Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / March 7, 2023 | Expresso - Cathy Ramshaw

Transcript

March 7, 2023 | Expresso - Cathy Ramshaw · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, speaking about God and his goodness is one of my favorite things to do in life.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: My vision of who God is and um what he could do started at a very young age.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up knowing I was adopted.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was three days old when my parents brought me home, and based on the story they tell, I was the best thing that ever happened to them.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was three days old when my parents brought me home.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um my vision of what it was like was that they went to the hospital, looked through a great big glass window to see a row of babies, and I was the cutest one.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: So they got me.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I had three brothers that were 10, 12, and 13 years older than me.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the stories that have been told would indicate that I was spoiled from the get-go, and I would have to say I have no argument against them.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I have a special memory of my dad telling me about why my mom put me up for adoption.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: She said that he said that she couldn't take care of me, but she knew that if she prayed to God, that he could put me in a family that could.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how I got to the trout family.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember the explanation being any more complicated than that.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was probably five when it happened.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And when my dad left, I remember praying for my mom.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I knew that God had taken care of me, and I wanted to make sure he was taking care of her.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the first time I remember praying to God.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: That explanation of my beginning built my foundation of my belief in who God was and what he can do.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I envisioned him just picking me up and putting me and moving me to the family where I belonged.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I never felt rejected, I never felt unwanted, quite the opposite.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: God put me where I was always meant to be.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't just born into a family, I was put into a family.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I lived here in Topeka.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: We moved back here when I was six, and um, I've lived here ever since, not including college.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I married uh Richard.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see if I do this right.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: There, there we are, 34 some years later.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um married Richard in 1989, and we had three boys.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is my favorite Easter picture of them.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Ryan was born in 95, Jackson in 97, and Cooper in 99.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: They were all healthy, and life was good.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was normal.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: We had a good life.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in 2008, uh, the boys are now 10 or 8, 10, and 12.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And um, we were just entering a new stage.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: We could go to Lowe's and leave them at home.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was a monumental time in our life, um, kind of like leaving the house without the diaper bag for the first time in years.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we were living in a time where Richard and I would have both said, we don't want our life to change at all.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I remember it being a time when I was spiritually uh feeling very strong.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And um, here I am, send me was my favorite song by Mercy Me.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I can really sing it in the car.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um Richard and I were teaching Young Married here at TBC with the Vanderhartz.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was teaching classes on marriage and intimacy at all different churches in town and speaking at mops groups on a variety of topics.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I should mention that I always dreamed of writing a book.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so much so that Richard gave me this book back in 2001.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's called On Writing Well.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to write a book about God.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted um to tell people how good he was.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I made a few attempts.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I would start to write, and uh a few pages would come together, but no chapters ever came of it, no book.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Richard and I would take long walks, and he would say, When are you gonna write that book?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, I just I just don't have a story.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: This makes me think about the scene from Forrest Gump.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Are you familiar with that movie?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: When Captain Dan and Forrest are on the shrimp boat and having no success with their shrimp fishing trip.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And Captain Dan says, Where's that god of yours, Forr?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Forrest says, About that time God showed up as a storm brewed across the sky.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I wasn't questioning whether or not there was a God by any means.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to tell people how good he was, how his plan was always better than mine, and that he loved me more than I could ever imagine.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: In my mind, I couldn't think of a reason not to believe in God or trust him.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, several of our friends were adopting children out of China.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: When you're adopted, people just kind of think maybe you'll adopt too.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: But Richard and I talked about it, and because I always felt God put me where I belonged, um, I didn't want to take someone else's child.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: We had three boys.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'd grown up with three brothers.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was really happy.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was a boy mom.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I just felt like if God wanted us to have a baby girl, you know, that he would make that obvious.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: But we just didn't think that we were going to pursue that.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: I remember having a conversation with the Vanderhearts where we were teaching this class, and uh I remember where we were standing in my backyard, and I said, if God wants us to have a baby girl, he is going to have to drop her in our lap.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And on January 25th, 2008, less than six months later, that's exactly what he did.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: The short version, I tell people, is Jesus walked up on our front porch and said, This one is yours.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: We learned of her situation on a Sunday night.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Her current family that had adopted her eight months earlier was disrupting, which I didn't know you could do.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know you could give them back.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, this bothered me being adopted, and I tried to imagine what could possibly be going wrong, but I prayed for her.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I knew God knew where that child belonged, and I prayed God would put her exactly in that place.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And five days later, on Friday afternoon, she was in our lap.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kaylin.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I would become her fifth mom before her fourth birthday.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: For the essence of time, you will just have to believe me when I say there was absolutely no way to argue that God didn't put her in our family.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Over five days prior to her arrival, we asked God to make it abundantly clear if we were to adopt her.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Write it in the sky, I said, God, billboard style.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: I have to know this is you.