Transcription
[Music] Good morning. Um, so I'd like to pray with you before I start. Jesus, oh Jesus, you, um, are truly, truly all that we need, and you do deserve all the glory, honor, and praise. And we recognize your presence here with us, and we choose you. Um, it just, it amazes me how you have aligned. I wanted to pray that we would be aligned with you, and we are aligned with you because we've been talking about that all morning. So I thank you that even though, um, we as, as speakers, that we, if we did not gather before this, yet you aligned us all. And I'm just amazed by that, and I thank you for that. And we recognize that it's your agenda here this morning and choose to follow you. And we pray that your voice would be the loudest one. In Jesus' name, amen. Come on, Jesus.
So I just, I really want to share with you, um, this morning how God has, um, how God moved in my life and called me into, uh, personal relationship with him. So I grew up in a home that I would have said, "Yeah, I grew up in a Christian home." If anyone asked me, that's probably what I would have said because we dressed up every Sunday morning and we went to church, and my parents sent us to Bible schools, and they sent us to Sunday schools, and we had prayer before every meal. And, um, I can probably tell you what those prayers were because we said them so fast that they were, um, completely memorized. We said them so fast so that we could eat. We said them so fast before our bed so that we could get to bed. And they just blended together like the alphabet where you can't even distinguish the words or what you're saying anymore.
So in the second grade, I had a friend who told me about Jesus and how he wants us to ask him into our hearts. And I thought, "What? Like, what is that? Who? How do you do that?" Because when I was even younger, I had asked my mom, "What happens when you die?" And she didn't really have an answer for me except, "Don't worry about that yet." You said, you know, and I'm about eight, eight years old, and she talked about being put in a pretty box with flowers. And I thought, "What in the world? I'm gonna suffocate in there." I just had no clue. So I took the advice of that second-grade friend and I asked this Jesus into my heart. And, and I, I went on to live life. And I, I live knowing that there's more than what I'd grown up with so far. But I was not acknowledging all that God had. I didn't pursue him fully. I began to give God more of me, but not everything. There was conviction over things I was doing, and I listened some of the time. And there was grace and protection, and I was seeing it sometimes. And I pushed the boundaries and I allowed lines to become blurred as to what was right and what was wrong.
Um, I went off to college. I pushed more boundaries. I struggled with decisions, and I caused an uphill battle. And so I was waitressing and living paycheck to paycheck to pay rent and bills. And what night, my future husband walked into this little pub where I was wiping down tables. I did not know that he was my future husband at the moment because I declared that I would never go out with anybody that appeared at that bar again. But he, he wasn't there to participate. He had come in with the track team, and he was kind and gentle and respectful. And a year and a half later, we were married. And we started doing what again looked right. We went to church, and we volunteered, and we were checking off the boxes and doing all the things that we were supposed to do. Kevin was a teacher, and I was working in foster care as a caseworker, and we were saving drug babies, and we were doing, looked like we were doing all the right stuff. And we had our first child. I decided to be a full-time mommy, and we bought a little, uh, bi-level on Warm Spring right in Chambersburg. And it was there that God got my attention.
This, I was cleaning, and the boys were, um, we had two then. The boys were young, napping, that was a miracle in itself. And I was scurrying around dusting, and I remember putting things back on the shelf. I was dusting things, putting them back on the shelf, and I dusted my Bible and I put it back on the shelf. And the Lord just pierced my heart. And it wasn't like he was shaming me, like, "You're putting your," you know, "How could you have done this?" He wasn't shaming me. He was letting me feel how much it was longing for me, what he was feeling for me. He lost so much to be in this personal relationship with us. And, and I was still checking all the boxes. I wasn't there at all. I still don't know what a personal relationship was.
So the next Sunday, I, I went up to one of the ladies after church and asked if, if I could join a Bible study and could I bring these small children? And, and she said, "Yes, because you have to start somewhere." And, and just started walking this out and, and, um, digging deeper. I received lots of mentors during that time, and I was feeling this pull of God and loving it. I was reading my Bible at every opportunity. Um, in having small, small children, getting up in the middle of the night kind of became a holy place because I was really, really connecting with God. Then the church then did Henry Blackaby's Experiencing God Bible study. And I was sitting there at my table in the kitchen, and I was a little kid to the Holy Spirit. Someone said that this morning, nobody was evangelizing to me. I wasn't in a big church setting, but I'm sitting there and I experienced this indwelling, and I felt this feeling, and I was just sitting there alone at the kitchen table. And the power of the Holy Spirit was so great. I remember thinking, "Am I still sitting here? Am I still touching the ground?"
