My name is Rachel Hargreaves and I have Cystic Fibrosis.
This is a sentence that I have said to less people than I can count on my own two hands. Only my immediate family and a few very close friends have been let into this part of my life. It is a battle that the enemy had convinced me must be fought alone.
Over the past month and a half, God has been showing me otherwise.
While I was in Cote d’Ivoire, God moved mountains in my soul. Mountains I thought were untouchable. He restored. He renewed. He healed. I was brought to my knees in awe of His goodness.
While talking with a teammate, in the spirit of vulnerability, I shared with her some of my struggles of living with Cystic Fibrosis. Part of the reason why so few people know about my disease, is the questions that it brings up. The conversation turns depressing fairly quickly.
Cystic Fibrosis is a genetic disease that you are born with. It is rare and fewer than 30,000 people have CF in America. Due to a gene mutation in the DNA, people with CF have thicker than normal mucus. This, in turn, effects almost every organ system in the body. It is especially detrimental to the lungs. There is no cure and the disease is a fatal one. The life expectancy has risen in the past decade with medical advances, but most of those extra years are filled with countless hospital stays, feeding tubes, and ultimately lung transplants- which isn’t even a cure, since the lungs aren’t the problem, just a band aid, prolonging the inevitable.
Many people might be familiar with the movie “Fault in our Stars” that came out a few years ago. In the movie the main characters have a form of cancer and are unable to be around each other or else they will make each other sicker quicker and end their young lives. The true story that this movie was based off, was actually about two Cystic Fibrosis patients who fell in love. Remember how the enemy convinced me to fight this battle alone? He didn’t have to work too hard at convincing me, since I’ve never met anyone else in my entire life who has CF. We aren’t allowed to be around each other because of the possibility of passing a deadly bacteria between each other that thrives in Cystic Fibrosis riddled lungs.
As I reluctantly shared about my silent struggles, she lent her listening ear and in turn, asked some really thought provoking questions. One of which was about asking God for healing.
I quickly dismissed this question, or thought all together, as I have done so many times before. I have grown up Pentecostal and absolutely believe in healing and have seen it and know God can and does heal. When I was young, out of love, my parents asked for healing for me in multiple church meetings and revivals. Nothing ever came of it, except for awkward expectancy and disappointment. My heart hardened towards the thought of healing. When I was a teenager I made it clear to my parents that I didn’t want to go up for healing or to be prayed for. And since then, I never have. Not once. Nor did I even tell people about it. It was my silent, lonely battle.
God’s grace and protection over my physical body were beyond evident growing up. I hardly was ever sick, healthier most of the time than my sister, who doesn’t have CF. I was MVP on my varsity basketball team. My lungs were never an issue. I struggled with a lot of digestion and sinus problems, but they were so minor compared to what the average CF patient my age should have been dealing with. I didn’t fully realize this until I heard one day in high school about a boy in a town about half an hour away who also played basketball and had CF, had passed away abruptly from a lung infection.
In the years that followed high school, I forgot and took for granted the grace that God had so generously and mercifully covered my life in. I lived a life far apart from Him. At one of my lowest points in life, God lifted that covering up, just a tiny bit. Just enough though. Just enough to let me see and live in what my life would look like without His undeserved mercy and provision.
I got sick.
For a year and a half.
My second year of nursing school, my patients asked me if I was okay more times than I asked them. I woke up coughing and went to sleep gasping for air. My sinuses were so clogged that I lost my sense of smell and even my ability to taste. I was miserable. I got depressed. I didn’t want to live anymore, not if it was gonna be like this. I am thankful every day that God brought me to this place though. He stripped me of everything and everyone. Every single thing that stood between Him and I faded away. All I could see was Him, He drew me so close to Himself. So close that all I wanted was to be with Him. Forever. In heaven. Every day for over a month I prayed that He would take me. I didn’t want to hurt anymore. I didn’t want to struggle to take my next breath anymore. I just wanted to be in His presence.
He didn’t answer my prayer.
But He did relieve me of my suffering. I finally got serious about my Cystic Fibrosis treatments and found a specialist a few hours away. He started me on a slew of new medications and nebulizer treatments. This was also at the same time I broke my shoulder and had surgery, so I was stuck in a sling and on my butt for 6 weeks so I had no choice but to comply with my treatments.
I got better.
For the first time in almost a year and a half, breathing wasn’t a struggle, I started to be able to smell and taste food again, and I could laugh without going into an embarrassing, terrible coughing fit. My gaze was still eternal, but the temporal became more tolerable and even enjoyable.
Since then, God has been taking me on this crazy, beautiful journey drawing me closer to Himself.
God had begun spiritual healing in my heart and soul but I had completely dismissed the possibility of physical healing. My teammate looked intently at me and softly asked,
“Why?”
That was a good question. I thought about my past and the hardening in my heart towards my own healing. Knowing that God could, but not necessarily believing that He would. I told her that I thought maybe it was like Paul’s thorn in his side, the one that he asked God to remove, but God left there to keep him humble. I was okay with living it out, so long as God gave me the strength to do so. For some reason, it was almost scarier asking God for healing than it was to let Cystic Fibrosis take my last breath from me.
Not two weeks after this conversation, I got sick.
The day before our travel day from Cote d’Ivoire to Ghana. At first I thought it was another lung infection, this broke me mentally. I laid on my bed, sweating buckets from a fever, even though it was also 89 degrees and 100% humidity at 8 pm that night in Abidjan. I laid and just cried. The devil took me to dark places in my mind.
This is going to be how it is until the end. Infection after infection, until finally you can’t breathe anymore. Just an endless parade of sickness. It doesn’t matter how much medication you take, or how faithful you are with your treatments, the end will still be the same.
It wasn’t until two days later after a 14 hour bus ride, multiple bus stops, a squatty potty, border crossings, in and out of consciousness, burning up like a furnace from cyclic fevers, that a blood test in a Ghanaian hospital confirmed that I had malaria.
On New Years Eve.
I spent New Years Eve in a hospital in Ghana hooked up to an IV. I laid there alone for hours. Listening to babies crying in the next room, they had put me in the maternity ward. I had no phone, as mine had been stolen a few days before (the enemy really was doing his worst that week). So I just laid and stared at the ceiling. As miserable as I was, I didn’t dare let the enemy take me to any dark places, instead, I started to sing.
Even though my body didn’t want to agree, I sang “Blessed Be Your Name”. Over and over again. A peace settled over me. I was acutely aware of my health struggles though. Out of this came a simple prayer, “Lord, sustain me.”
“Cast your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous be shaken.”
Psalm 55:22
So, every day for the next week I prayed this simple prayer, almost constantly it felt like.
“In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.”
Psalm 5:3
One morning, as I was praying my usual ‘Lord, sustain me’, God spoke very gently but matter-of-factly:
You keep asking Me to sustain you, and I am and will, but why don’t you ask Me to heal you?
What do you do when God asks you to ask Him for healing?
I was taken aback and humbled.
Okay, God.
So the next morning, I changed my prayer, “Lord sustain me AND heal me.”
I continued this prayer for another week or so when one Sunday morning, God changed it again.
I was getting ready for church service and I looked in the mirror and before I knew what had even come out of my mouth, I had prayed out loud,
“Lord heal me and sustain me.”
Ever since then I have been walking in bold pursuit of healing from the Lord.
“I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
Psalm 27:23-24
