Roberta Messner on the End of Her Chronic Pain

Hi Guideposts, I’m Roberta Messner, and I’m from Huntingdon, West Virginia. And I’m here to tell you about probably the most personal story I’ve ever written. It involves the journey that my mother and I took through genetic illness.

It was Mother’s Day and I was a very young teen, and I had planned a wonderful celebration for my mother, and then news at my doctor’s office spoiled everything. I had already had brain surgery for the genetic disorder neurofibromatosis, and I knew that I had some kind of a genetic illness. And he discovered the little genetic mystery, and that was that my mother was the cause of my genetic illness.

That changed everything. All of a sudden, I didn’t have that gratitude for having the best mother in the world. Instead, I was furious. This went on through so many stages of my life. Every time I experienced horrible, agonizing pain, I blamed her.

But then an amazing thing happened. I took care of her during her final days of cancer, and during her last conversation with me, she gave me a promise that when she got to heaven and could take God aside, she was going to talk to him about my agonizing pain, my years of pain.

Well, time went on and nothing happened, and I thought, boy, they sure are taking their time up in heaven. And then one night, I had a dream. Mother appeared to me in that dream and she was on a swing and in her hands were a Bible. She only looked at me and said, “Roberta, read Joel 2:25, and believe!” It was in the Old Testament, and the verse was so perplexing. It said something really off the wall, like I will restore to you the years that the locusts have eaten.

And I thought, that can’t be possible. It’s talking about time, the most important of human commodities, and time, the clock, it can’t be rewound. How could that ever be possible? Was she talking about pain, my pain disappearing?
It wasn’t very long after that that what my mother had promised before she died actually happened. Through a remarkable series of events, I did have my pain relieved. Just total, total absence of physical pain.

That’s been two years now. That was my mothers promise. My mother’s love that reached me from beyond, from heaven, and it gave me a lifeline of hope, the hope that comes that no matter how you’ve suffered, no matter what your genetic illness is, or that of someone you love, that there is always, always the promise of hope.