The Tree Branch...

August 4, 2009

Danielle Joyner Kelley

“Jesus turned and saw her. "Take heart, daughter," he said, "your faith has healed you." And the woman was healed from that moment.” Matthew 9:22.

The attempt to come back to what you once were is a journey full of trips and falls. For Rechandle Schofield, known to friends as “Ri”, that journey is life saving. The two-time breast and cervical cancer survivor will tell you today who she credits for her survival no matter how many bad cards the world has dealt her.

At a young age, she remembers dreaming about Jesus. Above the Earth, on a tree branch in the clouds, they would sit and talk. Although she had no knowledge of the crucifixion and resurrection at that time, she remembers seeing holes in His hands and feet, and asking Him about them. “I asked why he was always bleeding he replied, ‘that his blood flows freely to wash away our sins, and that by his stripes we are healed’. As a child that meant nothing to me and yet I understood it as gospel truth, I never questioned it.”

With the faith of a child you would not question it. “He said to them, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.” Mark 10:14-16.
Eventually, the world sought to overshadow her dreams. She found herself drifting further away from the discussions in those dreams and steering into the world’s harsh realities. Her parents divorced, and she spent her teenage years running from her father’s multiple marriages and her mother’s continual unhappiness. The bar scene was a constant for her, while she worked in her father’s bar at the age of fourteen.

She kept craving the love she felt in her dreams as a child. Bound to the world’s reality through others mistakes, in an attempt to escape her miserable existence, she married at eighteen, had one child, and was divorced at the age of twenty-one. Her daughter was taken from her by her ex-husband, and she felt as helpless getting back on her feet as she had felt trying to be a mother.

The world gave her an out, and she married another man in the hopes she would get her daughter back. She eventually succeeded in getting her back, and they all began to attend church. Under her new false hope of the world’s answer to her problem, Ri went on to have two other children with her husband. This hope began to fade as Ri became a victim of physical abuse by her husband which included hospital stays that lasted weeks. She found solace at church, even with abuse looming over her.

Eventually, she sought the help of law enforcement and left. As a single mother of three, she tried to get back up on her feet, only to find herself in another abusive relationship and working as a bartender. Even though she slipped backward, Ri knows now that God had not given up on her. “Although I was no longer walking with the Lord he still walked with me. He sent people into the bar that were broken and came to drown their sorrows in alcohol and my spirit would see this, and I would end up witnessing to them telling them about Jesus and how he wanted to save them.” She knew she needed to get away from this lifestyle, but did not know how.

At the time she was facing a court battle by the state over her children due to her boyfriend’s abuse, and she found out she had breast cancer. Her diagnosis only fueled the battle when the court questioned whether she could take care of her children due to her illness. She had to have partial bi-lateral mastectomies and chemotherapy.

Realizing what all the world had put upon her, she went back to her conversations on that tree branch, and asked for God’s guidance. She was cleared of cancer, and met her current husband in 2003, after the death of her father, only to find out in 2005 that her cancer had returned more volatile than ever. The doctors told her she would not live. Later, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. By this point she had a double mastectomy and had ports in her breasts and stomach for chemotherapy for both her breast and cervical cancer.

Upon seeing her first grandchild, Ri fought back. The ideas of innocence, purity, and being untainted by the world overcame her. After so many falls due to not trusting in God, she was not willing to leave this chance behind. That was over three years ago.

Today, Ri will tell you what an important role God plays in her life. She is an active church member, wife, and mother who still experiences life’s battles. However, she knows the biggest battle comes when you stop the conversation that she had on that tree branch as a child. Remembering what Jesus told her, she will tell you today, “Through my closeness to death I found life, and that to me is so symbolic to Jesus dying for our sins so that we may have eternal life. It took death to set free my life.”

Freedom to know that her tree branch never broke while the world was yanking on it, and freedom to know that although the conversation may have paused due to the world’s shaking of the tree, the person she was talking to stayed beside her all along.

And most importantly it is a freedom that not until facing death in adult years, did she know how to have faith like a child once again.

That is the faith that can overcome all….