“What If I Die?”

By: Jessica Maner

Have you ever heard the old Rascal Flatt’s song, “Skin”? It talks about a young girl named Sarah Beth, who has cancer. I remember being about 13 or 14 when that song came out, and I would lay awake some nights thinking, “What if I get cancer like Sarah Beth?” Every time I heard that song, my fear of getting sick grew more and more.

When I was even a little younger, I remember hearing the words “spontaneous human combustion,” and I asked an adult what it meant. They said, “Well it means someone can just be sitting there, and they just explode and die.” A lot of kids may not have thought much into it, but I did. I began to think, “What if that happens to me?”

I can remember hearing about car accidents and people passing away, and every time I’d get in a car I would think, “what if we get in a car wreck and die?”

My mind as a child was constantly filled with “what if’s” and “I hope that doesn’t happen to me.”  The only explanations or answers I ever got were things like “God just takes people when he’s ready to have them back in heaven” and “everything happens for a reason, even if we don’t understand it.”

So as I was growing up and trying to understand why things happen, and wishing there was some way I could prevent things like cancer, car accidents, and sickness, I began to accept the fact that we never know when or how God will “call us home,” and I just needed to be ok with that, even if it meant I was going to get cancer and die at the age of 16. I can honestly say I believed every bit of that about God and life, until I was in my twenties and I began to hear about a loving God who actually wants me to be healthy and live a long life.

I remember hearing that God does have a will, and maybe His will for my life wasn’t actually as mysterious and secretive as I’d always believed.

Then I learned something that would forever change my life and my family’s lives. Someone told me there is power in the name of Jesus. That when Jesus was living, He healed people, and when He died for us, He gave us that same authority. Talk about being mind blown. At this point in my life I hadn’t ever really read the Bible for myself, and I had never heard anybody talk about this before, so it was honestly so life changing. From that moment, I began to read the Bible and found scriptures where God promised us protection, health, and life to the full.

Those scriptures came alive in my heart, and my life has never been the same. I began to walk in faith, instead of fear. I began to pray like I didn’t know was possible. I had a little newborn baby at the time, and my husband and I continued to grow our faith and stand on the promises of God, not just for ourselves, but for our son as well. Our little boy is 6 years old now, and when he gets a fever, stomach ache, growing pains, etc., the first thing he knows to do is to pray for healing. He comes to us and asks us to lay hands on him and pray.

As a family, we have been through some hard things. That’s no surprise, because the Bible tells us we will have trials. But the incredible thing is, we’ve gotten through these things, prayed through them together as a family, and my son has gotten to be a part of that. His life will be completely different than mine was as a child, because someone told me the good news.

Someone introduced me to Jesus and encouraged me to find out the truth for myself, about who He is.

It can be intimidating to talk about Jesus in a way that people haven’t heard before. It can be scary. But coming from someone who never wants to imagine my life the way it would be if I hadn’t found Jesus, it’s worth it. It’s worth an awkward conversation. You could potentially be breaking generations of fear, anxiety, sickness, and depression by telling one person who Jesus is and how He changed your life.