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back, this whole transaction wasn't hard for me to believe.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was my story.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: God can spit you out on whatever beach he wants to.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Just ask Jonah.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Kaylin's life and mine had some amazing parallels.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: One, she was being adopted into a family of three boys, just like I had.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Her birth mom was four foot eleven, and so was mine.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: She came to us as Kaylee Grace.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And before that, she had a completely different name, actually, several.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you roll back the time to 1980 something, all the girls back then were called Stacy and Julie and Debbie and Kathy.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this was before the era of the Madisons and the McKenzie's and lots and lots of Caitlyns.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Kaelin was the last name of one of my best friends, junior high, high school, and college.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: We all said if we had a little girl, we were gonna name her Kaylin.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't know we were ahead of our time.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was well before all the Caitlyns came to be.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when our daughter arrived to our home, her name was Kaylee Grace.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine called me and said, Do you know what her name means?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Uh, no, because it's been eight years since I opened a baby name book.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Kaylee meant wearisome.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, how appropriate that she was wearisome Grace.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I thought about how weary she must be in a short life.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: She had been bounced from family to family.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: But what I noticed about the spelling of her name is if I replaced that E with an N, Kaylee became Kalen.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: My girl name from circa 1980 something.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And something else changed, the meaning changed.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Kaelin would then mean pure.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Pure grace.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Kalen Grace.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that happened is Kaylin equals pure, and so does Catherine, which is my name.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: God had spit her out on our beach, and I had no doubt about this.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: I knew how this story would be written.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: I lived it.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: She would be adopted by us at age three.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was adopted at three days old.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And while we were both three, the difference between three days and three years made all our similarities to our stories fade away.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was only after a few weeks that we started to see behaviors that we just couldn't make sense of.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: The behaviors that we were witnessing could only be caused by severe neglect and abuse, but at the time we didn't know any of that.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: It would be a couple of years before we were able to access some of her background information.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: At the urging of her doctors and therapists, we pursued as much history as possible.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Kaylin's first three years of life were not a fairy tale.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Far from.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Kaelin would eventually be diagnosed with something called rad, reactive attachment disorder, and fetal alcohol syndrome, amongst other things.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Kaylin, in her first three years of life, had experienced repeated trauma and a level of neglect so severe it rewired her brain.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Damage caused by both physical abuse and neglect changed how her brain processed everything.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: When you get a child the way we got Kaylin, you don't know if she's a chicken nugget girl or a burger girl.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know nothing.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Except that as you watch her, her behaviors just don't make sense.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't feel pain.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: She could break a bone and not cry.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't want to be touched by anyone, and she never stopped rocking.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: We were about five months into this life with Kaylin, and nothing looked as I expected it would.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: In a few short months, our peaceful home and our wonderful life was unrecognizable.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was in my office at home filling out paperwork to get her a new Social Security card.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Until she was adopted by the previous family, she didn't even have one.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: She had never even seen a doctor since her birth.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't have any immunizations.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: But again, we didn't know any of this at the time.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: I had one piece of paper stating her mom's name, height, eye color, hair color, and birth date.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: 92676, that's not right.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: I stared at it, trying to make sense of this date.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: I just kept reading it.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's not right.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was born 9267.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't make sense of it because I was trying to make it my birth date.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was born 9267, and her mom was born 92676.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: How did I not ever see this?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: In the Bible, God uses numbers, He uses it to show himself.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: 40 days and 40 nights.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's been mentioned 24 times in the Bible.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: The number seven is considered to be the number of completeness.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not superstitious and I don't have a lucky number, but I will tell you in my moment of desperation, because I was questioning what had we done.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: God was telling me, yes, Kathy, it was me.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: I felt very clear about what he was saying.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Kathy, I knew before you were born where you would belong, where you belonged before Kain's mom was born.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: I knew you'd be sitting right here wondering if you had really heard from me that had I really delivered Kaylin to your front door, and I want you to know I did, and I'm right here, and I know exactly where you are.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: That was in 2008, and for the next eight years, well, it was a walk in the desert, the wilderness.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Kaylin was not bonding with anyone.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Her behaviors became harder and more difficult to understand.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very much a getter-done kind of girl.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: My efforts were exhausted, and I felt like we weren't making any progress at all.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: My expectations of how life would be were shattered.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Every day was a struggle to survive.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Managing her was all-consuming, and I became isolated as she consumed all my time and energy.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And when she wasn't with me, I felt depleted and empty.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: We had changed our life completely to try to give her what she needed to heal.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was determined not to leave my post as mama number five.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would repeatedly question whether we had made a mistake or misread God's direction.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: But as I said, God all but sent an angel and said, This one is yours.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I couldn't make sense of why it wasn't turning out like I had imagined.