Whitney Hope- Spotlight Story

In November of 1995 I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was told I had a mass in my chest that was the size of a grapefruit and a half. Let me back up a moment and give you a brief background. At this time in 1995 my husband and I had been married for 10 years. We had three boys ages 8, 6 and 10 months;no girls in the mix which is a whole other story. Suffice it to say we have lots of testosterone in my house. From years 2 through 10 of our marriage thus far we had gone through really more than our share of very stressful and trying circumstances. Our first child was born six weeks premature and both of us were in very real danger of not making it. Then over the next eight years we experienced a lot of loss. We lost our second child through miscarriage. We lost a job, more than once. We lost our home because of loss of income. We lost my father in law unexpectedly. It seemed like every time we had just caught our breath, another crisis would arise.

Then in February of 1995, just two weeks after our third son was born we moved here to the desert. My husband was working at the juvenile hall and I was at home with the kids and for about eight months there were no crises or traumas to deal with. Then towards the end of October we found ourselves in another financially stressful situation that just overwhelmed me. God for years had seemed to use finances to try and get my attention. And I'm embarrassed to say that even though I had been a Christian at this point for 17 years, I allowed myself to be so focused on my circumstances that I put myself in what I thought was like an anxiety attack. I was like the person in the parable of the sower and the seed who was "choked by life's worries". It seemed like the opposite of hyperventilating. Every time I tried to take a deep breath it hurt and I was having trouble breathing normally. This is what led us to the emergency room at Eisenhower Medical Center on Halloween day of 1995.

We sent the older kids off to school and packed the baby's diaper bag with all we could fit and went to the hospital. We pulled into the first space outside the emergency room and because I was having chest pain they did a chest x-ray. This of course showed this huge mass. So they came back and said the x-ray wasn't clear and they had to do another one. So we did. Then they came back and said we see something on the x-ray so we'd like to have you undergo a CT scan. So we did. All of this took several hours in between each procedure. I was getting quite perturbed because I thought I was just having an anxiety attack and they could give me a shot or something and send me home. All the while my husband is in the waiting room with our 10 month old. Finally around 2:30 in the afternoon, after being there since 8:30 in the morning I told my husband that he should go home and get the boys from school at 3:00 because there was no telling how long I would be there and I would just call him when I was done. This is part of the story that no one can believe but it is the honest truth. My husband packed up everything and went out to the car and found that it was gone. He came back and told me and the first thing I thought was maybe we had parked there too long and the car had been towed away. My husband said no, that there was broken glass on the ground, that our car had been stolen. It had been parked at the very first spot outside the emergency room not more than 15-20 feet away from the front door with a security guard patrolling the area! Neither of us could really believe it. To top it all off, this was our only vehicle at the time, our son's car seat was in the car and because I didn't want to hassle with my purse while I was in the emergency room I had tucked it under the seat. Of course inside were my driver's license, credit cards, check book, etc. So not only were we having to deal with this health crisis, over the next several weeks we also had to deal with police reports, someone trying to use our credit cards, canceling everything. We were getting hit from all sides it seemed like.

So a sheriff drove my husband home to get the kids from school. Fortunately we lived right around the corner at the time from the school and could just walk them home. I meanwhile stayed at the hospital just continuing to wait for someone to tell me the results of the CT scan. Finally a doctor came in and told me of the huge mass in my chest and said that it could be X, Y or Z or it could be lymphoma. I was actually taking a course in medical transcription at the time and new that anything ending in an "oma" was not good. He said that now I would have to see my primary doctor and be referred to specialists and start that whole process. I called a friend to come pick me up and went home in a daze.

Even before this happened we were maxed out stress wise. We were off the charts were stress was concerned. This could have sent me over the edge but instead God did an incredible thing.

About a week after my ER visit my doctor sent me to see a pulmonary specialist. After looking over the CT scan and telling us what the possibilities were I said to the doctor, I need the bottom line here. Cancer was something that we had never dealt with in any member of my whole extended family. I was the first. I was only 33 at the time, had always been in good health, had never smoked, drank, even tried any kind of drugs, had always been exercise conscious and yet this happened to me. So I said to the doctor, I have three children at home the youngest of which is only 10 months old, I need to know is this the go home and get your affairs in order cancer or is this something that can be treated. He assured me that lymphoma was a treatable type of cancer.

