It was enough that I was ashamed of myself. I didn’t want Mark to feel compelled to go through the process. He doesn’t think it’s anybody’s business what he ate for lunch yesterday let alone all the in-depth information required to get licensed. I was surprised but steadied and encouraged by his response. “We’re not going to quit,” he said. “They can look at all our stuff and tell us they don’t want us, but we’re not going to walk away until we get licensed or it’s impossible to move forward.”
God knew bringing Emmalynn into our lives first, with applying to be foster parents second, was the way He would fortify us to have the wherewithal to put our fears of being rejected aside and continue to pursue the capability of caring for another child in a similar situation. The experience with Emmalynn made it totally worth the hassle!
For forty-six years, my GI issues had severely limited my ability to psychologically cope. Since my body was not contributing in any positive way to my being able to deal with life’s difficulties, God’s grace in preserving me all that time was now evident to me. However, there was a time when all I could see was what was wrong and hurting and broken. My church background led me to believe I was supposed to prosper if I was doing the right thing. Somehow God’s end of the bargain was to make life doable for me if I obeyed His rules. Now, on one level, this is accurate. Discipline and punishment don’t have to be meted out if you walk the straight and narrow. But we’re also promised there will be trouble in this life. Suffering is to be expected; it’s not an unusual occurrence.
My immature perspective of suffering compelled me to share with God that I did not do hard. I was not a soldier. I also had no desire to become one, thank you very much. I wanted to have struggles and suffering that were manageable. I wanted to run from trouble as fast and as far away as possible or get through it quickly and move on to what I considered better things.
It is pathetic that I told Jesus that I didn’t know why He caused or allowed tough things in my life because I prayed to Him and liked Him much better when things were going well. Didn’t He want me to like Him?
Even more serious was the spiritual deal I had laid on the table as early as my teen years. If things got too hard and I couldn’t handle it, I was “out of here.” I reserved the right to decide when I’d had enough and that I would have a say in the timing of my departure to heaven. I knew Jesus as my Savior. I was not afraid of death. I was more afraid of not living successfully, of being sick and disabled, and of feeling as though I was more trouble than I was worth to my family and friends. What a shaky, miserable place to stand. All around me were pits of emotional quicksand ready to pull me under based on my faulty estimations of my value and my ability to carry on under great duress.
Throughout my entire life I had struggled with being ill. Having recurring incapacitating pain was a cross I did not want to bear. While suffering for Jesus on the mission field was supposedly virtuous, having intestinal spasms that left me lying on the floor wasn’t considered spiritual at all! In fact, a lot of people told me it was my fault—I must be doing something wrong.
Reading an essay by biblical counselor Dr. David Powlison strangely comforted my heart as I resonated with his words.
“Suffering often brings a doubled pain. In the first place there is “the problem” itself—sickness, poverty, betrayal, bereavement. That is hard enough (and this promise speaks comfort). But it is often compounded by a second problem. Other people, even well-meaning, often don’t respond very well to sufferers. Sufferers are often misunderstood, or meddled with, or ignored….
Faulty diagnoses, misguided treatments, negative side effects, contradictory advice, huge waste of time and money, false hopes repeatedly dashed, false fears pointlessly rehearsed, no plausible explanation forthcoming, blaming the victim, and declining sympathy as compassion fatigue sets in for would-be helpers!”4
I have been a “problem” person ever since I can remember. At birth I had to contend with congenital nephritis, and the cause was never found. My mother tells me the doctors cut me in half from belly button to back bone and did a kidney biopsy. I still bear the long scar.
As a child, I also had frequent bouts with sore throats and respiratory infections to the point where I would be coughing up blood. These episodes resulted in multiple treatments with antibiotics. (The drug of choice at the time was tetracycline, and it discolored my teeth, causing them to turn gray.) After all the antibiotic treatment for infections I consumed, it’s no wonder I had GI issues.
When I was fourteen, I attended a camp in New Mexico where the boys found it greatly entertaining to throw cow pies into the drainage ditch where we girls brushed our teeth and bathed. I picked up amoebic dysentery and was so dreadfully ill that I lost fifteen pounds in a week. With only eighty-five pounds left on my five-foot-three frame, I was skin and bones. I didn’t learn until nursing school that the lack of fat on my body left me with no estrogen stores to have a period until I was back up to a more normal weight.
When my cycles started back up—O help me, Jesus—they came back with a vengeance. Every month for two to three days, I would be on the floor, curled up in a ball, experiencing the worst cramping, vomiting, diarrhea, and fainting I had ever had.
My system was in a constant state of inflammation, and doctors found it tricky to pinpoint where it had gone awry. The medications, procedures, surgeries, and ER visits to treat symptoms of an ever-widening array of troubles were expensive and humiliating.
In the fall of my senior year of college, I was hospitalized twice. The root cause of my pain was unknown and attributed to stress. I struggled with despair. How could I be feeling this badly and functioning so poorly and yet not have a diagnosis? My pain was constant because every day I was eating foods that my body couldn’t handle, but I did not know this, and neither did any of the physicians who attempted to treat me. I couldn’t seem to keep up with the demands of school and work, and some of my college advisers told me others coped much better with the same stress, so what was my problem? I didn’t have a clue.
