Great Purpose in Great Adversity

As a child, but neither Rosner was diagnosed with polio, a disease that would affect every aspect of her life for the rest of her life that something she began to recognize very early and just getting out of the hospital and I had been in for a year and one day walking a little bit home from school by myself.

My parents rented an apartment exactly opposite my school size can a surprise my mom and these boys came up from behind a rock and they started throwing stands at me and called me a couple and that was my first memory of the world is not safe. I'm not can it be protected and this is family like today hosts are David M. Wilson on Bob team. You can find us on lot of family life today.growing up with a disability can bring more than just physical challenges, something that the needs arise and are learned as a child will hear from her today about how God at her in the midst of that challenge. Stay with us and welcome to family life today. Thanks for joining us.

I did an interview many years ago before came to family life with an author who just so you don't allow this was with an author who'd been through significant adversity in his life, and I remember asking him the question. If we could go back to the beginning and I could say you can have that adversity removed from your life and live a trouble-free dinner on a trouble-free but a less troubling life and he said no, what I what I've learned about God. I would not trade for less trouble and I did not believe him and I'm still not sure you know you we meet somebody who's gone through real pain in adversity and you think who would choose that nobody would choose how that struggle hard question to. Why does God allow the US that question thinking okay the pain of going through my life with divorced parents, my little brother dying. I initially think I wouldn't trade it really I mean is horrible as it was, it's who I am in its shape to shape me into the man I am today. Well we have a guest joining us this week who has been through adversity when he theorized her joining us for the welcome to family like today. Thank you.

It's going to be here and just that smile and joy in you.

Hi, here it almost days what you've lived through in your life. Because if you feared in your new book which is called walking through fire you have had a life that's been marked by adversity. Also to your point, life has been marked by joy because everything that God has taken away. He's given me so much back in himself, so you understand why those of us who have not gone through what you've gone through here. You say that ago. You're just putting a spin on this to try to live with the adversity you've done with the understand how we would feel that way I deal and I think before I had gone through all of this I would look at people's lives that were really hard and think I couldn't get through this, that and if I have to I would be angry at God, and I would hate life and I feel like the harder life has gotten the more joy God is giving me which this actually happier than Mr. Goodin working to get into your story because Listeria doesn't know the suffering he went through. But what are you even when I hear you know Mike can't be true, can't be that real hunters usually when I read it through to get there I was like okay I can't wait to meet her because I don't know if it's possible what she said and I'm looking at you with his smile gone.

It's real.

I think we are all curious because we've all read your book and I think where I how she exudes the love of Jesus and joy in her life, and your adversity wasn't something that came after you'd had 30 years of trouble-free existence you develop polio in your childhood run. Yes I did and I didn't even know there were still people who were contracting polio, you know, we all think polio is one of those things that's gone that we've eradicated, but to share how that diagnosis came about and what you remember from all about.

I was actually three months old so I don't remember when. And I was in Indiana and in Indiana get the polio vaccine at six months*three months old. I have hundred and 5° fever and so my mom took me and said the doctor and they thought I had typhoid and so they gave me Cortizone which lowers your fever, but it also lowers your immune system and so within 24 hours.

They think I was probably paralyzed and and then went back to the doctor and the doctor said I'll I think she has polio and they said basically that point there's nothing they could do for me so I was a quadriplegic. I cannot move my arms or my legs and the doctors told my parents they needed to leave India because in Indiana several things. One, there medicine wasn't as advanced as the Western world but certainly in Indiana with a disability. You have a huge disadvantage mean people think you've done something wrong. Your family is cursed severe new services for people with disability. There is no accessibility and they basically said to my parents. If you want anything for her. You can have to leave and so my parents dead. My dad was a professor in Indiana, electrical engineering, and they laughed immediately and went to London. My dad took a job installing tile fence near family went from sort of a plush aristocratic lifestyle to what to cluster poverty and mean my mom said at the time you couldn't take any money out of Indiana so they went with almost nothing. They she said they couldn't afford hot water so they just use the cold water and slept on a mattress on the floor.

So then Vanita what did your life as a little girl turn out to be what happened I had my first surgery in England when I was two and then my dad got a job in Canada so we moved to Canada and I went to a free hospital called the Shriners Hospital at the time it was the phrase hospital for children and kids would live there basically and I lived in the Shriners Hospital for years. Not one time I lived there for a year continuously within a body cast so I was flat on my back in a ward with about 14 other girls and I spent I would say every year I would spend at least three months in the hospital so like for me was this mix of being at home being with my family going to quote unquote normal school and being in hospital. You remember how your parents dealt with this because as we hear your story. This fact goes back to human error. Yes. So it's one thing when it's out of your control.

