In 2004, I came down with a rare, degenerative autoimmune disease called scleroderma (also known as systemic sclerosis).

With it, the Lord has taught me that sometimes He loves us enough to nearly kill us. And I’m not talking metaphorically.

Yet, as Job proclaimed when everything good in his life also was being stripped away, “Though you slay me, will I trust you Lord.” Job 13:15.

When the disease first hit me, I nearly died and I lost everything – and I mean everything – dear to me. It was a difficult transition, but God used it to kill what needed at the time to die in me and around me.

As with Job, when He was done He then began restoring much that I’d lost, but in totally new – and better – ways that were not possible before.

For seven years, as part of that restoration, the disease was largely in remission – much to the amazement of my doctors. In 2011, however, I started feeling it re-surge.

In early 2012, the doctors discovered that it was now affecting my lungs. Normally, that is a fatal development, and during most of that year I experienced rapidly deteriorating shortness of breath and diminishing physical capacity as my health plummeted.

Through all this, I had to come to terms with the prospect of impending death.

It was hard to adjust to my growing incapacity and needing to lean on others, after God had previously blessed me with an amazing life of strength and adventure.

What made it particularly hard to understand was that most of what God was killing in my life were things He legitimately had called me to do and be in the past – along with all the associated responsibilities.

A particularly difficult turning point came that June.

I remember driving to the jail as waves of nausea washed over me. When I pulled into a handicapped parking space (thank God for those!), I sat in my car drained, exhausted and confused.

I struggled over whether I should go into the jail to be with, and encourage, some brothers who gathered each Sunday afternoon in a housing unit where I had helped start an indigenous church several years previously – and which was still going strong.

Through that fellowship, literally hundreds of men had come to the Lord over the years, discipleship was happening, and lives were being changed as they learned to obey all that Christ commanded.

Sitting in my car, I worried that if I went in that day I might have another nausea attack and throw up in the jail – which would cause all sorts of complications with the jail authorities, beyond simply my own condition.

As I struggled over what to do, I felt the Lord’s love and concern surround me. I had this intense sense of His pleasure over my years of having ministered in the jail. But as clear as could be, I also heard Him gently say, “Jim, this season in your life is over.”

I immediately began to weep. I mean, I WEPT, with sobs and convulsion, there in my car. Although I felt His acceptance and His grace, I also loved the guys in the jail and felt the loss.

In other ways, the Lord systematically killed other things near and dear to me throughout 2012 – not in anger, but out of compassion.

The emotional and physical pain – from the sorrow of impending loss and the scleroderma itself – was intense. Nonetheless, I felt increasing gratitude and trust as the year progressed and I learned to increasingly draw strength from the Lord’s abiding presence and Marianne’s amazing love and care.

Through it all, I grew in the tangible assurance that He knew me – and I was His. And I learned that this was enough to sustain and uphold me, even though I didn’t know if He was preparing to take me home to be with Him or had some other purpose in all that was happening.

In late 2012, the doctors put me on a new experimental drug – which stopped (but didn’t cure) the progression of the disease in my lungs. By early 2013, I was beginning to slowly stabilize.

Around then, Marianne shared a picture God gave her (He often speaks to me in logic, but to her in pictures). She said the Lord showed her a bear that had been hibernating in a cave, but was now starting to stir as spring came.

Yup, I thought – that’s where I’m at. I felt that stirring in my spirit: winter was ending.

God started giving me a sense of anticipation – that He had killed most of what needed to die, even though much of it was stuff He Himself had previously given me, qualities that He had used in me in the past, and things He had once called me to do.

I began to understand that God had new plans and directions for my life, and needed to strip away things from my past – including stuff that was good – which I otherwise would have tried to hold onto.

Eventually, though, I came through the other side because I had learned, like Job, what it meant to proclaim that “though you slay me, I will trust you Lord.”

Through it all, I found a new, very powerful – but quiet and humbling – sense of anointing as I slowly begin to move into some new things that He began opening up.

The Lord also restored some of my past – like being able to continue starting and sustaining indigenous fellowships in the jail and elsewhere – but in ways that now had less to do about me and “my” ministry and agenda.

So here I am, nearly twelve years later. I feel peace. I feel His presence and I know His assurance – because He loved me enough to nearly slay me, and because of it, I have learned to trust Him in ways that otherwise would have been impossible to comprehend.

I still have scleroderma, but I think the Lord has some things for me yet to accomplish here on earth for His Kingdom. But if not, that’s OK.

After all, I now know at the very core of my being that it’s not about my will, but His will.

Though you slay me, I will trust you Lord.

~ Jim Wright