God Guided My Life
a Mom Story by Mandy Carlsson

A special thank you to Mandy for sharing these words to inspire each of us.   To share your story online e-mail us at lisa@catholicmom.com today.

I once heard a lady explain how we can see our our impatience with God reflected in our children. The example that she used hit right at home with me. I was the mother of a VERY impatient toddler and I was fully aware of how trying little children can be. She shared that every time she prepared something for her infant to eat she was reminded of God's patience and understanding with us. She would be mixing up the baby food right there, within FULL view of her baby he would insist on screaming and banging his little hands on his tray. The baby had no concept of time and did not realize that he would be fed very shortly. Understanding this, his mother just smiled at him and lovingly told him that food was on it's way.

Makes you think, right? Well it made me think. God is preparing our life for us. Providing opportunities for you when conflict arises. His work may be right there, in front of your eyes, but you probably won't recognize his handiwork. As children of God, we have absolutely NO concept of God's timeline. Let me tell you about how God worked in my life and prepared me and my family for a very scary thing.... my battle with cancer. And I did not even know that he had a plan for me.....

After I graduated from High School, I was clueless. I had not yet enrolled in college (yikes!) and I had no definite plans for the future. I mother assured me that she could afford to pay for one year of community college and I assumed that I would eventually wonder on over to the local college to enroll, but I wasn't in a hurry. Shortly after graduation, the phone calls from the recruiters began. I shot down one after the other. The military sounded horrible to me and I had no intention of joining. God had other plans, though. The Army recruiter was relentless, insisting that with my SAT scores (they don't count at all, I later discovered) I could pick any job that I wanted. All that I had to do was take the military ASVAB test and I was set.

I took the ASVAB test fully expecting NOT to succumb to my recruiter. Well, to make a long story short, I ended up signing the paperwork, but I was not enthusiastic about it. I ended up really liking Army life. It was a great way to start my adult life. While in the Army I met my husband and we married. Our relationship started as a year long friendship and somewhere along the line we discovered that we really loved each other. My husband was a fallen-away Catholic, but he had remained chaste until our marriage. (Remember parents: if you raise your children up in the ways of God, those ways will stick!) We ended up getting pregnant and we were blessed with a beautiful baby boy. I became a full-time mother and life went on.

At this point in my life, I was not Catholic. In fact, we became very involved in a fundamentalist Baptist Church (double yikes! and yes, they did their fair share of Catholic bashing.) My husband tried to tolerate my new found zeal, but he finally got fed up. He began researching the attacks that the Baptist Church was launching at the Catholic Church. It was my turn to tolerate my husbands zeal, because once he began reading, his heart became aflame with the truth of the Catholic Church! As someone who was "born again" and baptized with the understanding that I was "saved" forever and always, you can imagine that many heated arguments ensued! I thought that he would never see "the right way" and that life would be a never-ending battle.

Knowing that he was pushing me further away, he finally backed off. Things smoothed out and then IT happened. My head swelled up to the size of a large pumpkin and my back was killing me. I ignored these symptoms for about 3 weeks, telling myself that they would clear up. I was the posterchild for denial. I knew that something horrible was wrong and one trip to the emergency room in the middle of the night confirmed my worst fears. A tumor the size of a large orange had formed just behind my trachea, were the trachea branches off to the lungs, and it was blocking my superior vena cava artery. The result was that the blood was unable to return from my head to my heart and was pooling in my neck and head.

After a really fun biopsy was done, I was diagnosed with non-hodgkins lymphoma. The year following was filled with six cycles of chemotherapy, one stem-cell transplant and too many tests to count. I begin radiation this next month. This last year has been close to unbearable, but has been worth it. As a result of cancer, I felt a need to delve into prayer and to nourish my soul with the Word of God. As I read the Bible, I was constantly faced with scripture that challenged my beliefs as a "born-again" Christian. Trying to explain away these scriptures, such as the parable of the vine and Paul likening salvation to a race, I ran to books written by Fundamentalist apologists, but was very disappointed, so, reluctantly I turned to books that my husband had.

 After reading Catholicism and Fundamentalism : The Attack on Romanism by Bible Christians, by Karl Keating, my life literally changed. I read the works of Karl Keating and Scott Hahn. I began reading about the lives of the saints and slowly (still working on it) began to tackle the Thomas Aquinas and I never quite reading the Bible. I prayed and begged God to let me know if I was seeing his truth or just deceiving myself. He answer was loud and clear. The Catholic Church IS the church of God. I attended my first mass and have not looked back since. I look forward to the day that I am able to fully participate in the mass and pray that God makes the time go by as fast as possible.

To sum it up, God had a plan for me, to come to his loving Church. It was a long road there, but I feel that I have arrived. I have no doubt that many, many challenges are ahead of my family, but at least I have God's truth and his Church. My heart leaps for joy every time I think about God's mercy upon me and, no matter what happens, I know that he will help me through it and that he always has something going on in our lives, whether we realize it or not.

To sum up my story, God guided my life completely. Who knows if I would have ever considered the Catholic Church.

A special thank you to Mandy for sharing these words to inspire each of us.   To share your story online e-mail us at lisa@catholicmom.com today.