No stranger to pain
BY PAUL ASAY THE GAZETTE
March 3, 2007 - 2:37AM


Watch Steve Brooks’ arm. Watch as the muscles — thin, fading — twitch and jerk underneath the skin.

Listen as he forms words with his rebellious tongue, speech slurring as if he’d been given too much novocaine.

Listen closer. Listen to a man whose own body is trying to kill him, nerve by nerve, muscle by muscle.

“It’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t about trying to get God to heal me,” he said. “This is about intimacy with God, an intimate walk with him. Just knowing that he loves me and that nothing can separate me from his love.”

Brooks, senior pastor for Springs Community Church in northern Colorado Springs, has motor neuron disease, a condition that impairs the way his nerves and muscles work together.

It’s a disease that could rob him before it kills him — stealing his ability to walk, speak and even breathe. It would be a devastating prognosis for anyone to deal with, and enough to make some believers question their God.

Why did you allow this to happen to me? And if you’re a good and all-powerful God, why do you allow evil and suffering at all?

Brooks faced these questions 30 years ago — when his first wife died — and found his answers. He doesn’t pretend these times aren’t tough. But he holds to the hope that God may cure him, and the faith that God will be there even if the cure doesn’t come.

According to Dr. Marc Treihaft, a neurologist from Denver, motor neuron disease is a category of diseases and conditions that impair how the muscles and nerves interact. Doctors aren’t sure what causes most of these conditions: Some seem to be hereditary, but many, such as Brooks’ version, seem to come out of nowhere.

The most serious of these diseases is ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Doctors tell Brooks that his disease could progress into ALS. There is no cure for ALS, and precious little hope if you get it. Barring a miracle, it’s fatal. Treihaft said the typical life expectancy of someone diagnosed with ALS is three to five years.
“They become trapped in their own bodies,” he said.

Brooks says his hands freeze up when he types, and it can take a superhuman effort for him to button his own shirt. The preacher doesn’t speak as clearly as he’d like, and his arm and chest twitch constantly — the product of his misfiring nerves.

Brooks believes in miracles. He says he’s seen them and feels that, if God wills it, he’ll survive, thrive and mystify the medical community. There’s been no miracle yet, but the disease seems to have stabilized. He still can talk and teach and preach, and most Sundays he does. Sometimes his sermons touch on his illness. Honesty has been a hallmark of the church, with Brooks sharing true, sometimes painful stories from his family’s life in the pulpit.

“We’re not real good about keeping secrets,” said his second wife, Linda, who married Brooks in 1980.

His sermons always deal with the radical love of Jesus, and how he’s there even in the darkest days. His theology is nearly the opposite of popular “prosperity gospel” teaching that promises wealth and happiness as a consequence of faith.

“I think everybody in our congregation is learning from this,” said Rick Treatch, Springs Community’s executive pastor.

‘A FALLEN PLACE’

Some people choose to be pastors. Brooks, his friends say, was born to be one. He’s loaded with ideas and full of compassion, they say. Linda Brooks says they have a joke in their house: Steve can give people the shirt off his own back if he likes — but if he wants to give away hers, he has to ask.

“He’s a pastoral Energizer bunny,” said Ron Gray, co-founder of Springs Community.
Gray and Steve Brooks met in the 1970s at Westwood Community Church in Omaha, Neb., where Brooks was working as a youth pastor and Gray was a church elder.

In 1979, both men’s wives were killed in a car accident. Brooks’ first wife, Kathy, left behind a 20-month-old son, Ross, and a deeply grieving husband.

“Your faith doesn’t exempt you from that (grief),” Brooks said. “It certainly helps you with it, though.”

Gray and Brooks grew close in their grief and, in 1985, they moved to Colorado Springs and started Springs Community Church. The church grew steadily in 22 years, with weekly attendance now hovering around 450.

“What God was doing was planting a church through all of that,” Brooks said. “My theology doesn’t tell me that God killed our wives: It’s a sucky world and it’s a fallen place and life happens. But can he use that to make some good come out of it? Absolutely, he can.”

Brooks first noticed the twitching in January 2006. Big deal, he thought. He was 54, and he assumed the twitching was just a symptom of getting older.

When friends asked whether he’d lost weight, Brooks laughed it off. He’d gone a decade without losing or gaining an ounce. He thought they were putting him on. Around Labor Day, Brooks finally weighed himself, and he was shocked. In one year, he had lost 15 pounds. He was tested, diagnosed and diagnosed again.

The conclusion was world-rocking. Brooks’ two sons are married, but his daughter, Bree, is not. After he heard the prognosis, his first thought was whether he’d be able to walk his daughter down the aisle on her wedding day. He wondered whether he’d get to play with the grandchildren he’s hoping for.

“Linda and I, we’re deeply in love with each other,” Brooks said. “All of a sudden, we’re looking at the idea that she might be doing the grandma thing without me.”

His wife also said she has faith that this season has a purpose: that God, through it all, has a plan.

“There’s something he’s doing,” she said. “There’s something he’s up to, and we’re going to face it together.”

Brooks told the leaders at Springs Community almost immediately. In October, he told the congregation. “It was hard for them to hear,” his wife said.

The announcement precipitated a curious role reversal: The pastor was now being pastored to. Congregants rallied around Brooks and his family, sending scores of get-well cards and offering whatever support they could.

“To know there are literally hundreds of people praying for you — it makes a big difference,” his wife said.

Such support, according to Treihaft, is of “paramount importance” to people who contract motor neuron disease. “Otherwise, you’re living this thing alone.”

Brooks hasn’t backed away from his pastoral duties. He still goes to work most days, preaches most Sundays and plots out the church’s strategy.
“I don’t see him slowing down very much,” Gray said.
“There really isn’t anything that’s changed,” said Treatch, adding with a chuckle that “part of my role is to change some things for him. I encourage him not to push himself too much.”

Brooks knows his calling could change anytime. And part of his job is to prepare the church for when he’s not around. Brooks and his leadership team are pondering whether it’s time to bring in a younger teaching pastor whom Brooks can groom to eventually take his place.

“Congregations get way too attached to the founding pastor,” Brooks said. “This (disease) has been a gift from heaven to say to the congregation, ‘God is the head of Springs Community Church — not Steve Brooks.’”

PRAYERS FOR A MIRACLE

Some people have asked Brooks what motor neuron disease has done to his faith. Do the twitches in his chest and slurring of his speech spur him to ask God ‘why?’ Why him? Why now?

“You’re talking to a guy whose wife was killed in a car accident,” he responds.

Six months after the accident, Brooks says, he was in a deep, black depression. Sometimes he’d spend a good chunk of the evening sitting in an easy chair, weeping.

One night, as he sat in that easy chair, a thought popped into his mind — a message, he says, from God.

“You didn’t know you could hurt this bad, did you?” it said to Brooks. “You didn’t know that my love is deeper than your hurt and, Steve, you need to know that.”

“That changed my life,” Brooks said. “I dealt with ‘why’ 30 years ago. It’s a fallen, sucky world, and I’m not exempt from any of that. Jesus didn’t promise we would be.”

He hopes there is a miracle. He’s praying for one, and his congregants are, too. “God hasn’t told me he’s going to heal me,” he said. “But I’m open to the reality that God is in control here, and that he will reveal to me what his ultimate intent is.
“I’m not afraid of God on that score,” he added. “We’ve got such a good track record with each other. I know his faithfulness.”

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