„Unfortunately, medicine is powerless in this case,” the professor businesslike explained my mother. „The disease will progress slowly, muscles will atrophy, and it will get hard to breathe… In short, get ready for the fact that your daughter will live 10, maybe 18 years…” 

My Mom was little more than 20 years at that time, and I was her second child. No signs showed that something was „wrong” with me before I became one and a half year old. When first symptoms showed up and we started to look for doctors’ advice and help, the very men whose knowledge and judgment my Mom trusted declared my life a hopeless case.

In fact, many years passed before I learned about these bleak prospects as my Mom did not share them with any person. I was not even aware that, from the medical point of view, each day of my life was lived in a shadow of death. However, although I did not know that my disability could cause early death, I felt constantly the stamp of fatality. Life itself reminded me in every step that I was different and did not fit in the system and the order of things created by „normal” society. People, my peers in particular, clearly made me understand that I was „faulty”. In some people, my physical condition caused pity, in others – contempt. Exception was my family and a few more individuals who accepted and valued me as a personality.

Ten years passed, and I was still alive. My teenage years began, the hard time of thinking, questioning, and searching. Every day I asked myself, „What’s the sense? Why I live? What am I to do with my life? What is the reason I live for?” All my dreams and desires hopelessly crumbled against the wall of unrelenting reality saying to me, „You can’t, and you never will, because… because… because…”  

My life was like a life imprisonment without any hope of amnesty. It seemed that, in this world, there is no solution or answer applicable for me too. 

In this hard time of hopelessness and despair, a man came into my ravaged lend; he started to tell me about God and Jesus Christ. Having grown up in godless Soviet times and in irreligious family, I found all these things completely new and unacceptable at first. Nevertheless, God was patient with me and convinced me little by little that he was the One whom I was looking for, and whom I needed.

On the day when I decided to receive Jesus Christ and trust him, the doors of my prison opened, and I went out in freedom and life. Christ became the Ruler of my life. He cancelled all the prospects of death and hopelessness and filled my heart with assurance that he had the right answers to my questions. God knows what’s the purpose of my life, and even my disability has a purpose and essential role in order I can fulfill the task for what I am here in this world. God never wastes our pain, suffering, and loneliness; he fulfills them with meaning.

Together with Jesus, I really live and are able to achieve and accomplish all Gad has planned for me. I could get a high school education and go to study in Christian Leadership College that had seemed to me a never realizable dream. I learned English in self-taught way and have translated from English into Latvian many christian books. At present, I’m fully involved in Wings for Wheels, Youth with a Mission’s ministry for people with disabilities. Being in relationship with the people whose lives are greatly affected by disability, I understand much better why God has led me this path of painful experience. I have found that, although the world rejects those who are weak, God is looking for them to embrace and to manifest his amazing work in them.  

If you’re someone (affected by disability, or not) searching for the meaning of your life, I’ll be very pleased to receive a letter from you. It’s possible that our meeting and conversations about God can become a starting point of your life’s greatest miracle.