A personal story from Roberta Cheong, a parishioner at St. Therese Chinese Catholic Church

4.5 years ago, I was diagnosed with a rare type of non-contagious kidney disease called Nephrotic Syndrome. The doctors told me I would recover in 2 weeks with medication. 2 weeks turned into 4.5 years. During this time, I was hospitalized 9 times, staying for weeks and months at a time in the hospital. I felt like I lived in the hospital half of the year and the hospital had become my second home. Every day I did research on my illness and looked for possible cures. No medication or treatment I tried, no matter how advanced, was able to heal me. Now there is only 10% function left in my kidneys. I am in need of a kidney transplant and I have been on dialysis for the past 6 months. Going to a dialysis clinic 3 days a week to send all of the blood in my body into a machine that cleans it and then send it back into my body was not the life I had imagined at age 35. But God had drastically different plans for me. This is my story.

Before I was sick, I was living very selfishly and greedily. I was very attached to the world and making sure I was experiencing all its pleasures– eating good food, trying new restaurants, shopping and buying beautiful clothes, striving for fame and human praise, accumulating wealth, working hard and earning money, success, reputation, constantly seeking fun adventures and excitement from the world, etc. I was living as though I had all the time in the world. Preparing for heaven was the last thing on my mind and my relationship with Jesus was almost nonexistent. Prayer was boring to me, and even when I did pray, I was only asking God to make me feel better or to give me things that I wanted. Prayer was more like a monologue of me talking rather than a loving dialogue of talking and listening between two best friends. And whenever I prayed, I was heavily distracted by what delicious foods I was going to eat later that day and what exciting activities I had planned. I was not focused on having a serious conversation with God or nurturing our relationship. I did not truthfully make room for God in my life. I did not make sure I was sincerely following the 10 commandments God gave us, because I took God for granted, I took His love for granted, and I took being His child for granted. I was self-centered and focused on my own interests. I tried to seek continual fulfillment from the temporary pleasures of the world, but I never found it. I never felt that deep sense of fulfillment, peace, and security in my soul. God could see that, in fact, my spirit was sick and He wanted to heal my spirit. So He made my body sick.

When I got sick 4.5 years ago, something happened to me in the hospital. I experienced a dramatic transformation that I can only describe as the instant death of my soul and the birth of a new one. Since I had already been baptized when I was a child, this felt like a second Baptism. All that was before in my life had been wiped clean and I was completely reborn with a new soul. To everyone around me, I looked the same on the outside. But on the inside, I had suddenly become a completely different person. By the time I was discharged from the hospital and went home, I was already a different person. No one knew of the spiritual transformation I had undergone at the hospital except the One who made the transformation—the Holy Spirit, and I never told anyone except now. What I experienced was called a METANOIA. It is the Greek word for a transformative change of heart or a deep spiritual conversion. 

In the blink of an eye, my whole life ended, and I was placed on the highway towards Heaven. The Lord allowed me to see my sins–I had sooooooo many sins–and that in the midst of enjoying life to the max, I had been rapidly and blindly heading towards Hell. I had been living blissfully in sin and completely oblivious to the state of my soul. With my illness, the Lord woke me up to the reality of eternal life and the very urgent need to be prepared for Heaven. There was no time to waste and I was running out of time. At age 31, death had suddenly become a very real possibility for me and I realized I was not prepared for it with my sinful, selfish lifestyle. I had to straighten out my life immediately. I knew that if I had died at the hospital, I would not have gone on to heaven. God was giving me a second chance. He purified me and used illness, pain, and suffering as tools to bring about this purification. If God did not suddenly bring on a serious illness into my life, I would have continued on that same path without ever questioning the selfish way I was living. God interrupted my life so that I could walk on the right path in life.

During these 4.5 years of battling kidney disease and now, kidney failure, I have discovered that there is an incredible redemptive quality to suffering. The Holy Spirit is a great spiritual teacher and He used suffering to discipline and instruct me in the Lord’s ways. There is tremendous spiritual value in suffering, because it purifies and sanctifies the soul. Like gold that is tested in fire. God was using my illness as a tool to cleanse and transform my soul, so that He can prepare me for Heaven after this life.And that–is much more important to Him at the momentthan physically healing me. After all, our souls live forever, but the body remains on earth.

Things that used to be important to me completely lost their value and suddenly became meaningless to me, because those things didn’t bring me closer to God. I realized that the things that I used to value, the busyness of my everyday life that occupied so much of my time and energy, were not the things I should have been doing for my salvation. In fact, some of those things were even harmful to my salvation. My life before had been in vain and I didn’t want to waste what remaining time I had left on earth. I stopped seeing the value in things that I couldn’t take with me to Heaven, so I donated many of my possessions to charity. There was no room for anything in my life besides God. Jesus was now my whole world. I stopped saving things for memory sake and started living a very minimalist and simple life with very few material things. I didn’t want anything holding me down. I was concerned with making my soul as ready for Heaven as it could possibly be and as detached from this world as much as possible. And things that never even crossed my mind before now became the center of my life. My mind became totally focused on eternal life and the things that mattered to me now was the Kingdom of God and my relationship with Jesus

I decided that since everything belongs to God, and, my body belongs to God, then He can do whatever He wants with it. So instead of trying to look like I did before, I surrendered my body completely over to God and I no longer cared how my body looked. I am the clay and He is the potter. I was ready for anything that was to come and fully accepted whatever He wanted me to endure. Every operation that was done on my body, I accepted. Every needle inserted into my body, I accepted. Every emergency room visit, I accepted. Every food I could no longer eat, I accepted. Every ounce of pain and suffering, inconvenience, and discomfort that came with having kidney failure and all of the problems it causes the rest of the body, I accepted, like the obedient son Jesus was in fully accepting the Cross and all of the pain that came with His crucifixion. I took up my cross and carried it as Jesus had. And as a result, God blessed me with a million-fold in graces, wisdom, spiritual knowledge, true peace, joy, and a transformed soul that dwells with the Holy Spirit.

Over the past 4.5 years, I was able to hear Jesus speak to me much more frequently and clearer than I ever did before I got sick. I was now only concerned with hearing and knowing God’s will and obeying Him; to please God and to give Him glory. My world had become consisting of being in constant conversation with God 24/7, reading the Bible and meditating on it all day and all night, and serving others as much as I could. My love for God grew exponentially during these years of illness and we developed a very intimate friendship. I had more joy and peace than I ever had in my life, and I wanted everyone to have that incredible, intimate friendship with God that I was enjoying. I discovered that the quality of our lives depends on our relationship with God.

It turns out, my illness was a great blessing in disguise after all. It had a redemptive purpose for me, and God used it to save my soul from destruction. I have learned that God wants us to embrace the suffering and the pain in our life, to take up our cross, allow Him to sanctify us, and bring us into an intimate relationship with Him, because there are many spiritual blessings, graces, and fruits He wants to share with us through our sufferings. And by embracing our sufferings, we allow ourselves to receive all of those graces, which are worth far more than our sufferings. And Jesus tells us that those who share in His suffering will also share in His glory.

There is so much more to the story, so much more I want to share with you–things that Jesus said to me and the incredible redemptive work that the Holy Spirit has done in my soul. If you are interested in hearing more about my experiences, I will be giving a much more extensive testimony on Sunday, April 22nd in the Community Room after the 10:30 am Mass. You are all invited to come and listen. Lastly, if you are healthy and interested in donating your kidney, please come talk to me. I ask for your prayers of healing for me. Thank you & God bless you.