A Speech by Debby Doyle McCalley

September 2006

To the Sophomore Class of Bishop Chatard High School - Indianapolis, IN

Return to Main Page


Good morning. My name is Debby McCalley. Not too many years ago, … who am I kidding… it was many years ago, I was where you are a sophomore at BCHS, although we just called it Chatard back then. Well, I'm back again today because Mrs. Schaffner asked me to talk to you about life. And mine is the only one I know much about, so here goes.

We usually think of life as the period of time spent on Earth between birth and death. It averages about 25,732 days. Some of the days are better than others. The days are full of trials, successes and failures. Some are lonely, some are sad and some are happy. Each day is a little different than the one before and is shaped by the choices we make.

Some things happen regardless of our choices. When I was a sophomore, just 16 years old, I noticed that I had more trouble walking than my friends; my parents took me to Minnesota to a large hospital called Mayo Clinic over Thanksgiving break to discover why I couldn't walk well or climb stairs. I found out I had a degenerative muscle disease called Muscular Dystrophy. With MD the muscle in your body turns to fat and dies. That means that anything you use your muscles for is something that I would be unable to do in the future. Waking, running, climbing, standing, raising my arms, clapping my hands, lifting, writing, sitting upright, swallowing, breathing, everything uses muscle -even the heart is a muscle. At 16, my future was to be in a wheelchair until I was unable to sit up any longer and then permanently bound to a bed. Imagine how I felt. I always wanted to be a little different than everyone else; you know a little special… But not this different!!! How would you feel if when you got home tonight your parents told you that you had an incurable disease that wouldn't kill you, it would just make the next 60 years of your life painful, frustrating and virtually unbearable? I asked God why, what had I done to deserve this and asked him to take it away. If he answered, I didn't hear it. I couldn't believe that the one life I had been given would be lived as a crippled up person. How could a life like that be worthwhile? What good would I be to anyone? I didn't understand why but I knew that a God who could do that to me wasn't a God I wanted anything to do with.

As the years passed I did the best I could. I graduated from BCHS and went to college at Butler. The doctors didn't think it would be a good idea for me to endure the stress of college but I went anyway. About my sophomore year in college my disease worsened significantly and because I was at a loss about what to do, once again I asked God to take this disease away. I was persistent in my prayers but after about a week I decided God wasn't listening and didn't care about me. I decided I had to somehow deal with this without God.

Life continued, I got married, had two kids and began another phase of my life. Just after Katie was born, my husband decided to leave and get a divorce. Part of the reason he left was because it was too difficult to deal with the effects of this degenerative disease. Once again, this disease was ruining my life. At this point though I realized that it wasn't about me any longer. I had 2 small children to raise … it was about them.

I tried God one more time but this time instead of asking him to take this disease away I asked him for the strength to endure it for the girls's sake. That was it. God helped me. He wasn't going to take this disease away but he was going to help me deal with it. I'd been praying the wrong prayer all these years. I wanted it my way, I wanted the disease gone so instead of submitting to God's will and asking for his help to use the disease for good, I was telling him to fix it my way. How stupid was I? Who did I think I was putting my own desires before God's universal plan? I felt a little better when I remembered that even Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane asked God to remove his sentence to be hung on the cross. Of course for him it only took a second to submit to God's will when in his next breath he said THY WILL BE DONE and it took me half a lifetime, but I finally got there. God's will for me was to be handicapped and like it or not that's how it would be. The choice of how to handle it though was mine.

With God's help, my outlook changed almost immediately and I began reading all I could about God, his will, and his promises. It seems I wasn't worthless after all and God did have a plan for me. I was concentrating so hard on the negative parts of being handicapped, I completely overlooked the positives. Besides good parking spaces and great seats at the Hoosier Dome, I get to see God work through me to help countless numbers of people with their own struggles.

Well you may say, "yeah but what about you in a wheelchair all of the time and missing out on some of the best parts of life?" Be assured God did not forget me or any of us for that matter. Over the years we've heard the phrases "life after death" and "everlasting life" and "living with God for all eternity". I got the general idea that when we died there was supposed to be something more but the details were a little foggy. So I decided to look into the eternal paradise God promised, to find out what it would be like and how I would get there.

The truth is that we control where we go after we die. God offered us a gift of eternal salvation provided that we "confess with our mouths that, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved." Romans 10:9

This means that although we live in this world for a certain number of years, we have the opportunity to spend all of eternity in paradise. A place where according to the Bible:

Return to Main Page