This week Supermom is Ana, She is a working mom and mom entrepreneur, she is a mother of 5 children.
Her baby girl went to be with the Lord after a long battle with cancer, she is sharing her heartfelt testimony how God had brought her through this difficult time. I’m proud to have her as this week featured supermom.
You can read Ana’s blog at http://imahodgepodge.blogspot.com

My name is Ana and I am a blessed woman, in spite of my co-dependent tendency. As far back as I can remember, I was always forsaking my needs for anyone or anything despite what I really felt. I took it to almost an art form with the degrees I managed to sacrifice myself, but the bitterness that was building inside me led to my looking for salvation. Problem was I was looking in places like food and people.
Married to my third husband with three sons and one daughter, God was still not in the picture yet, but I was searching for a deeper meaning in my life. I got into a lot of new age stuff but nothing ever satisfied, I was always left empty.
Then my baby girl got sick and we were informed that she had Stage IV Neuroblastoma. My world stopped. I felt as helpless as any human being could be. You see, if I had been the one to get sick, my years of training in co-dependency would have kicked in and I would have handled it in my own twisted sick martyr type way. Instead it was my baby. I was blank, there was nothing in this world that I had on me to prepare me for this. I couldn’t make this better or make it go away, but I had met the One who could.
After the initial shock, I remember finding myself alone with God outside the hospital sitting on a bench. I told God that I didn’t know Him, but I wanted to. I didn’t love Him, but I wanted to. Then I begged Him to make Himself more real to me than the bench I was sitting on. He took over from there, and the greatest adventure in my life began.
My daughter began chemo and we had the good pleasure to witness this great God

