Kathryn Allen

When I was younger I wanted God to be a big part of my life. I wanted Him to be important. But it wasn’t until about 7 years ago when something drastic happened that I started to learn that God can’t just be a part of my life. He needs to be my life and I need to live like it! I can’t just yield myself 98.7 percent. I have to be all the way yielded to Him. I have to trust Him with everything. It was October 2, 1999.  I was living with my family in Moscow, Russia where we cared for orphans in an orphanage. That morning my older sister and I were standing at a bus stop across the street from the orphanage, when a drunk driver swerved off the road and plowed into us. One second we were looking at our bus tickets and standing on the streets that were still just a little bit muddy from yesterday’s rain. The next second my sister was walking into the golden streets of Heaven because she was thrown into a pole and died instantly. I was also thrown far and landed unconscious on my face on the cement. Both of my legs, a rib, a bone above my eye, 5 teeth, and my jaw were broken. My face was very scarred, my ear was damaged (because a hinge bone from my jaw went through my ear before I swallowed it), my eyes were damaged, and my feet were scarred. So, there I was, lying in my own pool of blood on a dirty sidewalk in Moscow. I felt as if my life had gone through a blender. So much of what had been a part of my life – so much of what I had counted on – my sister, my body, my abilities, my work, my home were changed or taken away. When they were unloading me from the ambulance I remember grasping desperately for a hand. A hand that I could hold that would reassure me. Someone took hold of my hand. To this day I don’t for sure know who it was. But he held it and it made me feel so much more secure. I look back now and I realize that at that moment I couldn’t have begun to imagine how much God was going to teach me during the long days, weeks, months and years ahead about holding on to His hand and coming to know Him as my strength and protector, the One who went before me into battle (or surgery), who understood when no one else quite could, and, most of all, the One I could trust with my everything. After I was stabilized, I was emergency air evacuated to Finland. There I underwent a 10 hour surgery, was in intensive car for a week, and was in the trauma ward for another week. Then I was finally able to be flown back to Manhattan, Kansas, where we held my sister’s American memorial service. Over the weeks and years that followed, God began to teach me about trusting Him through my healing. I began to understand Him as the One who loves me more than I had ever known. The One who is the Healer of broken bones but also broken hearts. There were so many times, especially during the days and months immediately following the accident, when it was very, very hard to trust God. Yet, in His graciousness, He brought me through various circumstances to teach me the joy there is in coming to understand that He is indeed trustworthy. At times I would be tempted to become extremely upset about things I had gone through while in Finland and during the days immediately after I returned to America. It was emotionally hard to deal with the fact that I had been so humiliated physically. I never had a cruel nurse or doctor, and I knew that they were trying to help me, but it was still hard to have allowed them to cut off my clothes, give me showers, etc. Sometimes I would think: “If only such and such wouldn’t have had to happen.” Yet, God began to show me how He had allowed every single thing to take place in order for Him to be more glorified in my life. If He would not have allowed those things, I would not have grown in certain ways. Everything was for a reason. I have been learning that truly He is the Potter and we are the clay. He will mold us and then put us in the fire so that we can be most usable in His hands. But, while we are in the fire, He will not forget about us. His hand is right on the thermostat and He won’t allow the heat to become any hotter than it needs to be. One thing God has been teaching me through my experiences is That often times the hardest things in our life are just the thorns that lead up to the roses. The thorns are the path that get us closer to, and in a stronger relationship, with the Lord. The Finnish people are very careful in their hospitals and the doctors thought that I might be carrying a disease from Russia that they did not want spread around. So I was put in quarantine and I was treated like a very dirty person. At first it was very hard. Every time someone would come to see me they had to put gloves on. I felt so dirty. My legs were stapled and I already felt like a Frankenstein. And now here all the nurses were afraid to get close to me. And yet, the Lord was able to work through that. Although it seemed like a thorn it was actually a rose. Because of this situation I was able to have a private intensive care and trauma ward room, which was a real miracle. This allowed me to rest and get better so much more quickly. One time I had to go to an ear specialist because my ear had been damaged. On the way one of the nurses was about to touch me without gloves on and the doctor that was in the ambulance with her got so angry at her. I didn’t exactly understand what he was saying since he was speaking Finnish, but I knew that the general idea was that I was so dirty, I could have this awful disease. Again I felt so gross and so dirty and yet again the Lord was able to say “I am allowing these thorns because I have a rose for you.” The whole two weeks that I was in this hospital when I should have been eventually be moved to another room with a lot of people, I was able to stay in the quarantine room. When they finally got the test results back regarding whether or not I had that disease, they saw that it hadn’t worked correctly.  So, they had to do the test again.  I was able to stay in this room all by myself for about four extra days. It has been amazing to me to see how, a lot of times, the times that can be hardest, when we wonder: “Where are you God in this situation?” can be the greatest times, the times when the Lord is protecting us and showing us His love in an amazing way. Through this I came to understand that God allowed this suffering because He loves me. He loves me!!!  