Diabetes is God’s best
“Cancer drugs halt type 1 diabetes in mice.” My heart jumped at the article headline. But even after 11 years have passed since I was first diagnosed as a near-death seven year old diabetic, I still forget if I am type 1 or type 2. I rushed upstairs to my laptop to google diabetes and confirm that I am, in fact, type 1. Turns out, there are a couple of drugs that have shown to send diabetes into remission in 80% of mice with type 1 diabetes. I hope you never know how much lab tests on mice can make your heart rush and eyes tear up when you stare at a potential cure that could change your life.
Diabetes was my Valentine’s Day gift in 1997. I do believe it was a gift, because it has made me who I am. It has been a physical and spiritual battle often, and I think it has deepened my faith in a way I would have likely missed otherwise. It is a physical struggle when for the ten-thousandth time, my blood sugar is whacked out and I feel horrible and would give the world to have a day to be “normal” again and not deal with diabetes. It is a spiritual struggle when I wonder what in the world God is doing, because whatever He’s doing, it is just hurting now.
But I see the positives. I think diabetes has taken away my fear of death. My blood sugar has crashed in the middle of the night so many times, and the only way I’d live to see the morning is if God sends an angel to wake me so I can bring my blood sugar up. I know my days are numbered, and evidently God doesn’t want me dead yet. I can see He is in control of life and death, so I have no fear.
Diabetes has also given me a passion to live the life I do have. Multiple times a day I have a reminder of how fragile my life is as I test my blood sugar and calculate my insulin dosage. When life’s fragility is so plainly held before your eyes, it would seem foolish to waste the life you do have. I don’t want to waste mine.
Diabetes’s weakness has brought humility when I would have otherwise boasted, and its demands have forced self-discipline on me when I would have been lazy. God touched my life and gave me His best for me when He gave me diabetes. My Father knew that the very best He could give me to make me more like His Son and glorify His name was diabetes.
Do I want a cure? Yeah. In all honesty, yes. I can’t deny it, I want out. It is His best for me, but if He gave us the cure for it I’d gladly move on to something else and let Him sanctify me some other way. Maybe that experiment with the mice will work out. Maybe, like every other article that has made my heart jump, this latest mouse test will fail. Regardless of the outcome, I want one thing to be clear: God is faithful. This much He has shown me. His plan is bigger than mine, His will is better than mine. I’ll rest peacefully in that, and let the presence of peace declare faith in the realness of God and His faithfulness.
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE4AG78H20081117?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews
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Praise God! I pray that while He provided His best through diabetes, He would continually provide His best. Hopefully, this means that there is a cure.
I have recently had to let go of something so precious to me. Though it still pains me, I know that it was God’s way of showing me His best. I now see that I could only depend on God and that seeking His kingdom should be my ultimate goal in life. Now, to be honest, I also pray that if it is somehow in His mysterious plans to restore the thing that I have lost…and that that is His way of continually providing His best for me, then I desperately want it.
I will remember you in my prayers. Would you remember me in yours as well?
Thank you for stopping by,
I will be praying for you, that God will declare His name and character more clearly to us now, bringing a more intimate relationship with Him as He continues to work and bless us with a strengthened faith. And if He brings restoration of anything in this life, we give Him the glory.