She tells eternity how she began her own path to Christ as a teenager. And how it wasn’t until she was bedridden with Crohn’s disease that she really began to glorify God.
god will use any means to search for us and save us; in my case it was my sick beagle, pepper, who was dying of a wasting disease, and me trying to pray for the first time in my life. I only knew the Lord’s Prayer, so I’d quickly get over it and get to the part where I cried and prayed to God to heal my dog.
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One night, I was hurrying along saying “…thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” when I felt as if I had just hit a brick wall. what the hell did I just say?! who wanted God’s will to be done? not at all. he wanted my will to be done; god was just a means to achieve that.
but… that’s not what the prayer Jesus taught said! I felt frozen in a moment of eternity, with giant spotlights focused on me while all heaven waited to see which way I would move. What could it be? Thy will be done, and of course that would mean my dog would die, and I would no doubt end up a missionary in a pith helmet, single and alone in a damp place full of bugs (or so my imagination told me).
I burst into tears, surrendering to god and embracing his will and all the suffering and unhappiness it would surely bring.
Or would I demand that my will be done, even though it would be futile to try to fight god? still, I might give it a try! I could go my own way and try to snatch whatever happiness life offered me by insisting on my will.
How long this moment lasted, I’ll never know… it felt like a long, long time that my soul debated between you/me. In the end, knowing that I was signing Pepper’s death warrant, I burst into tears, surrendering to God and accepting his will and all the suffering and unhappiness it would surely bring.
and for the only time in my life, I heard (in my head) the voice of god saying “it’s not your dog’s life that I want; it’s your life.” Amazed, my tears stopped and I jumped out of bed, ran to the basement where my poor sick dog had his crate and told him he was going to be fine.
I didn’t know anything about being a sinner who needed forgiveness or which god had gone to procure that forgiveness.
and of course it was. god wasted a perfectly good miracle and healed my beagle, much to the bewilderment of our vet, who stated that severed nerves do not regenerate and the spine does not grow back.
After that time, I recognized that god had claimed me and given in to that claim, but I didn’t know anything about being a sinner in need of forgiveness or which god had gone to procure that forgiveness. it wasn’t until college that i met serious believers who trusted the bible as the word of god. and it wasn’t until seminary that I heard about substitutionary atonement. in the middle I was a sanctimonious, self-righteous, judgmental, loner raging self-righteous.
since i had already felt called to a life in ministry, marriage to tim felt like an extension of that call. His ministry was our ministry, and I was as busy doing the Lord’s work as he could ever want.
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He was an angry, sanctimonious, lonely, self-righteous man.
in 1991 i was diagnosed with crohn’s disease, an autoimmune condition that fits perfectly into my family’s collection of autoimmune conditions: i had sisters with birt-hogg-dube, ra, hashimoto, langerhans cell histiocytosis, and was able to, over the years, to add Sjogren’s disease, psoriatic arthritis, and thyroiditis to our collection.
what started as a mild case was exacerbated by receiving exactly the wrong medication (prescribed by a doctor) for my version of crohn’s disease, in addition to what I was later told was a “killer” antibiotic (prescribed by another doctor) when you had a mrsa (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus) infection caused by another doctor performing minor surgery.
in 2002 things got so bad that my surgeon recommended a “temporary ileostomy” and removed more than a foot of colon which he described to tim as a burned match. seven surgeries later, the attempt to reattach my colon succeeded for two weeks and then failed, leaving me with peritonitis and a permanent stoma.
god has pushed me over the edge with these crippling medical conditions and occasional brush with death.
In the 17 years since then, I have had numerous follow-up surgeries, some resulting in perforations, others peritonitis, and month-long hospital stays, two of which left me with open wounds that took months (in one case, 12 months) to heal, including with additional surgery and 13 visits to the hyperbaric chamber for oxygen therapy.
I thought only a small number of people knew about these adventures: my prayer team, the women in the study group I lead, but apparently people have prayed for me all over the world, for which I am deeply grateful.
What I wish I could tell you is this: God has pushed me over the edge with these crippling medical conditions and occasional brushes with death. and I am very grateful for it.
I can’t imagine any other way to overcome my religious pursuits or my confidence in my superior understanding of god’s ways (mainly taken from the reader’s abridged versions of what tim was reading, rather than my own growth).
I could just as easily glorify him in my shrunken, bedridden life as I could have him standing up and healthy.
I had been enjoying my gifts, instead of growing in grace. I had been in the dark, not knowing if or how far I would recover, unable to access the presence of god (since I had not cultivated it during the days of peace).
I am sorry for the lost years of service to God; afflicted by my sins of omission: my lack of love for my husband, my children, my neighbors, the people I knew were crying out for a connection. I repented for the massive failure of my life, for the gifts I did not use, for the grace I did not taste, for the wasted opportunities to love. i cried out to god over and over again with the words of the keith green song:
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what can you do with an old heart like mine? soften it, with oil and wine. the oil is you, your spirit above please wash me again in the wine of your love.
what god gave me was the recognition that i could just as easily glorify him in my shrunken, bedridden life as if i could stand tall and healthy. better, much better, in fact, because all that health had been wasted on me, my schedules, my plans, my calendar. With nothing to give, I could still glorify God by giving him my trust, believing that he loved me and that he was still willing to use me.
this became my refrain: “lord, I don’t see how this (failed surgery, stubborn infection, unhealed wound that had to be bandaged and bandaged for over a year) will glorify you; but if it does, then I accept it. if it glorifies you to have me here, in this place, fine. I accept it. I hug you I am so happy to have a way to testify to your love, wisdom and grace that is not above my microscopic abilities. be glorified, O Lord, in me.”
I am on my feet again, and nothing that I know of is waiting to take me to the hospital, to bed, or to the grave, but it will come. for me, for all of us.
Meanwhile, I marvel at how I missed this for so long. the first question of the westminster catechism is: “what is the main end of humanity?” to glorify god and enjoy him forever.
the scriptural text with that question is i corinthians 10:31 – “whether you eat or drink or do anything else, do it all to the glory of god.”
“whatever” is a broad word that encompasses not only our active life, but also our passive and suffering life.
I can glorify him, I will glorify him, from the depths he commands me.
kathy keller graduated from gordon-conwell theological seminary with her master’s degree in theological studies in 1975. she had married tim keller six months earlier. During their nine years at a church in Virginia, Kathy gave birth to and raised David, Michael and Jonathan. She is also the mother-in-law of three amazing women and has seven grandchildren.
during tim’s years on the faculty of westminster seminary in philadelphia, kathy worked as an editor for great commission publications. She and Tim moved to Manhattan in 1989, where Tim preached and Kathy was on staff at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. as she hired other staff, her role became deputy director of communications. she also had a second career comforting those who become redeemer and later found out that she doesn’t ordain women.
kathy now works for redeemer city to city, an organization that helps national church planters working in urban areas.
She is the author of Jesus, Justice and Gender Roles, and with her husband Tim she is the co-author of The Meaning of Marriage; the songs of jesus; the wisdom of god to navigate life (proverbs); and the meaning of the marriage devotional (October 2019).
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