But when you can put a name on a person that is somewhat responsible.

That's extremely hard to deal with so you remember how your parents are, or even you don't with my dealt with it by their faith in God. I didn't have faith in God. At that point I was actually very angry at God, but I think my mom and dad both sought God's doneness and got his gun he said and they didn't know how to tell us how they came to faith because India is not known for people who have faith in God is an amazing story on both sides both sides. I would say in the 1800s had people that were converted on my dad's side, my great great great grandfather was part of that Hindu Brandman family. His father was a priest, but they had him educated in a Christian school so they could learn English, and he came to Christ and and it's pretty incredible like his dad was so angry about it when he came home from school one day. He had all the family jewels on one side of this huge scale all their money in the Bible together and he said you need to choose and he picked up the Bible and never saw his family again.

That's one side and then the other side was a similar story of actually my great-great-grandfather was a merchant and was in the bizarre looking at things, and somebody gave him the gospel of John and attract and he read it and said this is trace and came to Christ and had to leave his family because there was so much persecution for becoming a Christian.

So they were believers from childhood growing up in the faith that foundation gave them something to hang on to win their daughter was misdiagnosed and mistreated in the hospital for you though. I was thinking of you said you were angry with God.

This was really all you never know this was your normal right so when did you start the process.

Wait, this is my normal but I'm getting the right end of the deal here. Not everybody has to suffer like I do different ways.

One way in the hospital in the ward there was a TV and I remember watching TV, thinking this is not my life like I would watch TV and see kids doing things and thinking I'll never do that and it almost felt sort of surreal like I was a kid in a candy store, sort of, pressing my face against the window to see things that I would never have said that was one picture as well as when I was home I was really bullied when I was seven I learned to walk at seven and I remember one day walking a little bit home from school by myself.

My parents rented an apartment exactly opposite my school size can a surprise my mom and these kids boys came up from behind a rock and they started throwing stones at me and they called me a couple process that I didn't even know what that exactly maintenance I had just been out of the hospital and I had been in for a year and that was my first memory of the world is not safe. I'm not going to be protected and that is when I remember just feeling angry when my parents would talk to me about God before that that just sort of made sense to me and say there's a God, but when I saw that I was really discriminated against, made fun of and everybody else's life seem to be really good. That's when I started getting on crutches structure childhood in a wheelchair so before braces. I never had crutches because my arms are much weaker than my legs so I would walk with braces and sort of hold onto the walls or people would help me.

My parents would carry me around a lot when I was little thing that they didn't want me to be in a wheelchair because their goal was always for me to walk so I did not use a wheelchair and then after I was seven I didn't need braces or anything. I could walk, but the time between then was a lot of being carried around scooting around really on my bottom when we went through our house and not going that many places and lots of surgeries how many surgeries did you have.

I've had 21 operations. Before I was 13, and since I've had a few as well. While so I can see how he would have this anger and angst toward God. I just thought God doesn't care about me. And when people would say that that God really cares about you. I just that you have no idea what I've been through.

If you did, you wouldn't say you have hope for your future. Now I didn't even have any vision of what the future could look like for me I ever thought about going to college or living a normal life because I felt like I was probably can it be at home with my parents. You spent a year in a cast. Yes like of like almost a full body it was I was flat on my back.

It was supposed to help you walk and mean what was the thought well I dislocated hip as well as several surgeries at that one time and so they can didn't want me to set up and change so much, because people don't do that anymore, but 50 years ago they did and so that was what he did do you just stayed in a cast until they were positive.

Everything is healed and everything was fine and did some other surgeries in the midst of that they figured, why don't we just keep operating. I can imagine if your daughter who spent a year in a casket and was walking home from school and is believed as a parent I don't care how great my phases as part of me thinking those kids are going to hear from me and I am so angry they do not understand. Obviously, in my my little precious daughter is starting a whole new life, and she gets picked on. On the way home.

I mean, how did they respond. I did not tell them who I didn't want them to know because I wasn't there. I thought I had done something wrong and I reread that's what happens when people are bullied, they feel like it's their fault and so I would try to walk straighter because of my lamp. I tried to do everything to blend in more and assumed it was something that I had done so didn't tell my parents about any of the bullying all through grade school. I was bullied and I didn't tell anyone remember any joy from the first, 13, 14 years your life believe my sister and so and our family is really close. So I had joy from that. But really even see myself as part of the rest of the world you're in the body Just Trying to Imagine Him to Be Immobilized for Year Would Be a Soul Crushing Experience.