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: When God delivered her, I had no doubt about how this would all work.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Just like it had for me.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when that didn't happen, I felt like a complete failure.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't just imagine what life was supposed to be like.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: I knew what life was supposed to be like.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to give her the life that I had had.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: 2015 was an exceptionally hard year for Kaelin.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: She was now in the fifth grade, falling behind her peers, not functioning socially, and a long list of behaviors that I can't even share.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: It had been eight years since her delivery, and Richard and I felt like we had made far less progress than we had ever envisioned.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so on October 28, 2015, God miraculously provided a full-time treatment program in Colorado specializing in attachment therapy.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: She was to be gone for four to six months, but would end up being there an entire year.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: A failure and broken myself.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was very much wandering in the desert like the Israelites.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why had God sent me here?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, here I am, send me.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: I meant uh like a two-week mission trip, not a lifetime mission trip that makes me feel like a failure.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: The staff at the treatment program sent us home with the instructions.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Go find your equilibrium.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: A huge task, given I couldn't even find myself in the mirror.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Where had I placed that equilibrium?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: So off we went to find it.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Broken, tired, and alone.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Five weeks later, we took Ryan, our oldest son, who was just shy of 21, to the ER with back pain.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Symptoms we had been treating as a bulging disc.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Symptoms we never imagined would be anything else than that.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that day, the MRI would reveal a tennis ball-sized tumor on his spine.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: We would later find it was Ewing sarcoma, a very rare and aggressive pediatric cancer, 200 cases in the U.S.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: a year.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Many of you prayed for Ryan through his first cancer treatment that lasted almost all of 2016.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Upon completion, it was now time for Kaelin to come back home and return to life.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: God had provided a place for her for an entire year, which helped us because Ryan was in full-time treatment.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: There is no way we could have managed both of them.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Ryan and I spent large portions of time down in Houston at MD Anderson as he sat out for a full year from KU.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Ryan was considered dead.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: No evidence of disease.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And a year post-treatment, on my 50th birthday, 926, 2017, at one of his checkups in Houston, he was diagnosed with blood cancer called MDS.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a precursor to acute myeloid leukemia, a secondary cancer that was caused by the Ewing sarcoma treatment.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: It would be a full two years before he would return to college and a new version of life.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of weeks ago, Jim preached on Elijah and how fear had been misinterpreted in translation, that the original text meant broken prophet.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: That Elijah, who had slayed 450 prophets of Baal sent by Jezebel to kill him, when told that Jezebel was still going to kill him, he ran and sought his own death.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Elijah thought the Israelites who would surely turn back to God after seeing this great victory, but they didn't.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I have to say, now a word from our sponsors.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I didn't know what that looked like.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it looks like to slay 450 prophets that were after me.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: How long did that take?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: How bad did it hurt?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: What were those battles like?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Were they hand-to-hand combat?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: When I tell people Kaylin had rad, which means she has no emotional bond to anyone still today, you can't imagine what that looks like when a child is broken to that degree.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: No matter how much I describe it, until you've lived that battle, you just don't know.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: I can't imagine how hard it was to battle 450 men that were after me, seeking to kill me and win.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Elijah, I thought, wow, did he just like wipe his brow and go, can you believe that?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: We made it.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's get back to worshiping the one true God.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: What was that like?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now back to our regular scheduled prayer.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Program.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Jim explained that it was like when the Israelites didn't turn back to God like Elijah had expected, that reality clashed so completely with what Elijah envisioned happening that he was broken, hopeless, prayed for his own death.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: I sobbed through this entire sermon, this explanation of how Elijah felt like a failure.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: How his expectations clashed so much with what happened, he couldn't go on.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is exactly how I felt about Calin.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: God, this isn't how the story is supposed to go.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't how I envisioned it at all.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Her life with us.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm out of ideas.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: You've given her to the wrong mom.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: For the first time since Kaylin was spat out on our beach, I understood why I was so broken by her.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Her story and mine from the outside looked so similar.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: I had no doubts about how life would turn out.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: But my life, my fairy tale existence that I had planned to give her clashed with her trauma history.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: My three days old versus her three years old made a huge difference in who we were.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: My beginning and her beginning weren't the same.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: My expectations for her in our family was that life would be much like mine.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't imagine giving her anything better in the whole world.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to give her what I had been given.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: The day after I found out about Kaylin, before she was ever in our home, back in January of 2008, I read from this devotional.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: This was just days before she arrived at our home.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the verse was Isaiah 64, 8.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: We are like clay and you are the potter.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Your hands made us all.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like God was telling me at the time, Kathy, she belongs to me.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: I know where she belongs.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put her where she belongs in the right home, and I'm not going to leave her broken.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I really felt was that God was saying, I'm the potter.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't leave people broken.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: After all these years, exhausted to the point we didn't even recognize ourselves.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: She was still very broken.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't make sense of it all.