It is often in our moments of greatest weakness that God’s power manifests in us most magnificently. And there’s hardly a moment of greater weakness than when we are faced with our own mortality.
Of course, we all know that none of us get out of this thing alive, but the weight of that reality rarely hits us until we’re staring death in the face. It is in that place where we are stretched and broken, frail and helpless, that God gives us the courage to exercise our faith in full bloom.
Such was the case for Valli Vida Gideons‘ father. The day he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in his abdomen, Valli never saw the invincible man she knew as dad look so afraid.
But according to Valli, a wonderful transformation started to occur… “as his body began to fail, his faith grew.”
As his health faded and his body withered, she watched the eternal light of Christ shine in her father ever more powerfully.
“He never lived like he would lose the battle.”
…And though he died, in reality, he never did.
Over a decade after her Dad passed, Valli saw the most astonishing proof of that in a place she never expected — the margins of his Bible.
It was in those intentional scrawls throughout Romans, John, James, Jeremiah that she received the “highest gift.”
Read Valli’s Facebook post below, detailing a beautiful story of a father’s unfailing faith that translated into a daughter’s greatest treasure, and be sure to check out more of her work at My Battle Call:
“I’ll never forget the look in my Dad’s eyes when the doctor told him the cancer was sprinkled throughout his abdomen like powdered sugar. At that moment I saw the man I considered fearless look afraid.
What started as an exploratory surgery ended in an unspeakable diagnosis. Mom and Dad asked us to leave the room; they needed to ask the doctor questions parents don’t want their children to hear.
The fight of my Dad’s life began behind those closed doors.
Through chemo treatments and all the hell inflicted by cancer, he never lived like he would lose the battle.
And I believed it.
What’s more, as his body began to fail, his faith grew.