At that moment I did not hear God audibly or actually see him but I got this very vivid mental picture of God reaching his hand down from heaven and putting it on my shoulder and saying "Don't worry, everything's gonna be okay". This may not seem like much but for me it was huge. I grew up a worrier. I was a nail bitter and the type of kid who if I had an 89.5% in a class and worked to make sure it would be an A by report card time and of course fretted over it the whole time. Even though I had been a Christian for a long time I still had not learned how to give things totally over to God. Even though I prayed about things I still held onto them. But God did an incredible thing right there in that doctor's office. If you had asked me before that moment to recite Philippians 4:4-7 I could have done so with no problem;."Rejoice in the Lord always, I will say it again rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving present your requests to God and the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." It was underlined in my bible. I had actually spent a lot of time in Philippians trying to figure out this secret that Paul talked about, about learning to be content whatever the circumstances. My problem was that I knew that scripture in my head, but not in my heart. It was at that moment that that scripture became real to me. I experienced, before we even knew the results of the biopsy, that I was gonna be okay. I knew the peace that passed all understanding.

What was interesting about that was I sensed from God that I wasn't going to be miraculously healed. I somehow knew I was going to have to go through the chemo and losing my hair, getting sick often and throwing up, going through radiation and all the testing, but I also knew that at the end of it I was gonna come out okay. So to get the results of the biopsy actually on Thanksgiving Day 1995, I was not surprised. And the peace that God gave me became a great witnessing tool to my family as I called everyone that weekend and told them and most of their reactions were "How can you be so calm?" and I was able to share with them that it was totally a God thing.

This past June I reached my five year clear mark, which is a very important milestone and I can honestly say that I am thankful for having gone through that trial because it brought me so much closer to the Lord. It allowed me to know him in ways that I never could have otherwise without going through this experience. Oswald Chamber says that God puts us in circumstances to educate our faith. Several months after starting the whole cancer process I was in a bible study with a group of women going through the Experiencing God study. At the back of that workbook Blackaby lists all the names and titles for God. I realized that before going through my cancer experience these were just words I had read in scripture, but now I knew God personally by some of those names. I knew God as my refuge, my source of strength, my ever present help in times of trouble, my rock, my God of all comfort, my peace, my Lord who heals me, my confidence, my provider, my hope;. If I had gone along in my Christian walk and never experienced any bumps in the road, I would not have gotten to know God by these names.

Steven Curtis Chapman has a great song called Up On The Mountain and he sings "Lord help me to remember what you showed me up on the mountain". God seems to work in my life backwards because for me the real growth and learning time comes when we're in the valley. This is where the rubber meets the road and where our faith is tested and we see what we're made of. Then as we come out of the valley we look back and say "WOW, look what God did, look how faithful he was, look what he taught me" and that for me becomes the mountaintop experience.

I would encourage any of you who are going through any kind of trial, whether it be monumental or relatively small to realize that there is absolutely nothing that God allows in our lives that is not first filtered through his fingers of love and that he allows us to go through for a reason. Sometimes we may never know what that reason is. I heard Chuck Swindoll on the radio one day say, Can you trust God with this experience even if he never tells you why? That to me is trusting God. But I believe that on a broad spectrum one of the main reasons he allows us to go through trials is to build our faith, to allow us to more intimately know him in ways that would not have been possible without the trial. Oswald Chambers has recently said in My Utmost for His Highest just last week he asked the question, "Have we come to the place where God can withdraw His blessings and it does not affect our trust in him?"

You may be going through a trial right now where you wonder where God is in all of it. I close here by sharing a scripture with you that a friend sent me in a card when I was going through my cancer experience. She pointed out that in this verse God does not say "if" but "when". It's found in Isaiah 43:2-4. "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and when you pass through the rivers they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned, the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior;down to verse 4;Since you are precious and honored in my sight and because I LOVE YOU!

That's a promise that any of us as believers can claim regardless of what you are going through. I finally learned what that secret was that Paul was talking about and it's simply just to trust God completely with absolutely everything.