The Needle Bent but Her Faith Didn’t
I still remember the day I asked Tammy to marry me on her 16th birthday. Looking back, I realize how bold (maybe even crazy) it was for a teenage boy to walk into her father’s house and ask for her hand in marriage. His answer came back sharp and decisive: “Absolutely not!”
But I couldn’t shake the conviction that Tammy and I were meant to be together. At that time, she was in the hospital facing exploratory surgery, the beginning of what we would later learn was stage-four cancer. Still, I pressed on. I asked her father again. And again. Finally, frustrated, he blurted out words that cut deep: “She is dying. You’re asking her to marry you out of charity, and it’s not right to give her false hope.”
I looked him in the eye and answered, “Tammy is not going to die. She will live. We will be married. And you have no right to take away anything that brings her hope.” After a long silence, he reluctantly gave me permission.
When I stepped into Tammy’s hospital room, I carried both excitement and fear in my chest. She had just undergone surgery and the pain was etched into her smile. Yet, when I asked her to marry me, she whispered the word that changed everything: “Yes.”
That yes transformed me. The boy many knew as “Fast Eddie” quickly gave way to a steadier, more serious young man. For nine months, Tammy endured 89 full-body radiation treatments. I watched her hair fall out, her skin burn, her strength fade but her spirit never wavered.
Two things carried us through that season:
1. The steady encouragement of my parents, Ed and Joyce Windsor. They would often stop whatever they were doing, look us in the eye, and remind us: “God can be trusted. Stay in faith that’s your part. The rest is up to Him.”
2. The Word of God. Someone had given Tammy cassette tapes of Kenneth Hagin reading every healing scripture in the Bible. We listened until the words were burned into our hearts and until the tapes themselves wore out.
Even now, 43 years later, I shake my head in amazement at Tammy’s courage. Imagine this: a sixteen-year-old girl, skin burned from radiation, often sick to her stomach, driving herself thirty minutes each way to treatments. Some days she would have to pull over to vomit on the side of the road before getting back behind the wheel. That kind of strength doesn’t come from willpower alone it comes from God.
In the middle of it all, my father challenged me: “Son, she said yes. So what’s next? Where will you live? How will you provide for her?”
Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it. My eyes fell on my grandparents’ abandoned homestead house condemned, broken windows, and sloping floors that sank fifteen inches from one end to the other. Most people saw a lost cause. I saw a future.
For six months, I split my time: four days a week cutting and delivering 150 cords of firewood to earn money, and three days a week rebuilding that house. I jacked it up with 20 enormous jacks, replaced the foundation, rebuilt the walls, and brought it back to life. It was grueling, dangerous work at one point the fireplaces collapsed around me, bricks tumbling like hail but I was determined.
By fall, Tammy had completed her radiation, and I had completed our home. Together, we looked toward our wedding day: December 12, 1980.
But one week before the wedding, the doctors called Tammy back in. They feared the cancer might have returned. She endured another round of painful tests: liver biopsies, bone marrow testing. I will never forget that day. As the doctor pushed the needle into Tammy’s back, it bent. She still says, more than four decades later, it was the most painful moment of her life.
And yet two days before our wedding, Tammy walked out of the hospital with the sweetest words we could have heard: “Cancer free.”
Our wedding day was both fragile and beautiful. Tammy was weak, but her yes was stronger than ever. Together we walked into a future that, at times, looked impossible. But today, looking back over 43 years of marriage, I can say this with confidence:
Her yes wasn’t just a promise to me. It was a declaration of faith that God’s story for us was not finished.
And when I drive past that old ranch house, restored and redeemed, I can’t help but think it’s just like our story. What looked broken, condemned, and hopeless was rebuilt by love, faith, and the God who always keeps His promises.
Reflection Question: What “condemned house” in your life needs the courage of a yes, the strength of faith, and the touch of God’s restoring hand?