When God Alone Sustains Me
by Dawn Irons
The last 12 months of my life have been a roller coaster ride that I hope to never experience again! The highs and the lows were almost more than I could bear, and there were times I truly felt I would crumble under the pressure.
Isaiah 59:19 says, “When the enemy comes in like a flood, The Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him.” There were days in the last year that I had to cling to that verse because I knew I was in a situation that only God could save me. If God alone did not raise up a standard against the attacks of the enemy, I knew I would be completely comsumed! God has been so much more than faithful!
There have been many health battles in the last year, but also many health victories! After being in longterm treatment for Lyme disease for three years, I finally hit a place of remission! I have been off all antibiotic and prescription treatment since April of 2009. I have maintained with the Cowden Protocol using Nutramedix products.
I know that the longterm treatment with antibiotics got me into a place of remission, but it did not come without consequences. Granted, I would take these consequences over what I had lived with for the last 18+ years in pain and bad health!
One of the consequences I experienced with longterm use of doxycycline is a secondary problem called Pseudotumor Cerebri (PTC), which is common in Lyme patients, especially those who are overweight. The tetracycline family of drugs in known to cause this condition over prolonged use. So, as the PTC developed, I had undergone several spinal taps to relieve the buildup of intracranial pressure. This only brought temporary relief. By August 2009 my neurosurgeon opted to put in a brain shunt to provide a more constant regulation of the pressure. This was an amazing success!
The very next month, in September, I had complete gallbladder failure and had to have the organ removed. This is also common with longterm use of antibiotics.
In November my husband was diagnosed with cancer. It seemed the attacks of the enemy and the pressures of life were just more than I could bear. My prayer life increased by leaps and bounds, all the while calling on the Lord to intervene on our behalf.My husband had emergency surgery in December to remove the Lymphoma and we received our Christmas miracle when the doctor declared him to be cancer-free! We will still have localized radiation as a recommended by the oncologist, but we finally breathed a sigh of relief!
I think of the story of Moses when he was praying and, as long as his arms were lifted, the army was winning in battle, but when his arms became heavy with fatigue and began to fall, the army would experience defeat. Moses needed the aid of his friends who came to hold his arms up for him when his own strength failed. God provided Moses with faithful friends to help him gain victory.
As my world seemed to be unraveling around me, God surrounded me with faithful friends who helped me keep my family, the PHA, and other responsibilities afloat. Many people brought meals, made hospital visits, sent donations to help the PHA during my surgical recovery time, and it was amazing to watch our friends from college that we had reconnected with on Face Book (who were all across the country now) rally around us with support and gifts for our kids at Christmas time since Brad had been out of work with his surgery!
Everywhere we turned, there was a provision from God to give us hope that He was right there with us and that we had not been forsaken.
With all that happened to our family in the last 12 months, I know beyond all knowing, that God alone sustained us! There is only so much stress a human can manage before seriously cracking. I was there. Then at what seemed the 11th hour, God showed up as our mighty rescuer!
I came to a much more intimate understanding of what it means when God says that His grace is sufficient for us. There was another passage in Zechariah 6:8 that says, “It’s not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord.”
This verse became a literal life-line during the last part of the year. As the circumstantial issues seemed to escalate far beyond anything that we could control in our own strength, or even sheer act of will or determination, it became very apparent that this was a situation that only God, by the power of His Spirit, could fix.
So rather than beat ourselved with exhaustion by living in a panicked frenzy, we simply just stopped...and beheld the glory of God as He moved in our midst.
