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Welcome to treasures in the storm. I’m Cindy schmidler and I’m very excited about our show today. I want you to go get your bible, your coffee and a pen and some paper because you’re gonna want to take some notes today. We’re gonna start. I’m gonna pray for us. We’re gonna look at some scriptures together. We’re gonna dig in the word and I’m gonna share some stories of what it looks like in our life. Today’s today’s show is called Ready Cancer, my gift. And so you have to stay with me to get the fruit of all of that. So let me pray for us. Lord dear, Heavenly father, We are so grateful that you are Lord over our lives, that everything that happens in our life is in your fatherly hands and that you know God more than anyone what is best for us, Lord, even when it looks so difficult for us, will you bathe us in your presence Lord in these difficult situations so that we can grab hold of you the one true um vine of life for God And I pray for my audience today. Lord, I pray father that you would give them a word of encouragement, a word of hope and strength and help today in whatever it is that they’re going through or whatever it is that their families or friends are going through. God, help them to see from your perspective today. That’s what we’re asking. We’re asking for your perspective today and we’re gonna trust you Lord, speak through me as your servant today and we’re looking forward to what you have for us in jesus name. So we’re gonna go ahead and get your bibles because we’re gonna go ahead and get started. I want to begin with one of my life versus this is first Thessalonians 5 18, First Thessalonians 5 18. And it says we give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for us in christ jesus. So God says he wants us to give thanks in all. Can you circle that in your bible? That word all because that means everything going on, not just the good things, but everything going on? And so he’s asking us to bow our heads and trust him with those things that are really difficult. I always think of someone 39, verse 16, someone 39 is just a precious psalm to me. And verse 16 says that all of our days, your day, my day. All of our days are already written in God’s book before one of them came to be. I just can’t even imagine what the fullness of that means. That I don’t have to worry about the things that are going on, the hard things, the tsunamis that are coming over me. Why? Because it’s already written in God’s book. He knows about it. He cares about it. And oh, how he loves us. So I want to share a story uh of cancer, my gift, which is how I get there. And it started, john and I, my wonderful husband and I had been married for just one year and I wasn’t feeling good and I grew up in a family you didn’t go to the doctor for every little thing and I had a cold that was just lingering and wouldn’t go away and Sean says you need to just go to the doctor and being obedient wife. I actually did go to the doctor. I brought a friend with me to the doctor which is very uncharacteristic of me and this gal that I brought with me, she was more of an acquaintance than a friend. But we drove together, we get to the doctor’s office and I go in and the poor waiting room is full. I felt so bad for my friend who is going to be sitting out there with all the germs and everything and so she was a gracious gal. Just gracious to have come with me. And uh you know I think about this is all the fingerprints of God in our life as we know from those scriptures. He’s orchestrating our lives. And so I have to say it wasn’t an accident that she came with me that God put it on my heart to invite her and that she said yes the bible says that God um he moves kings hearts like a watercourse, it says in proverbs so he is able to move people’s hearts to do what he wants them to do and I would say that’s a situation of this. So I get to the doctor and I go in it’s a female doctor. I go in and tell her I have this cold and my husband wanted me to come to the doctor. So here I am and she says oh you probably have this virus that’s going around. So I’m going to um do a chest x ray on you because I didn’t do it with the gal the day before and she ended up having pneumonia. I’m like okay well I had I’m you know I’m 23 years old. I’m like I have never had a chest X ray but if you think I need to have one I’ll have one. And so she took me down the hall and they did this chest x ray and um I waited and I went back in the room and waited while she got the results and the results came back and she comes in and she says well Cindy you don’t have pneumonia. I’m like oh great. You know I’m like ready to go home now. And she goes but I found something and I’m like what do you mean? You found something? And she said well I found a mass in your chest and I’m like I mean that just hearing that totally freaked me out because I’ve always been healthy and I’m young and you don’t when you’re young you don’t ever think about being sick. And so I’m like what are you talking about a mass in my chest. And she said, well, that’s what we’re seeing here. And, and so I ask questions like I always do. I said, well, how big is it? And she gave me some number that I didn’t understand because it was in centimeters or something. And I said, well, how big is that? And she goes, well about the size of a deluxe grape fruit. And that’s when my meltdown began. And I did not, I grew up going to church with my grandmother. So we’d have a fun bus ride and then we go to church and, and the church, I grew up in, um, you went to confession. And so, and I even went to um, the, the religious grade school and we went to