What God has taught us
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I meant to post this weeks ago, but it slipped my mind. This is the testimony that Lee and I shared with our Sunday school class about what God has taught us through my health circumstances. It came to mind to post it today because I needed a reminder of this. I've been blessed with sweet encouragers: friends like Karen who took the time to ask how my joints were feeling as we passed in the hall on Sunday, friends like Norma who always builds me up even when her schedule is crazy and sending her in a million different directions, friends like Jenn who always asks follow-up questions weeks after I've shared a prayer request with our Sunday school class, friends like Derek and Jenelle who invite me over on Wednesday nights when Lee has his engineering class so I don't get too wiped out, and friends like Brenda who called from Texas this morning because she had felt led to pray for me today and wanted to check to see how I was doing. I mention these sweet friends (and have left out several others since I'm blessed with a long list!) because, simply put, I've needed encouragement lately. My RA is flaring up, and I am hurting. I was hoping to start dropping my meds right now, but I might need to increase them as well. Most women with RA go into remission during pregnancy, but it is looking like that might not be the case for me. In Brenda's words, "leave it to you to buck the odds!" So we'd appreciate your continued prayers, since my pain and energy levels are such right now that it's tough to be a mom and wife right now. (Since another sweet friend, Heather, has rubbed off on me, I feel the need to include pictures throughout my posts now, so here is a picture of me, Jocelyn, Timmy, and Brenda at Thanksgiving last year. I'll be including pictures of me and Lee from the past eight years throughout the post as well!)
Me: An autoimmune disease occurs when your immune system, which is meant to fight off bad stuff in your body, begins fighting the good stuff. Both of mine are chronic disorders, which means there is no cure and I’ll deal with them to some extent for the rest of this earthly life.
--In Hashimoto’s disease, my immune system is killing my thyroid gland. Your thyroid gland controls your metabolism and affects mood and energy levels, among other things; mine isn’t completely dead yet, but one day it will be. For now, I take a synthetic version of the hormone your thyroid gland produces; eventually I will take a complete dose and get all my thyroid hormone from a little pill.
--In rheumatoid arthritis, my immune system is attacking the tissue around my joints. This causes stiffness for about an hour in the morning and constant pain in the joints affected. RA used to mean that you’d one day be crippled, with 30% of people becoming disabled within five years of diagnosis and 50% within ten years. Given new treatments out there, this is no longer the reality, but these treatments can be harsh and cause side effects, especially when used long-term. Since I was just diagnosed, we don’t yet know how my body will respond to the disease and how effective these drugs will be for me; we’ve also begun researching alternative treatments, but we don’t know where that path will lead either. So there are a lot of unknowns right now.
The two of us at a Halloween party in 2006 (me as a crayon, Lee as a little boy who played with crayons)
Me: Now that you know the facts, Lee and I are going to share with you a few of the lessons God has taught us as a couple during all of this:
Lee: Basically Shannon has laid out the facts for you, but we’ve learned that there’s a difference between facts and truth. Doctors can tell us facts. MRIs and blood tests can tell us facts. Research we do on her diseases can tell us facts. But the truth is God is still in control. We know that God is sovereign and has a purpose for the challenges He orchestrates in our lives. We don’t always know the reasons, but we can choose to cling to the truth and not be overwhelmed or bitter about the facts.
The two of us at NCSU's Red & White Ball in 2003:
Me: We often consider discomfort and suffering as something to avoid. We used to pray in the midst of sickness for God to heal us and take it away. We’ve learned that, while God can heal, his ultimate purpose isn’t to make us comfortable. It’s to make us holy, to bring about our good – by His definition, not ours - and His glory in our lives. We are often focused on the end result; He’s focused on the process we take getting there. All of this has come to be a blessing for us because a) this isn’t our home and we shouldn’t be completely comfortable here and b) anything that causes us to pray is a good thing because it brings about intimacy with God. While neither of us would argue that my health circumstances are good, we’ve seen the good that’s come from them in our relationship with God.
Licking snow (because that's, umm, normal) in January 2002:
Lee: With both of Shannon’s diseases, you can’t look at her and tell how she’s feeling all the time. So I’ve learned that we need to communicate well. I have to be willing to ask her how she’s feeling, and I have to make time to listen. Shannon has to be willing to tell me what’s going on and not bottle it up, because we’re in this together. Also, since our marriage is about more than her diseases, it’s not good for me to hold back how I’m feeling either just because Shannon is sick; I still can and should communicate my struggles to her, both things I’m struggling with that have to do with her being sick and things that aren’t related at all.
At my house in Texas in 2004:
Me: Lastly, it’s been easy to isolate ourselves and at times become self-centered. On that note, I want to apologize to any of you all who haven’t heard from us much lately or who have had struggles that may have seemed to go unnoticed by us; this is probably the most recent lesson we’ve learned. When you’re sick, it’s easy to become self-absorbed, and our culture tells us that we should be. Where does it say that in Scripture? It doesn’t. I have realized that I have to be intentional about asking how others are feeling because I’ve found that it’s easy for the conversation to always turn to me. We are to bear each other’s burdens; you’re not supposed to just bear mine. Furthermore, being sick doesn’t give me an excuse to sin – to ignore those in the body of Christ, to turn a blind eye to unbelievers, to be cranky and mean to my husband, to worry … the list could go on. God has allowed this for a purpose. As I close, I’d like to ask y’all to continue to pray for us, with one specific prayer being that we don’t become so caught up in this or in ourselves that we miss what God has for us in it.
