Hello, everyone! Because I started making vlogs for the World Race, I randomly had the idea to make this video a few months ago. But before you see what it is, I want to give you a little bit of insight into why I made it.
Firstly, I think I have a crazy testimony that God wants told because it brings Him glory. For those of you who don’t know, I had a rotting, necrotic biceps tendon and now I swim for Texas A&M, a top 4 program in the country. I should be dead, and instead I get to live this miracle every day. Like I said, crazy. But so many times I don’t think anyone has any clue what living my miracle actually looks like. If I am not questioning my sanity in a workout, it’s a pretty good day (and no, that is not a hyperbole). I spend one to two extra hours a day doing treatment and rehab and putting myself in all kinds of pain, just so I can put myself through more pain in the pool. I spend over 30 hours a week training and doing PT and treatment, all while balancing grad school and a social life. I have learned that if I want to see God do something in my life that I have never seen before, then I am going to have to pray and surrender like I never have before. There are no shortcuts to living the life God has for me.
After my third surgery, I genuinely believed that God would heal me fully and completely. I mean, I know I basically had the biggest surgery you can have on an arm, but like, He’s God! He can do whatever He wants! When I came back to the sport and regained my strength, I realized that I wasn’t even close to fully healed. In fact, I had to decide this year to cut down my practice load so that I wouldn’t curl up in a ball in the middle of the pool unable to move from pain (yes, that was happening consistently). And for a while I asked God why He didn’t heal me fully. Wouldn’t a greater comeback bring Him more glory?
And the answer is simple. No. God will do whatever brings Him the most glory, and He had so much more to teach me from me depending on Him every day than He ever could from me being an Olympic champion in need of no help. So I live every day in this beautiful surrender of dependence on Him. It is both excruciating and lovely and everything between. But what I realized is this is how God chooses to work in our lives most of the time. I don’t think miracles always look the way we think they should look.
See, we want God to show up in our lives and part the Red Sea or have us walk on water, but we’re not even willing to get out of the boat. I one hundred percent believe that God is the same God today that He was in the Old Testament, that He was in Acts, and that He was through the whole Bible. I have both seen and experienced incredible, miraculous, sudden acts of God that would bring you to your knees. I completely believe that He still performs those incredible displays of power today. But I think God more often works in the subtle ways, in allowing us to partner with Him for the miracles He is doing in our lives. I mean that’s the mystery of the whole gospel, right? That God chooses us mere human beings to spread His glory among the nations, even though He could do it all Himself without us if He wanted. It’s truly unfathomable when you really consider it.
Along this same vein, I think most of us miss out on countless miracles that God wants to do in our lives, simply because we’re not willing to live in the kind of dependence and surrender that these miracles take. It’s too hard. It’s too uncomfortable. We would have to sacrifice too much.
Well, let me tell you something. If you take God up on the life that He really has for you, then it will not be easy. It will be the hardest thing you will ever do in your whole life. Because He will break you. And I’m not talking He will kind of make you uncomfortable. I’m talking pillow wracking sobs of confusion and devastation and grappling with God as your pathetic human mind tries to trust that an omnipotent God loves you enough to bring you through this for your good and His glory.
The problem in America is that if we don’t want to live this life of dependence, then we don’t have to. We have everything available to us that we need to live a comfortable, complacent life. But let me tell you this: that life will never be miraculous. So my challenge and prayer for you today is that you would take God up on the life He has for you, that you would surrender to what you know He wants of you or to what He could ask of you, and that you would live a life worthy of the calling you have received in Christ Jesus.
I hope that as you see behind the scenes of my miracle in this video, you won’t just take it as a funny video of weird treatments on an arm with nerve damage, but that you would see the beauty of a life surrendered to the miraculous. I don’t have it all down, and nothing I do is of me, but it is all Christ in me. Therefore I will boast all the more about the miracles He has performed in my life. To Him be the glory and the praise and the honor forever. Amen.
Hope you enjoy!
Tera
