar in my own mind, questioning whether my own quality of life was worth it.
Where is my God
To be quite frank, after all the things I had to see and the daily picture of death I had to become ok with, I truly began to question what the nature of God is. I had no question that he was real because I had experienced him myself. Going to church by myself for four years, I learned to worship God because I really didn't have anything to lose. I started asking all the hard deep questions when I was still young and in the middle of this trauma. What is the purpose of life, what is faith, what is the point of prayer, is everything predestined, what IS God's will. These questions plagued my mind, and so I spent hours upon hours fighting God and trying to understand him. Trying to understand why this happened to me and my family. Trying to answer if God is just making me have to check if my dad is breathing every time I walk in his room and he is asleep on his hospital bed in our house. I found that there truly was no hope or peace, or joy without God. Because there came points where I just didn't know if I could make it, feeling so alone and completely dead inside. I felt like a ghost that people could see through. Sick of putting up a mask for everyone around me, at school, church, and any sort of public event. There came moments crying out to God asking him to just take my life. I had a 40 day period that I was severely depressed upon arriving home. Contemplating walking down my gravel driveway and never coming home was common. I had no peace until I came to a point where I was completely broken and crying and on my knees asking God to give me a moment of peace in all the chaos. He would. He had never left me, regardless of how much I fought him and yelled and wished he would do something, this was something I had to walk to walk through. When I called on him, He was always there. Sitting on the ground looking at a dying man who used to take care of me, whose flesh was bruised and torn from merely picking him up off of the floor when he fell, listening to him wheeze as he could barely breathe, I was ok. I had peace in Christ. His love for me was enough, and because I understood what it meant to see pain even in my misery God gave me the opportunity to minister to others and love them. This truly meant something for them, knowing that I was going through something like this and could still be ok and worshiping God, then they felt that they could make it to with God's help.
God is Good
To go through something lasting, painful, and significant doesn't mean God has abandoned you. It just means that his world is filled with sin and crap is gonna hit the fan sometimes. God never leaves or abandons you when you call. It may feel like it, but he doesn't. I wasn't saved in the middle of my time of trial, but I learned who God was and found answers to those hard questions I asked. This is a very summarized version of my testimony in an attempt to have brevity, but through everything I saw and experienced, in the midst of it, I could see God was there. In hindsight, life never really was so overwhelming I couldn't handle it. In my weakness I needed God, and when I realized that I really couldn't do it on my own, that my mind will and emotions really wasn't enough to get me through this God truly shined. My testimony is one of hope. That although over 4 years of watching death is enough to break any man's countenance God is bigger then it, and it really won't last forever. God is good, praise him in all things, because without the hope of His love everything is lost. I am praying for anyone who reads this and needs encouragement. Be blessed.