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't reconcile any of this with God's plan.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Jim shared some advice for broken, burned-out people.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Get to the end of yourself and find a friend.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: The thing was, I believed that God had given us Kalen, and my commitment to be her mother and never give up looked a lot like this.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Can you see her?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hey God, I've got this boulder.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: You go take care of some of those other big rocks.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: I got this boulder.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: I won't let it roll down the hill.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you worry, God.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've got this big one.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: You go worry about the other things going on.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I thought for sure he had given me this journey, and if he did, he must have thought I could do it.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Today, as I look back over our journey with Ryan and his two cancer diagnoses, for all the days I stood holding up that boulder, never leaving my post as mama number five for Kaelin, determined she would be healed from her brokenness.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Under the weight of Ryan's cancer, I collapsed.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: I could do nothing for Ryan.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was instantly at the end of myself, as I had never been before in my life.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: We had lost so much of our life taking care of Kaylin.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even know who to call.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I called the person most of us around here call in a crisis, a fellow get or done kind of woman, Mel Congdon.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: When I'd heard the words mass on his spine, I was just completely out of ideas.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I called Mel.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And all I could say was pray.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you remember, I told you I always wanted to write a book.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I never thought it would start like this.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the middle of the night, and I'm fighting with my brain.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: To believe what I have said I have believed my whole life.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: That God's plan is better than mine.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: That he loves me more than I can fathom.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that I trust him.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Truths I have built my entire life on.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: I am now fighting to reconcile as true.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: I never wanted to write a book about Kalen.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not our journey.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't qualified, it wasn't pretty, and I didn't have a viable solution to make it better.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't set out to write a book about Ryan when he got sick.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: I had no plan.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: My suffering poured out of me like I couldn't control it.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't keep it in.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was too painful and too heavy of a burden to carry.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Ryan and I would spend weeks and months away from home.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: I never added up all the days that he and I spent in the hospital.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: But while I was there, it was just God and me.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I would ask and he would answer.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: I wrestled with every topic from humility to hope.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I simply wrote about what God was teaching me in the dark.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: What I heard him whisper in my ear.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Filling just 20 minutes tonight has been a challenge for me.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: I have so many stories to tell.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: I could keep you here for days telling about how much God taught me in the dark.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: While Kaelin is still very broken, she will be a lifetime mission.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: She is living her best life, not the life I envisioned, but I look forward to the day that I meet her in heaven when I meet the Kalen God meant her to be.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: She graduates from high school this year, and in the fall, she'll attend the 18 to 21 program for children with disabilities.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Jackson and Cooper, now 23 and 25.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: They like us learned a lot about who God is.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that there are people in this world who look completely normal on the outside, but at the inside, there is a story no one would ever choose to live.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: They are both still walking with the Lord and know more about who he is because of our struggles.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Richard and I have a stronger marriage because of our trials than we would have if we hadn't.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: And Ryan, well, he's married to the girl I prayed for since he was born.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still praying for the other two.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: In May, he graduates from KU Med.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna be a PT doctor.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he's gonna help patients recover from their cancer in the oncology department.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew 10, 27, what I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: What you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim from the rooftops.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: I proclaim all of this because I want to share God's true goodness, even when life is really bad.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: I can't keep it in.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Proclaiming God's goodness is the gift He gave me in the middle of the worst suffering of my life.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: I never thought you'd send me here, and I never knew what treasure I would find when you did.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: I asked if I could pray with you before we end tonight.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to read the devotion that was um in my book the day that Calin arrived at our house that Friday afternoon.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't read it until middle of the night after she'd been dropped off.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was appropriately named Adopted by God.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Romans 8 16.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: When we come to Christ, God not only forgives us, he also adopts us.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Through a dramatic series of events, we go from condemned orphans with no hope to adopted children with no fear.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here is how it happens: you come before the judgment seat of God full of rebellion and mistakes.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because of his justice, he cannot dismiss your sin, but because of his love, he cannot dismiss you.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: So in an act which stunned the heavens, he punished himself on the cross for your sins.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: God's justice and love are equally honored, and you, God's creation, are forgiven.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the story doesn't end with God's forgiveness.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: It would be enough if God just cleansed your name.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: But he does more.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: Most Heavenly Father, this world is hard.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't promise us a life without struggle.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: But you are faithful and you promise to never leave us or forsake us.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you, Lord, that you were willing to sacrifice your son on the cross and forsake him so that we might be forgiven and be adopted into the family of God.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, I pray for all these women in the lives who will hear this message tonight.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: We ask that you touch their hearts and speak to them through your Holy Spirit.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name we pray.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.