Youth and Discipleship Family Shares Testimony
Rachael Ferrell was in the Intensive Care Unit, fighting for her life in Tennessee. Her dad, Chuck, was at Frontier Winterfest, praying in a Texas hotel room. Her mom, Sherry, was interceding in her living room back home in New Mexico.
By David White
From these three distant locations, the Ferrell family saw God do an amazing miracle that saved Rachael’s life and filled her with a sense of newfound purpose as a voice of the Jeremiah Generation.
“This,” Sherry Ferrell said, “is a divine miracle of God.”
Chuck and Sherry are the Youth & Discipleship Directors for the New Mexico Church of God. Rachael is a freshman at Lee University.
On Jan. 25, their world was tossed upside down when Rachael was taken to a local hospital with some diabetic complications that went from concerning to life-threatening in a matter of moments.
Rachael’s sugar level hit 15, low enough to put her on the verge of a hypoglycemic coma.
“My biggest fear was that she would go to sleep and never wake up,” Sherry said.
The Ferrells
For a moment, doctors struggled to find a pulse.
“She wasn’t just at death’s door,” Chuck said. “She was knocking on it.”
All along, Rachael had no idea how she went from attending class at Lee University on a Thursday morning to being rushed to an emergency room in nearby Chattanooga with her parents a thousand miles away.
“It happened so quick, and so sudden,” Rachael said. “That night I realized what God was doing with my life, why he let me have diabetes. That night, He gave me a voice.”
A Jeremiah Generation voice, at that, one with a profound testimony of a genuine miracle of how God rose her from an ICU bed and sent her back to her dorm room in two days’ time.
Within a week, Rachael was ready to head back to her business administration classes, ready to tell the world her miracle story.
“I always felt God gave me a leadership role,” Rachael said. “I believe God wants me to help anyone who ever experiences the question, ‘Why does God let this happen?’
“I’m a living miracle. I can stand up and say that He did this for me. He could have taken me in a split moment but He kept me here because I have a purpose. He’s using a negative thing for a positive outcome.”
Rewind to January 25.
Chuck Ferrell was in Arlington, Texas on the eve of Frontier Winterfest, ready to serve an arena packed with teenagers and young adult leaders.
The Ferrells knew their youngest daughter was headed to the hospital because her sugar levels were off, but that’s happened before since she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 15.
They’d run some tests, level things out and send her home. Maybe she was dehydrated. Perhaps she had a virus. All seemed normal enough to know their middle child, Stephanie, would keep them posted.
“I was at a dinner for the steering committee when I got a text from my oldest daughter,” Chuck said. “All it said was ‘ICU.’ I went straight to my hotel room and started to pray because I didn’t know what to do.”
Sherry was at their New Mexico home when she got the same text. She can monitor her daughter’s sugar levels on a phone app, and watched her sugar plummet from 200 to 40 in half an hour’s time. The alarm on her app would go off every time the levels got dangerously low. It kept going off.
Then, nothing. The machine was disconnected at the hospital. Sherry didn’t know why, or what that meant. All she knew was she was all alone and in the dark about her baby girl.
“That night, I just sat in the family room, praying,” Sherry said. “They took the monitors off of her, and it just says ‘No Data.’
“It was toward the middle of the night. I said, ‘Lord, you know when she was born, we gave her to you. She’s yours. I can’t fix her.’ I came to that point where you just hand it over to God. It was right about that time, we got the first text that her sugar was coming up and stabilizing.”
Prayer worked. Because, of course it did.
Rachael can barely remember anything once her sugar levels dipped below 40. She knows her sister was by her side first, and then her brother Ryan. She remembers waking up to a nurse who said it was so nice to talk to her.
When Rachael asked why, the nurse said it’s because most patients who went through this sort of thing simply weren’t responsive.
“She should be, by all clinical standards, either dead or in a coma as a vegetable,” Chuck said.
She should be. God felt otherwise.
“If I didn’t have my faith so strong in the Lord,” Rachael said, “I don’t know where I’d be right now. We just had to trust God that He was going to get us through.”
— David White is the Youth and Discipleship Director for the California-Nevada Church of God. He can be reached at [email protected]
