But - we're free. The choice is ours. Once we stop asking the question "Why? Why did this happen?" we find the even more important questions that make us choose: "How will I respond to this?" "What do I intend to do now that this has happened?" As Courtney Milan observes "No man is broken because bad things happen to him. He's broken because he doesn't keep going after those things happen."
Amy M. Purdy, expert snowboarder since the age of fifteen, was training to become a massage therapist, hoping to lead a carefree, itinerant lifestyle, traveling from ski resort to ski resort to work at their spas and snowboard in her free time. Then at age nineteen, she was hospitalized because of severe bacterial meningitis; her Doctors gave her a less than 2% chance of survival. They began surgery to amputate both her legs below the knees.
Amy recalls feeling her last heartbeat on the operating table, taking her last breath. She knew that she was dead. She found herself in a dark place, surrounded by foggy, hazy green light. Three silhouettes stood in front of her, no one she knew. They told her "You can come with us, or you can stay. No matter what happens in your life, it's all going to make sense in the end."
Amy thought about what she loved: family...rain...waves...these were the things she cherished. In that moment, she chose to live.
As she says, "We don't always get to decide which course we go down, or know which mountains we'll face. Yet we always have the most important choice there is: whether to resist, or to give ourselves over to the twists and turns of the terrain."
Amy gave herself over wholeheartedly to the turns and twists of surviving and overcoming, to crawling up the steep mountain of learning to walk with two new prostheses. She began snowboarding again seven months after she received her leg prostheses, and in 2014 won a bronze medal in adaptive snowboarding as a member of Team U.S.A.'S Paralympic Adaptive Snowboarding team. She and her partner Daniel Gale co-founded the non-profit "Adaptive Action Sports" to help other amputees participate in action sports and the arts.
Amy has also modeled, acted, dazzled and inspired America in season eighteen of "Dancing With the Stars" and has gone on a nation-wide tour with Oprah Winfrey as a motivational speaker. In her book "On My Own Two Feet: the Journey from Losing My Legs to Learning the Dance of Life," she talks about how losing her legs helped her find a spiritual path and sparked radical change in her life because she chose to see that traumatic experience as an "aha moment."
She says "An aha moment becomes most meaningful when it leads us to do more. Dream bigger. Move past our so-called limitations. Bounce back with the resilience that every single one of us was born with."
Life is hard, and we fight and rail against the stresses and tragedies that explode like I.E.D.S. when we least expect them. Yet, every life experience ultimately throws the ball in our court. We can choose to become bitter or choose to become better. We can choose to despair, or we can choose to trust God, Who always continues to fashion us, Who gifts us with inner courage to change and overcome when tragedy strikes. Whatever happens to us, God stays with us, waiting to help us become the stronger, more resilient, more self-confident person He has always known we could be.
"Just as you know not how the Breath of Life fashions the human frame in the mother's womb, so you know not the work of God which He is accomplishing in the Universe." Ecclesiastes 11:5.
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