CVBF - Testimony (Week 1)

Welcome to Christian Values and Biblical Faith. This class is super-fast paced. We have a lot of material to cover in 8 short weeks. But don’t worry! I am here to help you succeed. In this video series, I give you tips for your assignments, tell you what I expect from your assignments, help you develop the skills of critical analysis that are essential for this course and answer your questions. Make sure to read my Canvas announcements—especially on Mondays. The information will help you succeed. I’ll start by saying that the content and assignments in this course are set by the department at PBA—not by me personally. So I did not choose the textbooks or create the assignments but I’m here to help you understand it all and succeed. There are many important points for you to know and all of that will be said in upcoming videos.

For now, today’s video is special. I am SO glad to meet you and please watch this video because I am going to share my personal testimony with you and this will tell you a lot about me and help you understand where I am coming from as I mark your papers. OK here goes.

Seven years ago, I woke in a hospital bed and realized my life was absolutely devastated. My husband and I had been in a head-on car crash on a major highway in Canada. A car going about 70 miles an hour veered out of his lane and hit us directly. I incurred four lacerations to my bowels and was nearly dead by time I reached the hospital. But God preserved my life. At the crash site, within seconds, I was surrounded by emergency workers who prevented me from moving, thus saving my life because if I had tried to stand, I would have been dead before I got out of the car. A top surgeon was waiting for me at the hospital when I arrived and realized that there was no time for the nurses to do their tests to determine my injuries. The surgeon had me rolled into the operating room immediately and administered life-saving surgery by examining all of my organs by hand, and then another top surgeon repaired the damaged areas. Again, my life was saved by the quick thinking of people that I believe God placed on my path.

The next urgent need was to make sure I did not lose hope and give up on life as the horror of what had happened gradually dawned on me. When I woke up after surgery, my husband’s fate was still unsure—they didn’t know if he would live and ever walk again. I had such a bad brain injury that I couldn’t even hold on to the thought that he was alive.

I felt completed disoriented—I was hardly able to communicate and I suffered chronic memory loss. Again, God was present. For the whole first week of my recovery, a team of truly tender-hearted ICU nurses did not leave my side, even for a moment. Eventually, I was told I had experienced significant physical injuries and suffered a minor brain injury.

I was diagnosed with severe posttraumatic stress disorder, and other emotional and mental incapacities. Although my mental state was poor and I was constantly anxious, we discovered that it could have been much worse. In the process of trying to reconstruct how the crash occurred, a detective interviewed my husband. The detective shared that the computer program his department uses could not produce a single scenario where my husband survived.

My husband responded that at the last moment, when the breaks disengaged and all was lost, he threw his body over the caddy and leaned over the passenger’s side as far as he could so that his body would protect me from any projectile or broken glass from the windshield. He had held my head back against the headrest to minimize my whiplash. My husband’s act not only saved me from a much worse brain injury but also saved his own life from being crushed by the engine that was pushed upward into his driver’s seat.

So the first thing I want to share with you is that God can do the impossible. You can see that I am living and talking and able to think. It is a miracle beyond words that within a year and a half of the accident, I was teaching at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

But there is a second miracle that is much different. Our road to recovery has been long—not weeks but years. I needed to learn how to overcome depression, anxiety, and hyper attentiveness. Regaining my cognitive functions was a slow process and required me to completely reorder my life. But, day-by-day, God has restored my life beyond my imagination and beyond even what I prayed for or hoped for. Let me share one more detail.

Most painful of all was the diagnosis that I would not be able to have children. If I did get pregnant, I was told, it would be very painful and risky. It was horrible and I could not accept that someone fell asleep at the wheel and as a result my lifelong dream of having a child was over. It was so unfair and unjust.

But even in this, God performed another miracle. In time, I did get pregnant. And it was the most wonderful time of my life. Amazingly, by the sixth month of pregnancy, my little Willow had kicked out almost all of my remaining scar tissue. And the hormones of pregnancy had broken the endless cycle of depression and anxiety that I had suffered with. And I feared all my problems would come back after Willow was born. But honestly, they have not.

So again, God’s ways are beyond our imagination. God takes the most impossible situation and turns it for good. God takes the broken pieces of our lives and puts us back together. God picks us up when we can’t walk any further. When all seems lost, God redeems our life and fills us with joy. Today, my life is a testimony that with God all things are possible.

But life is not perfect. Now you might know that I wrote a Bible study on women in the Bible. But all the time, I think I can’t do this, I can’t write a book, I can’t, I can’t. But no. I have written a book and whatever other plan God has for me WILL happen. So, I had to shut down that silly voice telling me that my limitations are God’s limitations. Because they are not. In fact, our weaknesses are the very opportunities for God’s strength to shine through! So, please be encouraged that whatever you are facing—keep believing God for a miracle and trust that God will provide for your every need. With God, there is always a way forward.