The three of us at Hannah & Will's wedding:
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What God has taught us
(shared with our Sunday school class in early August 2008):
Me: Lee and I have been married for a little over three years, and we offered to share a testimony of what God has taught us through my health circumstances in that time. Simply put, when you combine my back injury, surgery, and recovery the first year we were married, not-the-easiest pregnancy in our second year with a tough delivery that took a while to recover from, and – most recently – the diagnosis of two chronic auto-immune disorders in the past year, we figured out that I’ve really only been healthy for about 3 of our 38 months of marriage. Lee didn’t know the sickness part of “in sickness and health” would outweigh the health part!
At our wedding reception:
At our wedding reception:
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Me: An autoimmune disease occurs when your immune system, which is meant to fight off bad stuff in your body, begins fighting the good stuff. Both of mine are chronic disorders, which means there is no cure and I’ll deal with them to some extent for the rest of this earthly life.
--In Hashimoto’s disease, my immune system is killing my thyroid gland. Your thyroid gland controls your metabolism and affects mood and energy levels, among other things; mine isn’t completely dead yet, but one day it will be. For now, I take a synthetic version of the hormone your thyroid gland produces; eventually I will take a complete dose and get all my thyroid hormone from a little pill.
--In rheumatoid arthritis, my immune system is attacking the tissue around my joints. This causes stiffness for about an hour in the morning and constant pain in the joints affected. RA used to mean that you’d one day be crippled, with 30% of people becoming disabled within five years of diagnosis and 50% within ten years. Given new treatments out there, this is no longer the reality, but these treatments can be harsh and cause side effects, especially when used long-term. Since I was just diagnosed, we don’t yet know how my body will respond to the disease and how effective these drugs will be for me; we’ve also begun researching alternative treatments, but we don’t know where that path will lead either. So there are a lot of unknowns right now.
The two of us at a Halloween party in 2006 (me as a crayon, Lee as a little boy who played with crayons)
 |
Me: Now that you know the facts, Lee and I are going to share with you a few of the lessons God has taught us as a couple during all of this:
Lee: Basically Shannon has laid out the facts for you, but we’ve learned that there’s a difference between facts and truth. Doctors can tell us facts. MRIs and blood tests can tell us facts. Research we do on her diseases can tell us facts. But the truth is God is still in control. We know that God is sovereign and has a purpose for the challenges He orchestrates in our lives. We don’t always know the reasons, but we can choose to cling to the truth and not be overwhelmed or bitter about the facts.
The two of us at NCSU's Red & White Ball in 2003:
 |
Me: We often consider discomfort and suffering as something to avoid. We used to pray in the midst of sickness for God to heal us and take it away. We’ve learned that, while God can heal, his ultimate purpose isn’t to make us comfortable. It’s to make us holy, to bring about our good – by His definition, not ours - and His glory in our lives. We are often focused on the end result; He’s focused on the process we take getting there. All of this has come to be a blessing for us because a) this isn’t our home and we shouldn’t be completely comfortable here and b) anything that causes us to pray is a good thing because it brings about intimacy with God. While neither of us would argue that my health circumstances are good, we’ve seen the good that’s come from them in our relationship with God.
Licking snow (because that's, umm, normal) in January 2002:
 |
Lee: With both of Shannon’s diseases, you can’t look at her and tell how she’s feeling all the time. So I’ve learned that we need to communicate well. I have to be willing to ask her how she’s feeling, and I have to make time to listen. Shannon has to be willing to tell me what’s going on and not bottle it up, because we’re in this together. Also, since our marriage is about more than her diseases, it’s not good for me to hold back how I’m feeling either just because Shannon is sick; I still can and should communicate my struggles to her, both things I’m struggling with that have to do with her being sick and things that aren’t related at all.
At my house in Texas in 2004:
 |
Me: Lastly, it’s been easy to isolate ourselves and at times become self-centered. On that note, I want to apologize to any of you all who haven’t heard from us much lately or who have had struggles that may have seemed to go unnoticed by us; this is probably the most recent lesson we’ve learned. When you’re sick, it’s easy to become self-absorbed, and our culture tells us that we should be. Where does it say that in Scripture? It doesn’t. I have realized that I have to be intentional about asking how others are feeling because I’ve found that it’s easy for the conversation to always turn to me. We are to bear each other’s burdens; you’re not supposed to just bear mine. Furthermore, being sick doesn’t give me an excuse to sin – to ignore those in the body of Christ, to turn a blind eye to unbelievers, to be cranky and mean to my husband, to worry … the list could go on. God has allowed this for a purpose. As I close, I’d like to ask y’all to continue to pray for us, with one specific prayer being that we don’t become so caught up in this or in ourselves that we miss what God has for us in it.
The three of us at Hannah & Will's wedding:
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