So I Wine You Know I Have Back Surgery and I Ask You to Advise Weiner If I Can't Get out. You Know, I Can Walk I Could Do Anything before the Surgery, but I May Have To Sit Here Thinking I Am the Biggest Baby yet. I Was Telling Them Right Now to Say I Did That When I Was 70. Never Say That Your Baby You Disqualify All You Got Older, yet His Life Start Looking a Little More Normal in Terms of Comparing It to Other Kids and One High School I Started to Every Frame and I Made Some Friends and I Thought Okay This Is This Might Be Okay. I Might Be Able to Have a Normal Life and Got Involved in SCA Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Not Because I Was an Athlete or a Christian, but My Goal and I Was All about That and I like That You Said You Said in the Back Row with Your Friend Yes and What You Talk about. We Talked about Alec. You Guys Always Talk Don't Really Remember That They Said Anything Else in SCA besides Looking around and Then One Day That She Came Back She Went on a Retreat and She Said to Me, God Is Real, and I Distinctly Remember Being so Angry Thinking Oh Now She's Want to Pay Attention. She's Not Going to Be Awful and She Didn't Want to Pay Attention, and It Was off That I Remember She Just Kept Talking to Me about It and Then One Night I Went Home and I Just Said If You Are Real Soon and I Really Didn't Expect an Answer.

I Didn't Think That God Was Listening so I Went to Bed and Didn't Really Think Much about It the Next Day. I Remember Getting up and Thinking Is Real Should See What the Bible Says in the Bible and I Just Asking If You Really Love Me. And If You're Real Then Tendon Flipped Open the Bible to Leviticus Is Okay Well This Is Exactly What Some Other Passages in One Returned to Me and I Flipped Open to John Nine Passage Where the Disciples Are Talking to Jesus and They See a Man Blind from Birth and Asked to Send This Man or His Parents That He Was Born Blind and Jesus Says It Is Not That This Man Sinned, or His Parents, but That the Work of God Could Be Displayed in His Life and That Was the Defining Moment for Me. It Felt Was Answering My Question. What Is Identifying but Why of Is There a Purpose in This Very Different Questions, but It Was the Answer I Needed. There Is a Purpose and It Felt like I Was Talking to Me and I Love about the Bible Is Actually Talk to Hess and Think I'd Ever Seen or Even Heard That Concept before so I Remember Just Saying You Know Me You Heard My Question and You Gave Me the Answer for the Purpose of My Life That I Could Glorify You and I Commit My Life to Christ, Then a Very Different Outlook Than I Had before Where I Had No Hope Because It Felt like When I Done Why Did This Happen Was in Meaning and Forgot to Say There Is Meaning in Theirs Purpose. Even That You May Not Know It Is Purpose Changes Everything. I Remember Being a Young Dad. I Think Her Daughter Was about Three Years Old.

Miriam Was Pregnant with Number Two When We Were out Walking around the Neighborhood with Amy in the Stroller and Miriam and I Have This Conversation and This Is This Is Almost Sounds Terrible to Say, but We Kind of Agreed with One Another That If We Have the Choice between One of the Two of Us Going through Suffering or Are Child Going through Suffering and I Would Feel Terrible If Miriam Had to Go through the Experience of Suffering, but It's Almost like Your Big Girl You Can Have a Loose but a Three-year-old. If Your Three-year-olds Going through This Your Two-year-old If You're My Seven-year-old in a Year and a Body Cast.

I'd Be Crying out to God and Saying, Lord, How Can This Be Your Good Purpose for Her for Us. Did Your Parents Did. There Was Their Faith All Shaken by What Their Daughter Was Having to Go through My Mom and This Is Actually a Really Kind of Amazing Story. When I Got Polio. My Mom Cried out and I Do Show Me. I've Been Sitting in This Is Sort of the What You've Brought into My Life and Assured Her Know It Wasn't Use the Exact Same Passage from John Nine. It Was Not This Man Who Sinned, or His Parents and That Was the Verse. My Mom Really Claimed to like God Is Going to Use Her Life, but I Didn't Know That and the Anything Is. My Mom Said She Prayed and Prayed and Prayed. When I Got Polio and She Had This Strange Sense That God Said I Could to Make Her Hole at 16 and so She Said She through My Whole Childhood Thinking I Was Can Be Healed at 16 That Was Her View Tell People. She Said That Was What She Believed.

But I Came to Christ, You Were Healed. Six and I Gave My Testimony. My Mom Was Teaching a Sunday School Class, and I Gave My Testimony, She Asked Me to Never Given It to Her and She Started Sobbing in the Back. I Went over to Her Afterwards and I Said Why Are You Crying so Much and She Said Two Things One That Was the Verse That God Gave Me into. I Had Always Thought You'd Be Home at 16 and That Is Exactly What You Are God Had Given You a Son or Daughter with Polio with an Infirmity or If You Were Talking to Parents Today Who Got Child like This.