church every day, we went to confession often. In fact, we, we would joke around about it. We’d say, you know, so if you are, if you were raised in this denomination, you’ll understand, they’ll say, you go into the confessional and the father is there and he says, you know, it says a few things to you and you say, well, my last confession was, and then you rattle things off like I lied to my mom two days ago. You don’t, you’re not really believing that you did that. You just know the language that you need to say, which is, so I felt now I would call myself just a pharisee, because I was just doing what the religious people told me to do, there was no relationship in that. And so now I’m older, I’m not even going to church, you know, not even practicing and I have this deluxe grapefruit sitting in my chest, wrapped around my heart and my lungs and I got off the table and she couldn’t tell me if I was going to die in the next minute and that was, I was totally freaked out and I’m so grateful that I had this acquaintance with me because she ended up driving me home that day and I remember getting home thinking what my, my world had just been rocked, I didn’t know what to do. And interestingly, john and I had visited a different church down in the new state that we were living in and uh one of his friends from work had invited us and so we went to this church maybe about three weeks before this, we go to this church and they’re talking about giving money, they want you to give money. And I’m like, john and I are thinking we’re not going back there and they’re just talking about giving money to the church and we just didn’t know, we just didn’t know well now I have this situation going on in my life and it’s a little different. So I remember I had to wait a week before I could go in for a special scan to find out what the plan was gonna be and what I had. And during that week I had met a gal and we, a friend of mine, she was a true friend, her name was carol and she had a Time magazine article. And in there she was reading something called Hodgkin’s Disease. And as she read about it, I had every symptom of that disease. Now, you know how we can conjure things up in our minds. And so I didn’t know what I was doing, but some of the symptoms were like night sweats. And I remember sweating in the night so badly that I would change my clothes, but you attach that to other things like, you know, it’s too hot in the apartment or whatever. And uh the other thing was itching, intense itching. I thought I was just allergic to my soap. I even went into a dermatologist saying, I think I’m allergic to my soap because I had this itching and that was six months earlier, but nobody had caught it. Why? Because God is in charge of all the minutes of all the hours of our lives. And he has a plan and a purpose even in disease, even in hard things. And so I the I had tipped myself off to this idea from that Time magazine article that I might have this disease. So I called my by then I had had the cat scan and the goal was to open up my breastbone, you know, saw open my breastbone and peel off this tumor that’s wrapped around my heart and my lungs like an orange, like you would peel an orange is how it was explained to me. They would put me on a heart machine and a lung machine. I was blessed enough to have a famous heart surgeon doing it. He does heart transplants. This was a big surgery they were going to be doing and just scare to death. Maybe you can appreciate this. You know, maybe you’re walking through hard things or you have a family member who’s walking through hard things and it is scary. It can be so scary. And so I had no faith to draw from. I had nothing to cling to To get my help from. You know, as someone 21 says, I’ve been memorizing it. You know, I look to the mountains and there’s beautiful mountains where I am right now. I look to the mountains, where does my help come from? My help comes from maker of Heaven and Earth. He’s not going to let your foot slip. The bible says he who watches over you will not let your foot slip. And I didn’t know this when I was going through that. And which is why I’m so grateful today to be able to share some of this story and the life giving power that we have in knowing jesus as our savior grabbing a hold of him in our lives. So they give me this information. I go into my heart transplant doctor and I tell him he thinks it’s not cancerous. And you know, because they have this beautiful plan. He said to me, when I went in, I said, oh, I have all of these symptoms. And he said, Cindy people who have cancer have a look about them. That’s really, he told me that and you don’t have that look. And I’m like, okay, all right. So you’ve comforted me. It was a comfort to me. And so I got ready for my surgery. And so I go in for my surgery. I remember the night before. I will never forget it. Um, there’s a there was a big, huge clock on the wall and you know, a tick tock clock. And it was Tiktok Tiktok and I was just watching every second every second. It was quite an experience to have. And uh, and I know that the Lord was already bringing people. I just didn’t have eyes at the time. It wasn’t the time for me to see those people yet. He’s got a plan. He knows his plan. He’s in all the details, but it wasn’t time for me to know that. So, I was left with my self, my wits end self. I’m gonna call it. And so the next day when I was went in for surgery, I had tipped that dr off instead of opening up my breastbone to do the work they were gonna do. They went in through my rib cage, did a biopsy while I was on the table, found out I had Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes closed