I heard several comments from well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) friends and classmates: “You know, maybe God has to hit you upside the head with a two-by-four in order to knock some sense into you.” Pastors advised me to repent of my unconfessed sin so I could be healed of my many maladies. I felt angry and bewildered and wondered what I was doing that was so evil I had to be punished.
Confused, I let their comments create a deep sense of despair in my soul. Carrying on day after day feeling as though I had been singled out for punishment was difficult, and I was at a loss as to what exactly I should do to fix myself so God could bless me—blessing being equated with good health, good grades, and a happy life in general.
My nursing instructors were also bewildered and were concerned about my health, absences, and fragile mental state. In November 1987, just weeks away from graduation, my psych instructor advised me to withdraw from the nursing program because she did not see me passing the rotation.
Not passing? The news devastated me. I had never failed anything in my life. My identity was wrapped up in getting excellent grades and being at the top of my class. In anything that had to do with sheer will, natural talent, or hard work, I wasn’t lacking.
One night shortly after I withdrew from the nursing program, I lay in bed, drenching my pillow with tears. I felt desperate and unproductive and as if I were a liability to everyone. I made sweeping judgments about others’ perceptions of me, which weren’t accurate but reflected my feelings at the time. I whispered to no one in particular, “Could somebody just love me for me?”
God’s answer was swift and sure, indelibly pressed on my heart and mind, though I did not hear an audible voice. He communicated, I loved you before you were born, before you’d ever done anything good or bad. My love is not dependent on your ability to perform.
I reenrolled in nursing school in January 1988, and when I arrived to register, I was asked to step aside and speak with the fi
nancial adviser. I stood there waiting to hear what he had to say, trembling. I imagined I would hear that I was a failure. What was I doing trying to come back again? I prayed, silent and deep, Dear God, I believe I should finish. I started this course to become a nurse. I can’t just quit. So, You make it possible to get this done.
The financial guy beckoned me to sit near him, and even though it was winter and chilly, I was sweating bullets waiting to hear what he would say.
“I see here you were enrolled in your last semester of nursing school this past fall, right?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Okay, well, I also see you paid for your semester even though you didn’t finish it. You were hospitalized a couple of times too?” He wasn’t callously probing but rather compassionately inquiring.
I nodded affirmatively again, thinking it was all over my record that I couldn’t cope well with my physical ailments or with the school load.
Instead, he looked back at his computer screen and told me with a smile, “You know, I think it’s great you’re back again! I’m going to transfer the monetary credits from last semester to this one. You’ve already got your books, and along with the Pell grant for this semester, you’re good to go. Finish well!”
I was speechless, having no idea God could answer my prayers over and abundantly above all I could ask or think. I graduated without difficulty and with great grades on May 21, 1988.
I got married a week later.
Almost four years earlier, in August 1984, the lyrics from a Roberta Flack song—“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”—came true for me: I thought “the sun rose” in someone’s eyes. That day the sun was streaming through the high windows as we waited to register for our classes in the hallway of the Old Main building at Maranatha Baptist Bible College just west of Madison. I turned my head and caught sight of Mark standing a little farther down the line. His hair was blond with natural curl and shine. His eyes were bright blue, and he smiled at me.
“Be still my heart” hardly cut it. The pump in my chest nearly stopped.
I instantly thought, Oh my goodness, you’re going to marry that guy. Then I faced away quickly, berating myself for being so silly. You’re only eighteen years old. You just got here. You’ve got four years of school to finish. Good grief, you don’t even know his name or whether he’s already married.
A few weeks after that fateful encounter, Mark and I were in Speech 101 class. As part of our coursework, we students were told to prepare personal testimonies to share with the other students. On the day it was Mark’s turn, he stood and said he was twenty-nine years old and fresh out of the Air Force. (I wanted to do a jig in my seat, and was singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” in my head upon hearing his age. I thought all college freshmen were eighteen years old and dumb as a box of rocks. Not so!) Even more impressive than his age was his desire to learn more about God and his willingness to become a missionary. He expressed with an endearing earnestness that his salvation and loving Jesus were the most important things in his life. I was moved to tears with joy.
How could it get any better than that?!
I shared my testimony the next week, mentioning the time I had spent on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, but I didn’t share my specific desire to serve in India. I confess that part of the reason I remained mum about India was because I wasn’t sure where Mark thought he wanted to go, and I was leaving my options open.
After class as I walked past him in chapel, he called out, “Speech! Speech!” to me. I thought it was pretty sweet he had paid any attention. I effortlessly chatted with him and decided to ask, “So, you mentioned you wanted to be a missionary. Where?”
Mark replied, “Oh, India, I think.”
I was dumbfounded and even more convinced this guy was going to marry me someday.
I responded with, “You know, that’s where I’ve thought about going, too.”
I later learned that Mark shared our conversation with his dorm buddies and they hooted and hollered. They said, “Ha, you could’ve said you wanted to go to Timbuktu, and she’d have said that was her mission field too. Bahahaha!”