at work. The first time I became aware of her own personal relationship with Jesus was after she underwent two stem cell transplants when she was two years old. She started talking about Him on her own. My favorite example of this was the summer of 2001 when she has just turned three. She was six months out from her last treatment when a routine scan revealed there were new spots on her left lung. I was completely caught off guard when her doctor explained that they needed to do surgery to biopsy the spots and verify it was the same cancer. I guess there was a chance that it could be a secondary kind from the treatments. I was scared. I ran home and called every praying person I knew. I remember standing outside on my patio when in between cigarettes and phone calls my little girl starting tugging on me to tell me she had a secret. I told her that was nice but mommy was busy. She kept on insisting she had a secret and when she added that it was from Jesus, I stopped what I was doing and gave her my full attention. She told me that Jesus said she didn’t have cancer. I told her that was nice, promptly dismissed her and got back to the important business of worrying.
The morning of the surgery, my daughter announced from her car seat that she thought we should pray. My husband and I looked at each other and quickly agreed with her. She led us in a wonderful prayer where she said out loud, “Jesus, I know the devil is trying to put cancer on me, but You said I don’t have it. Amen.”
When the surgery was done, the surgeon phoned us in the waiting room to give us the news. In his professional opinion, he didn’t think the samples he removed were cancerous. We still had to wait for the official report from the pathologist and when we got it, we were told that she must have had some sort of respiratory infection within the last three months since her previous scans because what they removed was scar tissue and not cancer. Amazingly, she had not even sneezed in that time span. God is awesome.
My relationship with God over those years was nothing like I expected. Early on I had taken it upon myself to help God with my husband. Trouble with that was that the more I prayed for God to change him, the more he changed me. He paired me up with a wonderful mentor that taught me about submission. Submission? Don’t get me wrong, there were some aspects of this Christian life that was right up my co-dependent alley. After all, if one is so inclined you could almost use certain scriptures as a license to be a victim, in the name of the Lord. Even though this may have been at least a step above my old motives, I still harbored bitterness and resentment.
Right before her fourth birthday my daughter relapsed. Her doctors here ran out of options for her, so the Lord led us to St. Jude’s. My daughter never passed an opportunity to pray for other children at the hospital and even some parents. After two years of traveling back and forth to Memphis, the Lord made it possible for us to move there and be together as a family. We even had another son.
Then my daughter died. She was just six years old. This wasn’t supposed to happen. She had gotten this bad before, and every time she would bounce right back. Her doctors had started to call her the cat with nine lives because she would get to the brink of death so often.
In hindsight I can look back now and see the times that God tried to prepare me for this. I would just rebuke it and continued to believe for her complete healing. It’s what I learned, what I believed. I had no reason to doubt God. I had seen Him do it way too many times. This time He chose differently and I had no clue as to why. Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. What was worse was that I didn’t drop dead right then and there. How was it possible that I was still waking up to this nightmare? I was so angry with God. He betrayed me. I could only curse Him. Even so, I could still see Him working on my behalf. It didn’t matter though; nothing mattered. For ten days I fought Him. If healing in the bible didn’t mean healing, how could I be sure redemption meant redemption?
Then one day, I let go. I just began to worship him because in spite of it all, I still loved Him with all my heart. Like Peter answered Jesus when He asked the twelve disciples if they wanted to leave with the others because of His hard teaching, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” I immediately felt a weight lift off my shoulders as I went face down before the Maker of the universe. When He began to put all my pieces back together, He led me back into His Word. I was somewhat resistant at first, but He would bring to mind a scripture I had studied before her death, and instantly I would see how different its meaning was to me now. Before long I was living inside the pages of my bible. I devoured Paul’s letters as I could now relate to his yearning to be with Christ. The whole world was different to me now. God took my earthly perspective that I had when my daughter was alive and traded it for an eternal perspective.
I often wondered if I was losing my mind because the things He showed me were so radical so different from what I had believed before. Yet even though my relationship with God was taking off with such an incredible force, my relationship with the rest of the world was still very broken. I can see now the grace He poured out on me while He allowed me to pursue Him all the while laying down another layer on the foundation for the next season of healing that was yet to come.
After two years of living in this bubble of God’s mercy, He brought my family back to our hometown to face the skeletons that I had so neatly tucked away in the hopes that they would just disappear. It didn’t take long for old habits to surface with a vengeance. I didn’t know what God was up to and I didn’t like it, not one bit. I was already well aware of the fact that it had been easier to walk through my daughter’s death with Jesus than it was to put up with the daily stuff of life. I believe it was because I had already established my own way of dealing with the non-crisis things, so this was not easy to give up to God.
I decided to check out a Christian recovery group, for my husband of course, but as I watched my friend walk back to her car after church, I started to cry. I could see what needed to be done and I was scared. I wanted to hang onto the idea of who I was and everything everyone else wasn’t, but in my heart I knew better.
I joined their study seeking freedom, real freedom to not be trapped in this false identity I had created for myself. To know how to give without conditions, without guilt, without resentment out of the abundance I had in Christ. In fact, I was ready to get this done ASAP. I was shocked when I expected to start really plowing up this field, dig up some roots and ‘just do the thing’, you know, when instead I felt like God was handing me a spoon to dig with! Ahhh! Couldn’t I just do it a little bit my way and just fix it?
Change was hard. I found out quick that it is much easier to stay the same and never be challenged, but let’s face it, what fun is there in that? Either I trust God with just my words and fool myself into a false sense of peace that is obvious to all but me. Or I admit my powerlessness and learn to trust Him with my life.
I began to realize that I was addicted to a lot more that just food. I was addicted to turmoil and control. I could see that I help to set up situations and play the role I was accustomed to. Anything different felt strange and out of control, it was almost a relief to know what was expected of me. The Lord was expanding my territory and my view of Him again, but He was shaking up my world.
My wall of denial came down with a roar. I was exposed to myself. My sweet cushiony denial that kept me free from responsibility from all things bad was ripped away. There was no going back, though I kind of wanted to. Working the recovery steps brought those areas in my life that I was desperately avoiding to the forefront and helped me to allow God to show me how to apply His truths to my everyday life, not just the crisis times. The areas that I have long pretended don’t matter or made excuses for are the very ones I realized I was withholding from Christ.
Once more God readjusted my perspective. I have become more honest with my opinions and less afraid to express them. I feel less threatened by other people and I’m starting to believe that their opinion of me doesn’t change who I am. I am learning to define myself by who Christ says I am. I have been pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion to find that I was diffusing situations that were only confrontational in my own mind. The filter in my head tends to add a lot of extra stuff, like hidden innuendoes that just weren’t there to begin with. Kind of like e-mail I got once. You know the kind that has pearls of wisdom and a bonus wish come true if you send it to five people. Anyways, this one said something to the affect of, “When you’re young you worry about what everyone thinks about you. When you reach middle age you don’t care about what everyone thinks about you. When you’re old you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place!”
Now that the dam has been broken, the barrier of denial is split wide open and I can freely follow my Savior into the different areas in my character that need restoration. I recently read Isaiah 58 and the entire chapter had such a fresh new meaning to me. I especially love when God answers our self serving ways of trying to get Him to take care of our problems by saying, “Is not this the kind of ‘fasting’ I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” I was thinking small, when God was trying to show me big, I was looking at now when He was trying to get me to see forever. No more, I am developing a taste for this real freedom and it is good.
I am still learning that no matter how hard I try to hide and guard the ugly parts of my character, it still slips out occasionally. Pretending it’s not there doesn’t make it go away either. Instead I try to bring it to the table before God does and yield to Him. Sometimes He still beats me to the punch. The Lord is also showing me how to handle the rejection in my life instead of trying to stop it from happening. You just cannot please everyone all the time, ask me how I know. I find the more I accept myself, the more accepting I am of others.
Life is hard no matter what path the Lord has for us. What I do with my hurts, habits and hang-ups is where my faith becomes my life. The tragedies in my life are no longer as important as what I’m willing to allow God to do with them. When just knowing what is right isn’t enough anymore, but letting Jesus lead me in the way of truth even when it’s harder and more painful. Doing the easy in the first place is what got me into this mess to begin with.

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