me up. And that saved my life because they could start chemotherapy right away. So I was young, you know, newly married john and I had just been married one year when all of this happened. And yeah, I think he moved us away. The Lord had moved us away from our family. So we’re living in a new state, newly married. We had friends that we had met in our apartment complex, but that was it. No church because we weren’t going to church. None of that. We visit that one church. And uh I remember now looking at acts 1726, write this down because it will be so profound in your life. It says God sets the boundaries of where we live. Do you know that it’s already written in God’s book and he has set the boundary of where he brought me to that state to be alone during this time. And oh by the way that state had some of the best doctors in my home country of the USa. And you know, a side note, you know, we met all of these friends and they were so gracious to come and be with us. And so after I was diagnosed with my Hodgkin’s disease, I went in afraid of death. I don’t know about you. But when the rubber hits the road and you get a chance to know that you might be dying it makes, it makes life stop completely and in when it stops like that you can’t help but wonder about the Lord, wonder about God and where you’re going when you die. And so having visited that church, that non denominational church, I told john not my husband, I said honey will you go get us an appointment with that guy that pastor of that church Because I’ve got to find out how to get to heaven because I don’t know in my religion, mother Teresa was like one of the highest people and she did so many things. She laid her life on the line. She went over to the poorest of poor countries to help people and I wasn’t even going to church more or less helping anybody. And so if there was a pendulum of or a stick, a measuring stick, if you could get into heaven, I didn’t know, I didn’t know, let’s say it’s a scale of 1 to 10, 1 and 10. I didn’t know where I would be on that scale because I wasn’t even going to church. And so I had to go find out because the rubber had hit the road for me that I might die. And so john john got me an appointment and we went in to visit this pastor and what an incredible time that was with him. And he actually opened my eyes to see, actually opened the bible For me to, he opened to um, John 316 a very popular passage. Most everybody knows if you are in the states and you go to a football game, they’re usually draping it over the side of the balconies. Uh, and it says for God, so loved this world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. And he made me read it. He opened the bible. He made me read it. I had never done that before. My life. My grandmother would go to church and she wrote her bible, but nobody had ever opened, I didn’t have a bible and nobody ever opened a bible for me. You may be like that today, you may be watching today and nobody has ever opened a bible for you. So today could be your day, my friend, today could be your day just like me back then. And I asked the pastor, I said, well what does that mean? And he says Cindy God loves you so much that he’s had his son die on the cross for your sins. That there’s a chasm between you and God. God being all holy and you’re over here and the sin that came into the world means that you have sin. I said, well, I’m not sure if I have sinned and and he said, well Cindy, have you ever thought poorly about somebody? And I’m like, well yeah, of course everybody has. And he goes, that’s called sin. And the bible says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So everybody on the earth has sinned and so we have no way to get to be with God, who is all holy, he cannot coexist with sin. So he made a way by bringing jesus to die on the cross for all of our sins, but since from yesterday, today and tomorrow that we will ever commit, that’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? And so I said, okay. And I said, well, what about this? Thinking about my scale, what about being a good person because that was important to me? And he said Cindy, it’s not about that Jesus didn’t die for you to be a good person, he died because you were a sinner because all of us are sinners. I said, okay, all right. And so it’s not about how many times I would go to church or if I was kind, those are all great things, but those things can’t get us to heaven, only jesus gets us to heaven. And I’m so thankful today to know that, aren’t you? And um and I have to take you to open your bibles because this is so incredible, we’re going to go to the book of Galatians Galatians, chapter one verse 15, this is about, this is about Saul who becomes paul. Okay, And when you talk about somebody who has sin, we’re gonna say he he would call himself the chief of sinners. Because you know what he did, he would kill christians. That was his goal. Find christians put them in prison or kill them. Okay. And it says in verse 11, I’m gonna start in 11, Galatians, chapter one verse 11. This is paul. I want you to know brothers and sisters that the gospel I preached is not of human origin, I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it. Rather I received it by revelation from jesus christ for you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism. How intensely I persecuted the Church of God and tried to destroy it. That was his goal. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among the people and I was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers ready. This is it verse 15, but when God who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, I was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I might preach him among the gentiles. My immediate response was not to consult any human being. So what he’s saying there is, I killed christians, but before that, when I was in my mother’s womb, Way back here, God had already called me, even though here I was in sin killing christians and then over here what did God do? He saved me? It’s his job, it’s his job to save us. We don’t save ourselves, he saves us. And so today maybe you need saving, maybe you need saving from sin that you’re going through. Maybe you’re struggling with addictions. My friend, you all you can do is go to God and ask him to deliver you. He is the god of deliverance. He will come and deliver you. And I think of those who want so much for their Children to know jesus or their parents to know jesus, do you know my father? It was a professed atheist for many years and he was glad he would say I’m glad that you have religion Cindy but it’s not for me. And then just like I’m doing for you today. Then he turned on the T. V. One day and God spoke to him through Charles Stanley watching a Tv message by Charles Stanley, my dad realized that God was his savior and he came to know him through that that’s available to us. God wants that. That’s why I’m so passionate to be here with you today for that reason. Oh that’s so good. So let me see I want to make sure I cover everything here Proverbs 1691 of my favorite passages, you’re gonna hear a lot about it is we make our plans. So we got all these ideas that we make our plans, but it is God who directs our steps. And so that’s what he does for us. And in my situation I went through my chemotherapy and during that time many came, many came to me and they prayed for me and they encouraged me and I really didn’t understand it all then but I started grabbing hold of it. And this pastor that I went to see about how to get to heaven, who showed me That? It’s not by anything you do in Ephesians 2 10. It says it’s not by works that you’re saved, but by him it’s a gift from God. So it’s not by going to church and all that. That pastor ended up coming to our little apartment John and I and ministering to us and do you for a year. I went through chemotherapy for a year and during that time he would come and visit and people would come and they would bring me bible on tape. I didn’t even have a bible but people were giving me bibles and the whole churches were praying for me. Can you imagine that? And it’s not about me. I was not a great person. It’s God who brings these people for all of us into our lives to help us and that’s what was going on. Those are the fingerprints of God through all of that. So I was so grateful this pastor, Are you ready? This pastor? His son was going through Hodgkin’s disease in another state. And he couldn’t be with him. But he could be with me. Imagine that. Just imagine that that’s how detailed God is when he calls us when and sometimes those things that he calls us to are really difficult like cancer. And that’s why I call cancer a gift. Why? Because it brought me my salvation. It brought me to know that pearl of great prize, the one that you sell everything to have because it’s so worth it. And that’s what I want for all of us. And if you already know him but it’s just you don’t know him well. Get into knowing him so well that you are strengthened that your frame is strengthening your like a well watered garden and that whatever you do prosperous like the bible says get into know him that way. Get around people who know him who can help you along your way. I want to pray for us before we end And I want you to be encouraged today in this message? Let God just speak to your soul, write it down and take it with you today. And so dear heavenly father Lord, will you speak to your people today? Will you speak to those who don’t know you that that want to father that are crying out that you are drawing near to yourself right now when you speak to them, will you show them how intimate and real you are with them? Will you show them all of their days are already in the book? They don’t have to be afraid. You never said it was gonna be easy but you said I will be with you all the way. And so help my audience, help myself today to trust you with that truth. And we pray that in jesus name. Thank you so much for watching my show tonight. Look forward to seeing you next time. Hello, my name is Cindy schmidle er and I have something very special that I want to share with you today. This is a book that I’ve written called tragedy turned upside down. This is a book full of hope and help. If you need some strength today, I call it God vitamins if you need some real uh inoculation of the Lord and faith and belief in your life. This book is for you. My readers have said they devour it. They sit in one sitting to finish it. They have laughed, they have cried. Most of them have taken notes on it because there’s so many good foundational truths in it that you will want to write down and keep for the storms of your life mostly. You’re going to take this book and you’ll want to share it with others that are struggling to. So at your earliest convenience, I’d say pick it up, read it, you will be blessed, blessed blessed when you read this and share it with those that are struggling right now. Maybe even if they’re not struggling, somebody who needs to know, maybe they don’t have faith and you want them to have faith. You want them to know who jesus is. This book is for you those words that you you just can’t bring to say to a friend or relative. This book is full of all the things that you had hoped to say to them. So pick it up at your earliest convenience.