Oh, I was mad. I wanted to go to India long before those dumb guys assumed it was a ploy to get Mark’s attention!
Mark told me not long after we met as freshman that I was a buxom babe, and he liked that. In other words, I had packed on the “freshman fifteen,” but he didn’t mind the way I had left the teenybopper figure behind for a more womanly shape. We didn’t really date but rather had many lively discussions in the snack room in the basement of the college. We also found many reasons to argue, and while he said he liked my fiery spirit, he didn’t have time to tame a young filly. “Find yourself a young buck and have a bunch of fat babies” was his admonition time and again during our college days.
Mark was steadfast in his determination to be the next apostle Paul, a celibate preacher and martyr. Women, he explained, were a distraction, and he was not altogether happy to find that this Baptist college housed hundreds of women when he had expected a men-only kind of seminary setting. (His expectation was based on his Catholic background and the fact the college had been a monastery at one time.)
In my sophomore year, I started the nursing program at Madison Area Technical College that partnered with Maranatha Baptist. Mark and I saw each other only occasionally at church.
During this year of nursing school, I was hospitalized a couple of times when my period set off intense spasms in my large intestine, which would result in my passing out on the floor. This hormone-induced spasming did not show up on CT scans or in blood work or in the invasive exploratory abdominal procedures that the doctors ordered. The results always came back negative for a disease, and more than a few medical professionals suggested that I should take an antidepressant because they believed my pain was solely psychological.
Time spent with Mark was a welcome distraction from my medical issues. One day during the summer after my sophomore year, he told me we were going to move a freezer, but I didn’t know the freezer was at his sister’s home, where I also met his mom and dad. Mary Catherine immediately hugged me and had us all but married; she couldn’t stop gushing. She’s marvelous, but Mark, in his typical kid-brother fashion, resisted her enthusiasm. He did, however, listen to his dad, who said, “She’s a nice heifer. She’ll make a good cow. Better marry that one.” This was a high compliment from the earthy butcher, and he meant it in the best way.
Mark and I had an argument over nothing on the way home from the meeting with his parents, and that was the end of any serious talk about our becoming a couple, but we remained friends.
As my senior year began, Mark’s dad passed away in August 1987, and the grief Mark experienced as a result of his death drew us back together to spend Sunday afternoons sharing a meal at the local Ponderosa Steakhouse week after week.
In January 1988, Mark made the decision to move to Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and attend Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary. Over the winter break, I had been in Idaho where my folks lived at the time, and I was making plans to go to the University of Utah the following fall and pursue a higher degree in nursing. My mom asked about prospective guys, “How about that Mark fella. Didn’t you like him?”
“Oh, Mom.” I sighed. “I love the guy. But we argue like we’re siblings. He’s like a brother to me, not a boyfriend.”
Well, that “brother o’ mine” picked me up at the airport when I flew back to Wisconsin for my last semester, and we attended a symphony in Milwaukee a few days after that. Little did I know at that point his intentions had changed, and he was no longer determined I should marry some young buck, but rather, that I should go ahead and marry the “old” guy who was thirty something and no longer so interested in being single.
Mark asked me to go along to St. Cloud, Wisconsin, to meet some of the rest of his huge family the last weekend in January before he left for seminary. I loved Mark and was very comfortable hanging out with him no matter what we h
appened to be doing at the time. But I had a menstrual cycle from Hades that weekend! I took pain relievers before we left to meet his sister Jan, her husband, Tom, and their two girls. When we arrived at Jan’s, I managed to sit at the dining room table for a little while trying unsuccessfully to carry on a conversation before asking quietly if she had something for the cramping. She gave me a couple of Midol.
This would have been fine, but the cumulative effect of all of the meds caused me to pass out on the way down the stairs. Tom picked me up and carried me to one of his girls’ bedrooms. Jan told me she would let Mark know what was wrong, and I bawled and cried out, “No, don’t tell him!” She laughed a little and said, “Cori, he has four sisters. He knows about periods.”
I wailed, “Yes, but he doesn’t need to know I have them!”
What an embarrassing beginning to our more serious relationship; but Mark wasn’t put off by my health troubles at that point. Perhaps if he had fully understood the scope of my health issues, he might have run, which was my greatest fear.
I lived in continual anxiety that I would get sick and be considered too much effort to care for and my crying about it all would be reason enough for people to abandon me.
I feared people would leave me because I was altogether too much—too sick, too expensive, too stupid, too little, too weak.
Four weeks and four hours after we said, “I do,” I began vomiting from pregnancy hormones. Mark did not understand my inability to keep food down. His sisters and other women he knew were not tossing their cookies at the sight or smell of food; he was at a loss as to why it was such an issue for me.
I also couldn’t stand to be kissed, which was very sad since we were newlyweds. I would drive to pick Mark up from work because we had only one vehicle. He would slide into the driver’s seat, lean over to kiss me, and I would promptly have to climb out the passenger’s side door and puke my guts out in a bush near the parking lot.
I Will Love You Forever Page 9