There is so much peace in realizing that it was His great love for me that allowed me to go through it! He loved me and desired for me to grow in a deeper relationship with Him and be used by Him in ways that I would have not been able to be used otherwise. He allowed me to suffer because He wanted to chisel His character deeper into my life, and although it would be painful, in the end He knew He could use me to better reflect Christ’s light. Suffering is hard, and sometimes we do not understand how the Lord could ever bring glory to Himself through a certain painful experience, but we must learn to trust Him. Once I heard someone say that all Christians’ suffering is temporary. Even if it is for a lifetime, it is still only temporary compared to eternity. There is so much joy in learning through suffering to more deeply base our hope in Christ and the security of eternity. There have been times I’ve wanted to say: “But God, it is so hard to trust You! Where were you God when they covered my sister’s body with a gray blanket as it lay all broken on that muddy sidewalk?” And Jesus says, “I was there.” The night before the accident our family had read together this verse: “and I will keep your foot from dashing against a stone.” I’ve thought about that so much because after the accident we learned that both of my sister’s ankles were broken. Jesus says in Isaiah 43:2, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. I was there, Kathryn. You can trust Me.” And when I say, “But, Lord, remember all those dreams my sister and I had about being in each others’ weddings and someday getting together at our parents’ house with all our children during the Christmas season? All those dreams have perished.”, He says, “Take hold of My hand and trust me.” For almost a year I couldn’t walk. No one was quite sure why my legs weren’t healing. I went from doctor to doctor all across the country – I am not exactly sure how many doctors I had. I stopped counting at about 25. I was in a wheel chair. For that year I crawled around like a crab. I ruined all the bottoms of my clothes because I would just slide around on the floor day after day. Some mornings it was hard to wake up and know it was going to take about two minutes for me to slide into the bathroom when a normal person my age could do it in about 5 seconds. And yet again God’s grace was sufficient and His strength was made so perfect in my weakness. There were so many other times God taught me about yielding various things to the Lord. Sometimes it was small things, like when my doctor told me: “Kathryn, there are going to be times you will be frustrated, times you will want to just throw your socks across the room.” Yet, I realized that I couldn’t even through my socks across the room because I couldn’t bend my legs enough to reach them. Those little things, like yielding and accepting that God was allowing someone else to be the sock putter on-er for awhile. And there were bigger things, like yielding my energy level to Him. For months after if I would even make my bed I would be so tired from that I’d have to lie down. Even now my energy level is low, and it is something I am still learning to yield to Him. Even though I can walk again, I continually have pain in my legs and I have arthritis now. So many times I find myself crying out to God and asking Him to help me just get through the day. There are so many areas of my life I’ve been learning I have to yield to Him. Doctors had seen all parts of my body and had done all kinds of painful things to everything except my hair. THAT was mine. Although it was not as nice as it had been before the accident because the medication and affects of the surgeries had made it very drab looking, at least I still had it. They had not had to cut it off. Finally we came to the point where doctors had been trying all sorts of tests to see what was going on with my body and why it wasn’t healing. So, it came to the place where they wanted to cut off some of my hair for a test. That was the hardest things, one of the hardest things I had ever done in my life. I wanted so much to keep it. It was the only thing I had left that someone hadn’t taken from me and I remember just wailing and crying and crying and crying as I sat on the floor not able to do anything except sit there and cry. And yet again, I felt God’s love pouring into my heart and I don’t know how to explain it except that God’s grace was sufficient again. And although it was the hardest thing to yield that, to finally break and say, “God, you have taken everything and I finally trust you with this last part of me that I want to hang onto.”, when I was finally able to do that I had the greatest peace that can hardly be explained with words. God had been working so hard and He had finally taken me to the end of myself. It was like He was taking me now to the edge of the cliff, asking me to let go. But I had been holding on, trying to scramble up, not wanting to go down there. I had been trying to hold on to just anything – just give me one little tiny iota of my life that I can hold onto – but God had been pushing, He had been shoving and saying, “Kathryn, until you let go of everything I can’t really show you my love in the way I want to show you. I can’t use you in the way I want to use you.” And so, finally, when He was able to take that hair, it was so exciting. It was like my fingers were pried from the edge of a cliff. Then He let me drop to the bottom of the cliff, but instead of smashing when I got to the bottom, totally ruining me like I thought was going to happen, He was able to lift me on His wings and carry me as on a pillow in a way I had never experienced. The Lord is so trustworthy and His love is so beyond our ability to fathom. I’ve thought a lot about how I want to hang on to life. “Well let me keep my hair, just something, God. I know you are so great. I know that I can trust you. But, God, just let me keep something!” And yet, until we are willing to give all, God is not able to show Himself as our all. Sometimes I think of how it is like a traffic jam in Heaven. He must have so much He wants to show us about Himself, so much He wants to give, and so many neat ministry opportunities He is just waiting to pour out on us. And yet, we are not willing to give it up! We are not willing to say, “We trust Your love. We know that we can count on You.” And so we let the traffic jam happen in Heaven. We let the doors close and God isn’t able to show us Himself in the ways He desires, to work in and through us for His greatest glory. When we hold our small hands up to God and offer Him the little we have, He delights in pouring out more onto than we could ever hold. Before the accident I thought I had true life. I was a Christian, but it wasn’t until He was able to begin to break me that I learned to see God’s love for me and what He desired to do in and through me, in a more vibrant way. I hadn’t realized that when I held on to parts of my life, not willing to give them to God, thinking that was the “safest” thing to do, what I really was doing was holding onto a bondage of chains. God wants to do so much in our lives. But we have got to let go, let go of those chains, and allow God to be our All. It is a daily process, continually learning to place our needs and cares in the hands of God and trust Him. One of my favorite Bible verses talks about how those who trust the Lord will never be ashamed, they will never be disappointed.

Erika Pruemer

It has been so exciting these past few months to see how much the Lord has been teaching me through Pillars! Reading books and working on on projects dealing with topics like knowing God, prayer, who I am in Christ, and purity have made such an impact in my life and challenged me in my walk with the Lord to live a life wholly devoted to Him- loving and serving Him with all my heart.