Guest Blog: What about God by Brittany Chan
“…for I am the Lord that healeth thee.” – Exodus 15:26
In July of 2008, I was a happy seventeen year old girl, working on a farm with one of my best friends. My biggest concerns were how to get the people around me to laugh and to think that I was cool. In those days, I was carefree: I lived for the here and now and didn’t care to think too much about the future.
It’s funny how life can change all in one day’s time. When the possibility of a future was almost taken from me, my priorities changed drastically.
Wondering what happened?
On that humid summer’s day, I steered my black, 1995 Toyota 4Runner onto the main road. Kristan and I had just left our summer job for lunch and I wanted to fit as much as possible into that one hour of freedom. Being filled with excitement and thinking ahead to the friends waiting for us at Subway, I handed Kristan my wallet and said, “Count how much I have left.” For just a moment, I glanced her way and took my eyes off of the road in front of me.
And there was my mistake.
I remember “waking up”, nearly a month later, as an inpatient at HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina. They told me that the front bumper of my SUV brushed up against a small concrete barrier on the right side of the road, which caused the airbags to deploy. This left us both unconscious and I lost control of the vehicle. As the road veered to the left, the 4Runner stayed right and collided with the side embankment of a fourteen foot ditch. The car flipped over backwards, which left me suspended by my seatbelt and partially projected Kristan from the window.
After EMS workers arrived, we were airlifted to Palmetto Health Richland in the capital city. Kristan had multiple physical injuries, including fractures in both legs, a dislocated hip and a dislocated jaw. She spent a few weeks in the hospital and several months in therapy. However, by the next season of softball, Kristan was back on the field and was still one of the top players on her All-Star team.
The fact that I was responsible for injuring another person caused me to feel a lot of guilt, shame, and regret. I would have rather taken all of her pain and afflictions, even the ones that still affect her today, upon myself. In my eyes, her wounds were much more significant than mine. They were external; everyone could see them. My problems weren’t as visible.
The impact from the wreck caused the strongest bone in my body to break: my right femur. Doctors were also concerned with scans that showed abdominal swelling, most likely caused by the seat belt and might have been a sign of internal bleeding. One of the first miracles of my recovery took place as I underwent exploratory surgery to determine the reason for swelling. I’m so thankful for the friends and family who had started to gather in the waiting room. They joined together in prayer and trusted God to intervene. The tests had revealed problems that warranted immediate attention, but once the physicians began to take a look inside, there were no longer any signs of bruising or fluid retention. Jehovah Rapha had already shown up!
Perhaps my greatest injury was a blow to the right frontal lobe, which led to sustaining a diffuse, multi-axonal Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). To make it a little easier to understand: if I was a computer, it was as if my hard drive had been damaged on the outside in one spot, but the internal corruption was widespread.
The results of a TBI differ depending on the intensity and location of the injury; but more than likely, patients experience issues in areas such as cognition, temperament, physical ability, self-control, and speech. I had to learn how to walk again, how to form coherent sentences, and how to express feelings of frustration and confusion in acceptable ways. My brain had to form new pathways and connections; it was like the road my thoughts traveled down was under construction and they had to find another way to get to where they were going. I spent a few weeks at Palmetto Health and was then transferred across the parking lot to HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital. This is where my memory of the entire ordeal begins.
Being completely dependent on other people has a way of humbling a person. As a young teenager, I was just starting to venture out from under my parents’ wings and gain responsibility for myself. But in that hospital room, I was helpless. Someone had to help me use the bathroom, shower, get dressed, fix my hair and I couldn’t seem to understand how I got there. I spent most of the day either sleeping or in some form of therapy. The moments in between held questions of what had really happened. I tried my best to make sense of what people were telling me. I had been in a car accident and suddenly woke up in a rehab facility where a doctor came in every morning at 4:30 to give medicine that was supposed to be helping me.
Whether it was a side effect of the medications I was taking or of the brain injury, I didn’t trust anyone. It’s safe to say that I was slightly paranoid. I remember thinking that everyone I talked to – doctors, nurses, custodians, therapists, counselors, friends, even my family – were all working together in this great conspiracy against me.
Can I just say that my mom is truly a saint? She stayed with me day and night and attended to my every need…but I still didn’t even trust her completely. On multiple occasions throughout the day I would beg her to tell me something that only my mother would know. Yet, every answer she gave wouldn’t satisfy me. I felt alone. I was convinced that no one understood what I was dealing with.
I remember laying in the hospital bed one day contemplating everything and everyone. I kept thinking, “Well, I can’t trust him” and “I can’t trust her”. My irrational thoughts were starting to overwhelm me when I asked myself, “What about God?”
In that moment, it felt as if the tumultuous waves I had been drowning in suddenly died down. The response to this question had the potential to shape the rest of my life.
What about God?
Doubt had clouded my mind when I questioned everyone else. What would make God any different? Somehow as I laid there, I knew that I couldn’t go wrong if I chose to put my faith in Him.
A sense of peace surrounded me from that moment on. No, life wasn’t back to normal yet, but a spiritual landmark was erected that day when I determined to trust that God’s unseen hand was holding me. As I began to pray, something else became abundantly clear to me: I was imperfect in a lot of ways. I wasn’t the faithful Christian that I should have been and I knew that I caused God shame many times; but in the crucial instance when I could have slipped into eternity forever, God was merciful. It’s as if He extended another chance to me; a chance to do better, and it’s been my intent to do just that.
I wish I could say life has been a walk in the park since I made up my mind to serve God unconditionally. I wish I could say that my emotions have never betrayed me again, that I have never found myself low in another valley, or that I never felt like I was walking in a desert; but I can say that my Lord has been with me all the way.
I’ve found God to not only be a Healer of our physical bodies, but also of our hearts, minds, and souls. He desires to know us on an intimate and personal level. He sees and cares about every trial. Even the ones we try so hard to cover up, because we think no one else could understand. But He does.
You’ve got regrets piled higher than you can see,
But what if I told you of the Man who can wipe your slate clean?
He knows about your past and He loves you still,
Every void in your life, He’s longing to fill.
The prophet Jeremiah prayed “Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved” (Jeremiah 17:14). You can hear his faith in that verse. His soul was troubled for an entire nation that turned their backs on God, but Jeremiah’s prayer wasn’t one that questioned Him. He was confident of what God – and only God – could do.
Too often, we walk through life trying to fix ourselves. We superglue our hearts back together with relationships or by fulfilling our own desires, but then we wonder why we never feel whole. It’s because we are attempting to do something that we weren’t created to do. Only God can mend the broken pieces of our lives and make them new. He cares about every concern we have and His healing can reach past your physical person and touch the depths of your soul.
So what hurt do you have? What is it that plagues your mind every morning and hinders your worship? What burden do you struggle to carry by yourself?
Bring it to God.
Brittany Chan
