Try to picture yourself as young, attractive, and the owner of your own growing business in Jamaica, with the potential for fabulous success. Then suddenly you are attacked, blinded, and left with your face disfigured beyond recognition. In the days and weeks that follow you ask yourself why God should allow all your dreams to be dashed and your very identity as a human being to be devastated. How do you trust him under such circumstances? What do his biblical promises for protection mean in the context of such continual suffering? And where do you turn to find strength to choose life when everything around you appears to be darkness and death?

When Carol entered my Sabbath School class in Garden Grove, California, for the first time, she was led in by a friend. As I encountered her appearance I felt a rush of deep emotion, shock and horror that I tried not to show. The scarring and disfigurement of her face was overwhelming. I calmly welcomed her with a smile and asked if she had any words she'd like to share. The brief testimony that followed was so riveting that we all longed to hear more of her story. Carol made it clear that she was there to glorify God, but that it had been a long journey for her. In 1994, two men had entered her place of business with the look of revenge in their eyes. They had threatened her a few days earlier for refusing to buy inferior lumber from them.

Cornering her with a knife, they tied her up and then poured acid in her eyes and over her face and body. She said the pain was so excruciating that she screamed for God to take her life. When the landlord next door discovered her, he rushed her to the hospital, where she was expected to die. After four months of continual treatments she finally left the hospital, grossly scarred beyond recognition and totally blind, but she was still determined to live. Carol had survived her journey into the valley of the shadow of death and emerged seeking to fulfill God's purpose in bringing her through this terrible tragedy. Through her grief, depression and pain Carol had still managed to discover that nothing happens to us in this life without God's permission or apart from his purposes. Before her attack, Carol had been driven by a desire to succeed in business and fulfill material ambitions. She now prayed that the rest of her life would be an unfolding miracle in God's hands, but little did she anticipate the strange path this miracle would take.

Carol longed to go to America, where she could receive more advanced medical care, but she had no money left after her expensive treatments. Yet, this was the beginning of God's plan to bring light out of darkness. A friend of Carol's helped to organize a fund-raising program that distributed flyers throughout the community, making people aware of Carol's plight. Hundreds of people began to donate small amounts that ultimately were enough to send Carol to the United States for more medical attention. After spending six months in Florida, however, her money was gone and her sight was still not restored. Through church connections Carol was invited to come to Southern California, and once in Orange County she attended our Garden Grove Seventh-day Adventist Church.

A whole new set of miracles began to unfold. As I got to know this remarkable woman through her testimony and numerous conversations, I was deeply impressed with the depth of her love for God. Before long, she asked to join our Adventist church and I had the privilege of baptizing her on a Sabbath, where she shared her testimony with the entire congregation. People were so moved by Carol's story that she became an important focus of interest for the whole church. Her need for further surgeries and her desire to have her story published became an object of special prayer in our church staff meetings, our Wednesday night prayer meetings, and the growing small groups that were part of our church ministry.

But prayers were not the only path we wanted to pursue. On the publication front, both Rudy Torres, our senior pastor, and I had worked with Kit Watts, a public relations specialist. So we contacted her and she interviewed Carol to see how her story might be published in book form, a project still in process. I contacted Stephen Chavez, managing editor of the Adventist Review, an old friend of mine, about the possibility of the Review running an article on Carol's story as well. Steve came and interviewed Carol on her experience and wrote a feature story that appeared in December, 2002.

This article got the attention of many Adventists as well as others. We decided to see what we could do to help Carol pay for the expensive surgeries that could potentially restore her sight. This endeaver was no "sure thing," for Carol had already spent approximately $100,000 in donated monies for reconstructive surgeries, to no avail. These donations had not only come from some Adventists, but from sources as diverse as the Lions Club in Fullerton, and a group of caring prisoners in New York who heard her story through a prison ministry. Her benefactors had also included celebrities such as Pat Boone, Helen Hunt, and Lily Tomlin. But, through our K.E.Y.S. Family Resource Center, the community service wing of our Garden Grove Church, we decided to try to access any possible grants that might be available for such a humanitarian cause.

Working on several fronts, we helped Carol find top surgical specialists at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, who expressed confidence that sight could be restored in Carol's left eye, given the right set of surgeries. One surgeon in particular, Dr. Robert Herrick, took such an interest in Carol's case that he offered to help dramatically reduce the expenses for such surgeries through pro bono and significant individual efforts, so that the procedures could be done outside of a hospital setting. But, even with these contributions, we anticipated that costs would run into the twenty to thirty thousand dollar range, far more than our KEYS Center could afford. However, God wasn't done with this project. Right when we were desperate for money, we heard from the VersaCare Foundation in Corona, California, promising that they would seriously consider our application for a grant in Carol's behalf. Two months later we were informed that our application had been accepted for an amount that would make it possible for Carol's surgeries to proceed.

After months of our praying and hoping, as Carol progressed through a number of painful preparatory surgeries and waited for just the right cornea donor, the big day came. Our prayer groups and prayer meeting warriors went into overdrive, as we anticipated the results of this final surgery. Then the eventful news came-Carol's sight had been restored. We celebrated this miracle with great joy, not only because the long process was over, but because God had used so many different people, means and methods to accomplish his purposes.

As I talked with Carol after her sight had been restored she acknowledged that the method and process God had used to answer her prayers through this collaborative miracle had affected her more powerfully than an immediate miracle would have done. And her answers to the three questions that opened this article were clear and profound. "I learned to trust God in the midst of my pain," she said, "knowing that he had a calling for my life. In the context of this calling his promises became more powerful for me than they had ever been before. And though I shed many tears as I experienced repeated trials and failures in the darkness, the reality of his light would never allow my hope to die."

God could have intervened miraculously to restore Carol's sight directly, without making this such a drawn-out ordeal, for I have seen comparable miracles in the past. But in this case I can see how God's purposes were played out through a process of networking and cooperation that was a miracle of its own. We have just had a church-wide celebration of Carol's restored sight in our Garden Grove church. It included Dr. Robert Herrick, the surgeon who gave Carol her vision and the agency that made the major grant available to our KEYS Family Resource Center to pay for the surgeries. It has been a faith-building experience that may well rival the marvelous miracle that John describes in the ninth chapter of his Gospel, for there are few testimonies more powerful than the words, "I was blind, but now I see."

Notes

See Stephen Chavez, "She Refused to Die" Adventist Review, December, 2002, pp. 35-37.

KEYS is to our Adventist church in Orange County what Lutheran Social Services is to the Lutheran church. In our three years of existence we have already received more than half a million dollars in grant monies from government agencies and private foundations that are not connected to the Adventist church, for our various community service programs. For more information on KEYS see Adventist Today.

Steve Daily, Ph.D., is associate pastor of the Garden Grove, California, church and director of KEYS. E-mail: GGSDA@aol.com