I called, uh, one of the youth pastors at our church at that time and said, "What is happening?" And she said, "This is real." And it was so exciting, and I couldn't hold back now. So life was now about the living. It was so exciting. It was more than life. And it became this spread, this great news about Jesus and his desire to have a relationship with us and this power of the Holy Spirit.
So I had a son who was three and a son who was two now, and I started to have extremely bad headaches. And we tried, you know, coffee and Tylenol and naps, and nothing was helping. And then I got this small blur in my vision. And our family doctor said that, you know, migraines will do this. You're experiencing migraines. And I went back again and I said, "I'm telling you, I can't see. I have to turn my head to see. This blur is growing. This blur is getting really big." So we went to, um, the normal eye doctor, and there's nothing wrong. So we went to a specialist who said, "Well, maybe it's the optic nerve behind your eye." So then we did an MRI. And then I was standing in my kitchen, and I was hearing the doctor say, "The tumor on your brain is fairly large." And, and then I thought, "I can't read that. I can't." And panic attacks are very real. I understand what people go through. Twice, I went to the ER, and both times my blood oxygen level was perfect, but I was very sure that I couldn't breathe. And I cried out to God, and I would say, "I just, I love you, Lord. You know, he brought me to this place where I was in this relationship with him now. You know, they wanted to live for him."
And the neurologist told me this tumor was inoperable. He told me they would destroy me trying to get to it. And I was clean. [Music] And I was desperate. And I, when I look back on that time, I was never, I never got, I'm so thankful to say that I never got angry with God. I had, he brought me into this relationship with him, and now I was just clinging to him for what I was going through because I needed him just so much. I would even be out, I can remember to be out in public places, and I was just wanted to find a restroom where I could go and be alone with him and, and pray because I had grown into that relationship so much.
So there came a time when I was in the hospital for a three-day intravenous treatment that they were going to try to reduce the swelling behind my eye. And they still, they were telling me that I would never see again. I remember telling God when I went into the hospital, I was like, "Okay, well, you can still use me. I'm still here. When I go into the hospital, I'm gonna, I'm gonna witness to my roommate. I have these big plans. I'm gonna witness to my roommate." And I learned how much bigger, though, God is because my roommate was very elderly and hard of hearing. And, you know, they drew that curtain, and I never even got a chance to say anything to her. So the nurse came in to my room one night, and she asked me, um, she said, "I see you have a Bible." And she said, um, "Sometimes as a nurse, I'm asked for a scripture or something, and I never know what to say." So I said, "Yeah, I got to help you with that. I will write down healing verses and give them to you." And she said, "Well, I don't work in this part of the hospital. I'm kind of a, uh, traveling nurse. They pull me all around." So I realized then, you know, how big God is. You know, our little plans. I was going to witness to one person, and he's like, "No, I'm gonna use you, and we're gonna send out scripture in the whole hospital." And I wouldn't have come up with that. And so I learned, you know, just how big God is.
So that night, um, after my family has left, I, I did cry and cry. And I was, it was at a point where I was drained, um, really physically drained, and really mentally, just at a complete surrender, a complete surrender. And the next morning when I woke up, I remember looking at the clock because I had really got to the habit of, um, closing the bad eye, the one that I couldn't see out of anymore. And when I woke up the next morning and realized that I was looking at the clock with both my eyes. And I told the neurologist who did not believe me. He said that I was really responding, though, to the treatment. That I would never see again out of that eye. But it, it never regressed. God had returned my sight.
So now the plan from there was to redo the MRI and in three months to see if the tumor had grown. And that's a long time to wait, three months. I'm just saying, "Well, we're gonna see what is doing in three months." And I realized that I was still holding on to a lot of fears. Um, and I went into our room one night and I knelt down by myself, and I just poured out the rest of my fears to God because I think they were just really scary to say out loud. And I thought, you know, I was, I was holding on to them because if I, the scariest ones, then would become really real, and I really didn't want to leave my two little guys, um, or my husband. I wanted to watch them grow up, and I wanted to grow, you know, old with Kevin. And, and I'm praying this and releasing all of this to God. And I, I got to feel the presence of Jesus. And I can describe it as just that his palms were on either side of my face. And as I said, "How much I really wanted to watch my boys grow up," um, and how I wanted to grow older with Kevin. And I felt this pressure on the side of my face. And just Jesus saying, "I want that too. I want that too." And I remember next saying, "Then please tell me that this is really happening. This is real. Please tell me this is happening because I'm so afraid I'm gonna go up and, and leave this room, and then I'm gonna start questioning whether all this just happened." And, you know, because I went out and told my husband, and I just wanted to hold on to that feeling.
