POPLAR BLUFF – “Stage IV cancer” usually strikes fear into patients’ hearts, but for Debbie Medley, the diagnosis brought about new hope, new life and new purpose.
Medley, a member of Second Baptist Church, Poplar Bluff, has inoperable metastatic breast cancer. There were no tumors, no symptoms and no warnings when her doctor gave her the diagnosis in 2008. The prognosis was that she had 2-4 years to live. But in the five years since then, God has used her health – or lack of it – to renew her faith and bring her to a new level of service for the Kingdom.
For most of her life, Medley was painfully shy introvert. She accepted Jesus as her Savior at nine years old. Her family moved around a lot, before coming to Poplar Bluff when she was a teenager.
“I have never in my life seen such a shy person,” said Saralie Morgan, long-time secretary at Second Baptist. “She wouldn’t speak to a single person, except one young man.”
That one young man, of course, was Richard Medley, Debbie’s eventual husband. They were married at Second Baptist, But her shyness still kept Medley from living the full life God intended and the coupe fell out of church.
“That shyness later escalated into social phobia,” she said. “I was so uncomfortable around people and I turned into a recluse for a lot of years. I just couldn’t cope with anything.”
When their kids were a little older, they attended a larger church in town where Medley was able to blend into the crowd. but when she got her diagnosis, they came back to Second Baptist “because it was home.”
That’s when God began to open Medley up a little bit. The church rallied around her at her darkest hour and her spirit was revived even as her physical body was weakened.
“They loved me, even though I’d never given them anything,” she said. “Since then, the change God has brought to my life and the eternal value of that is worth what I’ve had to go through. For years, I cheated God by not being in service and in that right relationship. I felt such shame. I reaped so much better than I sowed.”
She began spending time in Bible and despite her social anxiety, Medley also got up in front of her church family and to sing on Sunday mornings and play piano.
At 54 years old, Medley also spends weeks working on banners to decorate Second Baptist’s worship center and transformed the stage into a living recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, “The Last Supper.” Then there’s the Vacation Bible School (VBS), where the formerly reclusive Medley turns P.T. Barnum. When LifeWay’s Bible School theme took on New York City, she (along with Richard) turned the church into the Big Apple, complete with a wearable taxi cab costume for Morgan to wear to promote VBS. In 2012, she created a wearable airplane so Morgan could zoom up and down the aisles, and a hangar for the stage. For this last summer, when the VBS theme took an amusement park turn, she built a motorized, rotating Ferris wheel and swings, and made a rollercoaster seat for Morgan, complete with dangling legs.
“God has been so good to me,” Medley said. “He gave me a job to do.”
“The kids just eat it up,” Morgan said. “I think God gave 90 percent of the talent to Debbie Medley, and He divided the other ten percent among the rest of us.”
Regardless of talent, Medley is steadfast that all glory – whether it be for her singing, her testimony of faith amidst trials or her flair for VBS – goes to God.
“It’s not me,” she said, “It’s the change that God made in my life. It’s His direction, where He put me, and the things He gave me to do.”
Medley is not cured and still faces a difficult prognosis, though she is still able to be active and outwardly looks healthy. Medley said chemo was able to “beat it back, but once you have metastatic cancer, you always have metastatic cancer.” A scan this January showed some new lesions, but they were completely gone at a second scan in July.
“Sometimes we can tell she is having a bad day,” Morgan said, “but certainly not because she tells us or complains. She is an amazing woman with an amazing testimony. She is a constant reminder of how God is always working in our lives no matter how difficult and painful that life is.”
One more reminder: the VBS in which Medley played so large a role this summer was used by God when he worked in her 13-year-old granddaughter’s life as she accepted Christ.
“[If not for the cancer diagnosis], I wouldn’t have made the changes. I wouldn’t be serving the Lord and He wouldn’t’ be my focus,” Medley said. “God took the circumstances and made them work for my good. If I had the opportunity to say ‘I don’t want this, take it away,’ I don’t think I could say that.”