Angry with God and Asking for a Miracle

Vanessa Crosson shared a special bond with her mother, Sue Cox. “It was a very close mother-daughter relationship.  I felt very accepted by her.  No matter what I had done wrong or how I had disappointed her, she was always warm and very accepting of me,” she says.
 
Vanessa was moved even more by her mom’s faith, and gave her life to Christ when she was 10.  “It was her relationship with God that really spoke to me, that caused me to want that. I wanted that close relationship that she had.”
                            
Vanessa never imagined life without her mom, until she was in high school.  She remembers when she first heard the diagnosis: “Melanoma--she had melanoma, skin cancer, and it was everywhere. She had tumors all over her colon, all over her lungs, her kidneys. Internally, she had tumors everywhere,” Vanessa recalls.  
                     
Vanessa, her father and her brother all prayed and believed that God would heal her. However, within a year, Vanessa’s mother died. Vanessa was outside her hospital room when the code blue rang out. “I remember the doctor coming out and saying it was done,” she remembers.
                           
The loss devastated Vanessa.
                          
“I needed my mom, and when I didn’t have that, I felt very robbed. She was my go-to, and when I lost her, I lost a friend,” Vanessa says. “I lost that support system, and so I immediately felt like I was alone. That was when I remember I just felt this shift in my heart, from faith, I just went to –anger, I was angry.  And I was hurt.  I thought, none of my prayers worked, none of our faith worked, so I just felt like, ‘Why even do it?’ That turned into, ‘Well, he just doesn’t love me,’ because if He had, why would he let this happen?’ And then that turned into just disbelief. He must not exist.”
                             
Soon after her mother died, Vanessa married and began pursuing a nursing career, but she could never get over her loss. Often she needed anti-depressants to get through the day. “I felt so empty inside. I just wanted anything to make the hurt go away just a little bit. I just wanted just a little relief, to not wake up and feel that and to go to bed and feel the same way, if not heavier.”

Several years later Vanessa found out she was expecting. “I felt like that missing piece to my puzzle would be back again. That it would fill the emptiness that I’d been feeling. It would bring a satisfaction in my heart that I had not felt since my mother was alive.”

“But I began to have spotting,” she says. “And what was supposed to be a joyous occasion just quickly turned into fear, fear of losing again, and I didn’t want to go through that again. All those emotions of losing my mother and loss just kind of crept up in the shadows That’s when I realized if I were to lose this child, that I couldn’t do it alone. I broke down and I prayed for the first time in over six years.  And that’s when I realized that I needed God. I wasn’t going to run anymore. I wanted to pray more. I wanted to talk to Him more. And I felt heard, for the first time in a while. And it was a full awareness that He was here, and that He never left.”

As Vanessa drew closer to God, she felt the depression and loneliness begin to lift. “It was gradual, but it was enough to where I knew that He was changing me,” she says. “He was healing my heart, deep down emotionally, things that people couldn’t see.”

Vanessa went on to have a healthy pregnancy, and gave birth to their first child. Today, she and her husband Trent have three.  Vanessa still works as a registered nurse, and tells the story of her return to faith in her book, Among the Myrtle Trees.
                           
“I actually have a joy in my life. I want to live. And that emptiness that I once had is now filled with that reassurance that I have a purpose, and that God is with me, and hasn’t left me. God in my life means constant, never changing, unrelenting,” Vanessa says. “He doesn’t give up on us, even when you give up on Him.”