So on what more days, um, me soaking up every detail I could of Tyler and Cody with my new eye that I was now seeing out of, just clinging to Kevin and clinging to, um, journal pages that I had written about that experience. So we had a month to go before the next MRI. Now our neighbor, we were still living on Warm Spring Road, and our neighbor at the time was on a missions trip in Malaysia. Now these neighbors, they moved in after us, and it had been a vacant lot. So we had fails, and I'm so ashamed to say that we were like, "Oh, neighbors." And I don't know why we felt so strongly about our privacy, and we were not rude, but we were not the warm and, um, welcome, welcome committee here. We acted, and we put up the fence. We put up a fence for, we said it was for a dog, but just, we put up a fence. And still these neighbors reached out to us and have been so kind. And so on this day, I walked outside. I was going to ask him how his missions trip went. And he said to me, "Healed. You were healed while I was gone." And I started to say, "Well, well, we never do the MRI yet, but I have this encounter with God one night that was really amazing." And I started to explain to him, um, how I felt that presence and his hands on my face. And, um, he said, "Well, I went to a healing service while I was in Malaysia. And he said, you know, I couldn't think how to spell that last name of yours, so I just wrote Megan on a piece of paper, but we put it in a box, and there were about 18 different countries there. So we just prayed for your complete healing." And he said, "But we also prayed for your faith to be increased so that you would know that you would know that this really happened." And I said, "What was that? What was that service?" And I ran for my prayer journal. And with time changes around the rocks, is I'm not really sure where Malaysia is. We figured out that when I was drowning my knees and when I was experiencing the presence of God, that was exactly when the healing service was that he went to, that the 18 different countries were praying for me and praying for my faith and for me to know without a doubt that this is just how good our God is, that he is real, that he is miraculous.
So we did a second MRI and we waited and waited. I had to call because, you know, the doctor was out when the results were coming in. And I asked, "Please, can you read me this over the phone?" And she read what it said in the report that the mass had been virtually dissolved. I kept saying that over and over again. It's dissolved. It's dissolved. Dissolved. And we met with a neurologist, and we saw the images ourselves. My brain with a big, like potato-like looking mass on it, and then my brain with nothing on it. And I remember the doctor saying, "Well, I have never diagnosed someone." And we said, "But it's not there." And he said, "Well, I don't know how it's not there." And so we, um, I wrote him a letter asking him, thanking him for all my care and asking him to allow God to be part of what he does and part of his practice.
So we, we moved on, and we had to have faith that all of this just happened. We had lived so abnormally for so long. And people would comment that maybe we should just be on the safe side, maybe we shouldn't try to have too many more children. Um, that is not fake. God just did all this. And God doesn't heal us, um, you know, at 80 or 90 and say, "Now be careful because I'm not sure how good of a job I did." Um, he did this in this huge, big God way from Malaysia with people that I didn't even know, but people, people that loved him enough to be obedient and pray for a person on the other side of the world that he told them to pray for. His word is so true, and his promises are so real and true, and he finishes what he says, and he gives so much more than we ever ask for.
So I get super excited about people and praying for people, and I love doing that. And I just, I just get super excited over people in the first place, and just knowing how God loves us and how he pursues us with his ferocious love, and just how he longs to be with us. And the healing part of my journey is so awesome, but when I think about how he pursues us and how he let me feel the ache that he has for his kids, their fatherly love. So he brings the healing, and he supplies, and we all have access to the unlimited resources of Jesus Christ always.
So I'd like to pray for you. Lord, I just pray for your continued touch of this place. I just pray now for this a fresh filling of your Holy Spirit and an outpouring of your miraculous power because we welcome here with only you are able to do. And we surrender ourselves and our needs and our minds to your perfect will. And we just look, we're just going to continue to look with anticipation to your response because we praise your holy name. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. Thank you. [Music]