Would You Tell Them What's the Best Thing They Can Do As They Raise a Child Whose Wrestling with Is God Good. What about My Body. What about My Limitations Culture Counsel to I Would Tell Them to Trust God Because It's a Long Game, and That They Don't Need to See Their Child Commit Their Life to Jesus or to Trust That This Is Good) Because I Feel When People Try to Push Someone When They're Not Ready. It Turns Them Away from Faith, but Saying I Don't Know Why This Happened but I can Use It and God Loves You, but This Is Hard, and I Want to Sit with You and I Want to Cry with You, and I Want to Be There for You through Every Second of It and I Think That's the Best Thing Think Parents to Try to over Spiritualize It for Me to Kids Could Turn Them against God More Than Help Them but I Think Just Saying I Do Know God Is in This and God Is with You Is Very Helpful. I Do Know and I Would Agree with All of You to Watch Our Kids Go through Pain Is One of the Greatest Suffering That a Parent Go through As We Just Morning We Ache for Them, Sometimes More Than They Ache for Themselves. I Said This before, but Our Oldest Son Has ADD and He Was Going through School I Mean It Was a Struggle Just Wouldn't Watch Him and This Is Nothing Compared to Polio Are Being Having All the Surgeries.

This Is Nothing. And yet I Watched Him Struggle. I Watched Him Change a Little Bit and so I Was Mad at God, and I Asked the Same Questions I Don't Get It. God, What Would Be the Purpose to This and Sometimes I Would I Would Say That Flippantly, but Then I Started Praying Fervently Saying God Show Me the Purpose I Need Your Wisdom. I Need Your Answer and I Get Pretty Strong like I'm Going to Fast until I Hear from You.

Well I Didn't Know It Would Go for Days, so It's Day Seven and I Can Eat till I Hear from You. Thinking I Would Hear from Them Right Away but on Day Seven. I Was Glad I Just Don't See the Sense I Need to Hear from You I Need Your Wisdom. Few People Are Your Word or Something to Give Me Hope for Him and I Was Reading in Exodus and It's When God Had Given the Instructions to Moses, and Moses Was Was Battling with God Saying I Can't Speak I Can't Free These People and God's Response to Moses Was in. This Is a First Time for This Hundreds of Times but God Said to Moses, Did I Not Make the Blind Did I Not Make the Mute It Stopped Me and I Was Thinking like What Does That Mean I Felt like in My Spirit. God Was Saying.

Do You Think I'm Surprised by What Is Happened and and What Your Son Is Going through.

Cannot Think My Hand Is in It and It Was the First Time I Felt like Okay If You Are in This Than I Can Walk through It and I Will Trust You with Him and I Will Trust Your Future for Him and I Have Freedom and a Sense of Okay Lord, Something I Think We Give up Too Early in Hearing from God. We Need to Be on Our Knees and Fasting Immediately in the Word We Need to Be with People That Are Counseling Us with Wise Counseling Because God Wants to Speak to Us and Believe If This Was All You Ever Had to Walk through Yeah That's Not Enough. Yeah, That's A Lot, but This Was Really a Foundation for What Was Ahead for You. In Fact, You Sure about in Your Book the Various Trials You Found Yourself Walking through in Your Life. It's Really a Remarkable Story Called Walking through Fire, a Memoir of Loss and Redemption and We Are Making. Beneath This Book Available This Week to Anywhere Listers Who Would like to Hear the Rest of the Story and Who Can Help Support the Ministry of Family Life with the Donation. Your Donations Are the Lifeblood of This Ministry. Your Financial Support Makes Everything We Do Here at Family Life Possible. When You Donate, You Are Responsible for Hundreds of Thousands of People Every Day Receiving Practical Biblical Help and Hope, Encouragement, Support for Their Marriage for Their Family Make All That Possible through Your Donations. If You Can Help with the Donation Today Would Love to Send You a Copy of beneath His Book Walking through Fire, Memoir of Loss and Redemption. You Can Request the Book Would Make a Donation online@familylifetoday.com or you can call one 800 FL today to make a donation by phone.

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We appreciate it now. Tomorrow were to hear about another one of the challenging chapters in your life when you're some Paul who was seven weeks old.

He rushed to the hospital bills about that tomorrow could be here as well. I want to thank our engineer today. Keith Lynch some help to end our entire team hosts David and Wilson pain swing back tomorrow for family life, family life, to use a production of family life of Little Rock, Arkansas. Accrue ministry help for today hope for tomorrow