Charlotte Austin is the programme manager for the Hackney and Islington Mission Project. In this article she reflects on how her type 1 Diabetes has been an important element in shaping her personal faith and God’s call upon her life.
What is type 1 diabetes?
When your body is digesting glucose, small but vital beta cells on your pancreas produce insulin. They keep your body in perfect balance, regulating blood glucose levels when you eat or drink. Only a God of detail could create something so finely tuned.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition where your immune system mistakes the insulin-producing cells on your pancreas for foreign objects and kills them. Glucose sits in the blood without travelling to where it needs to be – to muscles, the brain, and other organs. The body tries to get rid of this excess glucose in other ways, such as by filtering through the kidneys. Effectively, in Type 1 Diabetes, your immune system veers off the path intended for it, which results in a lot of brokenness. Sound familiar?
The main symptoms are the Four Ts: Thirsty (unquenchable), Toilet (passing more urine), Thinner (unexpected weight loss), and Tired (unusually lethargic). As well as these symptoms, my mum also notes that I was extremely hungry, as the food I was eating wasn’t being converted into useable energy.
An introduction to my life
In July 1992, my life and the lives of those around me changed forever. Following months of being unwell, and mum fighting GPs who insisted that she was paranoid, the local pharmacist gave my parents some testing strips and advised them to take me straight to A&E on learning the results. I was 3 years old.
From that day I felt different, and everything in me knew that I was different. What followed in the early years was a life of injections, seizures (from low blood glucose levels), a lot of time in hospital, and an unhealthy relationship with food. At the age of 4, my younger brother found me having a seizure on my bedroom floor. And that was only the beginning.
The guilt that I held from the burden placed on those around me almost cost me my life. A few years later, my dad’s death from renal cancer turned my world upside down again, and a very angry child turned into an increasingly reckless teenager with the weight of the world on her shoulders.
Type 1 diabetes and my faith journey
In October 2016, I had another seizure from low blood glucose levels during the night while living alone where no one could help me. The thoughts that filled my mind after this included “how did I even wake up” and “friends have died this way, what makes me any different”. What followed was a significant time spent fearing death, resulting in sleep anxiety and over-managing my diabetes on a micro level.
What I haven’t mentioned yet is how I inherited my dad’s love of sport, and at this time I was training to be a professional wrestler. To get back into wrestling condition after the seizure, I started doing CrossFit at a new gym in Elephant and Castle, where I accidentally ended up doing CrossFit with pastors and Christians…
The healing curve after this seizure looked a bit like my childhood – excessive control followed by sheer reckless abandon without self-control or a care for my purpose. The world gave me the things to distract me from the pain, but at 3am in a pub in Aldgate, Jesus was reaching for my heart. A conversation with a colleague that night resulted in a visit to a church where my CrossFit friend was a pastor.
Exactly six years after that seizure and after 30 years of living with Type 1 diabetes, I gave my life to Jesus. While I still live with a body that doesn’t produce insulin, I know that my God is a healer in so many ways.
What difference has Jesus made to my life with type 1 diabetes?
One of the hardest things about living with Type 1 diabetes is the decision-making demands –with very fine lines between life and death. What this looks like is obsession with food, extreme control over everything, fear of failure, self-critique when numbers are different than expected, and hyper-independence because no one can understand it like you do.
What Jesus did was take my rollercoaster of chaos that was filled with fear of dying on the one hand and self-destructive behaviour on the other and restored the balance of my life. Proverbs 3:5 says “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” – the more I trust that Jesus is Lord over everything, the more my physical weakness reveals His power, to the praise and glory of His name.
His grace is sufficient for me, even when I don’t have enough grace for myself. For most of my life, Type 1 diabetes has felt like or been labelled as a weakness. But His power is made perfect when I am weak. “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me”.
Jesus changed the way I see my own weakness, which changed the way I see others. I now have the privilege of serving His Kingdom in my role at the Diocese of London.
This article was first shared in the Disability Ministry newsletter. Click here to join the mailing list.
