When my faith is tried, God’s love is manifested in my fellow travelers
Tom Swift • published January 11, 2009 12:15 am



As I face a new year while living with a terminal illness, I take stock of my resources. The greatest of these is faith. One of my earliest and fondest memories is of my mother reading a Bible storybook to me at bedtime. My mother loved me, so I have always believed that God loves me. I vividly remember looking out the window of our Atlanta home when I was 5 years old and seeing a rainbow. My mother explained that it was a sign of God’s love. I trusted my mother and I trusted God.

My childhood faith served me well in making sense of life. It did not occur to me as a teenager to question God why my mother developed Alzheimer’s disease in her mid-50s. God was still good and loving and ultimately in control despite the terrible toll the disease took on my mother, and on me.
My early experiences in college introduced me to the hard sciences of calculus, chemistry and physics. By contrast, my faith seemed simplistic and irrational. I decided that the people who believed in God were either simple-minded fanatics or had some disabling problem that left them needing God since they could not make it on their own. I still attended church for social reasons, and a brother and sister I met there proved my point. They were physically and mentally challenged. I watched them struggle to play volleyball at a picnic and thought, “Those two are the kind of weak people who need to believe in God!”

Within an hour I was humbled by their story. Their challenges were congenital. Their biological parents abandoned them. The loving couple that adopted them knew about these challenges when they decided to keep the brother and sister together and brought them home. It was a decision they made from love that exposed and defeated my ignorance and arrogance. It would be a few years before I resolved my intellectual problems with faith, but those loving parents restored my belief in God.

Another challenge to my faith came two years ago when I was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. I have had the typical responses to this terrible news. If God is good and powerful, then why does God allow this to happen to me? Is God really trustworthy? Once again, my faith has been preserved by love. Fourteen men take turns dressing me and preparing my breakfast each morning. As many or more women cook for me. Others shop, wash my clothes, do minor home repair, mow my grass and come to visit. They are the hands and heart of God, showing God’s love to me at a time when I desperately need it. I have spent a lot of years in seminary trying to understand my faith, but it is the love of God expressed through human beings that has given me faith. It matters what I believe, but my faith is primarily trust in a love that will care for me to the end of my life and beyond.

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Tom Swift is a writer living in Hendersonville. The next monthly ALS support group for patients and caregivers will meet in Asheville on January 11th. Contact facilitator Pamela Brown at 252-1097 or at pbrown@catfishchapter.org for more details.

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