Freedom

“Understanding my identity in Christ is the ultimate freedom. It’s a truth to hold onto and a feeling I can re-experience every time I remember who Jesus is and who I am in Him. I was always waiting for that someday when I would have a healed body. But I’ve learned all of what Christ has, including healing, is ours now,” Josie* shared.

* Her real name, used with permission.

Change How I Live with It

You’d expect someone with chronic illnesses to feel as if they are a prisoner to pain and weariness, but not Josie. Freedom is what she feels.

She believes, “The most important thing for me to focus on when I don’t feel well is my relationship with God. I can’t dwell on the pain and weariness. There is freedom in releasing that. My mindset might not change my illness, but it will change how I live with it.“

Body Beginning to Attack Itself

Looking back, Josie realized the multiple episodes of bronchitis every winter during her childhood, as well as her joints swelling and her body breaking out in rashes during her teen years, were indicative of her body beginning to attack itself. The first time she tested negative for Lyme disease was after a flare-up in high school.

Josie experienced another flare-up during college. Again she tested negative for Lyme disease, but a rheumatologist diagnosed her with Raynaud’s disease. “She also told me I had high ANA numbers, a marker that meant I had a high propensity for developing an autoimmune disease.”

From the time she was young, Josie wanted to be a missionary, so she could share the gospel with people who are isolated and feel unloved. After college, she pursued that dream through the Christian Missionary Alliance, which is headquartered in Colorado. She was eager to serve as a missionary as soon as possible.

Struggling with Autoimmune Issues

In January of 2008, after enjoying Christmas with her family in Wisconsin, Josie flew back to South Carolina where she’d been working since graduating from seminary.  During the flight she felt feverish and couldn’t feel her legs, but she attributed her symptoms to her Raynaud’s disease acting up.

While changing into her pj’s that night, she noticed her legs were a splotchy purple.  A difficult night led to stiffness and soreness in the morning. Her pain progressed over the next few days to the point of needing help to get up and move around. She tried to find a rheumatologist in South Carolina, but no appointments were available until July.

Not accepting that absurd wait, she flew back to Wisconsin to her rheumatologist, who saw her right away. The testing revealed she was struggling with autoimmune issues.  She had symptoms of many autoimmune diseases, but not enough symptoms of any one autoimmune disease for her rheumatologist to give a definitive diagnosis.

Just Existing

The medication to suppress her immune system caused terrible fatigue. It stabilized her symptoms, but she knew she couldn’t continue working. She quit her job in South Carolina and moved in with her parents in Wisconsin.

“I thought how my body felt was just a fluke. I thought the doctors would figure it out. However, over the course of the next couple of years, I was really just existing,” Josie shared.

After realizing her time in Wisconsin wasn’t going to be short-term, she began working part-time at her church. “I felt like I had to be strong spiritually, because people were watching how I was dealing with my illness. It was extremely hard watching other people fulfilling their dreams of being missionaries.”

Because her symptoms lingered and were at times debilitating, she postponed her first four-year appointment as a missionary in Southeast Asia.

Staying and Not Going

“For most of my life, I’ve been an emotional stuffer. I just don’t deal with things. Instead of processing the idea of this illness being chronic and not really ever getting better, I just stuffed it.”

One day in 2010 the song “I Surrender All” played during the worship time at an event Josie was attending for work, and Josie was forced to deal with the feelings she’d been stuffing.

“I felt like God called me to be a missionary, and I couldn’t be one with my health issues. I realized I found a lot of worth in doing things for God instead of being happy with who I was in Christ. That night, I surrendered to the fact I was staying and not going.”

Later that year, Josie saw the diagnosis of Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disorder on her paperwork. It meant she had symptoms of multiple autoimmune diseases: Lupus, Rheumatoid arthritis, and Fibromyalgia, as well as dermographism (a skin disease). She began taking intense medications to suppress her immune system.

Diagnosis of Lyme Disease

In 2012, Josie dropped down to under 90 pounds. She had surgery to remove her gallbladder. During surgery, they discovered an extra growth on her liver and removed part of her liver, as well. “It was easy for me to get frustrated and feel miserable as the cesspool of toxins in my body were building up,” Josie remembers.

The next year, she started turning orange. Her blood work showed it wasn’t anything serious.

A conversation with a college roommate who also had chronic illnesses pointed Josie in a new direction. A recommendation to a holistic practitioner gave Josie hope.

The holistic practitioner gave Josie an unofficial diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease and educated her about how Lyme cells hide and morph into something else.

“Your liver is shutting down,” she told Josie. “I’ve found mercury poisoning, mold poisoning, and fluid around your heart. I can treat you, but it’s not going to be a quick fix.”

Layer of Healing

“It’s all about removing the toxins that have built up in my body over time,” Josie shared. It’s like a room that has been painted 20 times. My treatments are removing layers of paint (toxins). As each layer is peeled away through detox, I experience – to a lesser degree – the same symptoms I was experiencing at the time that layer was ‘painted.’ As crazy as it sounds, it becomes a layer of healing.”

These last five years of treatment have been hard work as her body is detoxing, but keeping a positive attitude is extremely important in maintaining endurance while her body heals.

“I’m great at coping,” she said when I asked her about the weariness that comes with living with a chronic illness. “My holistic practitioner said my ability to cope is what has kept me alive. But I have to quit stuffing. She told me I can’t be physically healthy without also addressing the emotional and spiritual component of my illness.”

Broken but Priceless

At Exchange Life Ministries in August of 2016, Josie did just that. She engaged in a week of intense spiritual counseling and finally saw herself as God sees her.

“I learned we limit God. We think we have an idea of what God wants to accomplish in our lives, and we try to make it work on our own. For me, it was being a missionary. Often, we can’t see the bigger and better picture of what He has for us. His bigger picture for me was finding Erin in 2009 and becoming part of the missionary work of Broken but Priceless Ministry.”

Fellow Columbia International University alumni Erin built a ministry for those with chronic illnesses. It reaches people all over the world, giving them inspiration and hope as they walk their journeys.

“I learned God didn’t discard my missionary dream after all! It just looks different.”

Josie continues to learn about her identity in Christ by reading Ted Dekker’s book The Forgotten Way and discussing it with her small group.

Freedom

An interesting fact about Josie is she loves riding her motorcycle. She learned when she was eight years old.

“For a long time, I thought there was nothing better than the feeling I get as I roll the throttle and accelerate down the open road on my motorcycle. Don’t get me wrong, that will always be an incredible feeling, yet it pales in comparison to the freedom I’ve found in understanding my identity in Christ.”

Currently, Josie is writing a book about true freedom. In it, she will go into detail about how learning her identity in Christ has given her freedom from the shackles of living with chronic illnesses. I can’t wait to read it!

Leave a reply (below): Prison. Freedom. The two words couldn’t be more polar opposite places to live. Those places don’t just apply to someone who has chronic illnesses, but they are where any of us choose to live when facing life’s tough challenges. Choose wisely!