Today we’d like to introduce you to Jodi Tomlinson.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Have you heard the phrase: “When it rains, it pours?” Well, this is a story about just that. About the deluges of life. It’s a story about a girl and a boy who fell in love and lived happily ever after … until they didn’t … and then did again. The process happened over and over as it does in all of our lives, because we’re human and this world is tragically fallen. It’s a story of a Savior that saves simply because He’s the saving kind; who loves merely because He’s the loving kind. A story about a God that never lets His children drown in the downpours of life. This is God’s story. The one about how He saved this boy and this girl over and over again … the story about how He kept them from drowning when life became a tidal wave.
I’ll start when we first landed in Jacksonville. Fourteen years ago, we packed our bags and moved to the first coast to plant a church. I say planted because we are just a small seed in what Jesus started years ago. Our church’s name is Destiny; we have been mobile all of her life. We were youth pastors for 15 years before, so we weren’t new to ministry. We love ministry and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. My husband started an SEO business to support us while we grew our church. His business has continued to help support us.
We spent almost a decade at a pleasant pace of loving our people, our three girls, and what we do. During the day, I was homeschooling and administrating the church while my husband was running his business. Our flexible schedule allowed us to do it all and take many beach and Disney days too. When we turned 40, all that could be tested in us … was. One difficult situation after another pushed us to our limits. The ebb and flow of it lasted nearly seven years.
Many details are just too personal to share but raining and pouring took on a whole new meaning. I mean, we’d known difficulty … a lot of difficulty in our lives. I kind of thought we were moving on to greener pastures, but life doesn’t really work that way … not like the happy ending of a Hallmark movie. If it did, we’d probably stop growing.
At the height of our difficulty was a health crisis. I had been dealing with an eye condition for about 6 years. It started right about the time all of our troubles did … a dreadfully pesky thing that just wouldn’t go away. It would look like pink eye but hurt like crazy and stay for at least two weeks when it flared. I saw about a dozen doctors over the first five years without any diagnosis. The doctors just didn’t know what to do with me. I finally found a doctor who diagnosed my condition as an autoimmune eye disease. I began a nine-month course of high-powered medications to stop the pain and hopefully remedy the source of the inflammation. Unfortunately, none of the medications worked but instead wore down my energy and immune system.
Around the same time I received my diagnosis, my husband, Chris, started having some neurological problems. In the summer of 2021, he blacked out and ended up in the ER. Over the next year, he progressively got worse. He started having difficulty with word finding, reading, brain fog, and comprehension. The moment it became undeniable was when Chris officiated a wedding for a dear friend. He was reading his message word-for-word but stumbled through the whole thing. My oldest daughter and our friends noticed that something wasn’t right. He had another wedding to perform two weeks later, and it nearly did us in. Once the wedding was over, we sat in our car for what seemed like hours and decided Chris wouldn’t do anything else outside of preaching on Sunday mornings until we could find out what was wrong.
The next time he was scheduled to speak at Destiny, the sermon preparation was unbearable. We decided that Chris would stop preaching too, and I would step up to take his place. Chris and I have always copastored, so the shift was warmly received. Our church was understanding and supportive, but that Sunday, Chris was overcome with debilitating anxiety. He was struggling to keep moving forward. We went back to Chris’ doctor again trying to get help and still weren’t getting any answers or help. The doctor’s dismissive recommendation was speech therapy. We convinced him to do another MRI.
In the middle of all this, my rheumatologist had been sending me for test after test trying to find the root of my inflammation. I did a series of three chest scans. The first showed a shadow. My doctor thought it was probably nothing but wanted to be certain, so he sent me in for another scan. The second test came back confirming that something was indeed there. So, the doctor sent me in for a PET scan.
Two days before Christmas, my rheumatologist called to say that my scan read: “consistent with lymphoma.” He encouraged me that he didn’t agree with the technician’s findings but that a biopsy was necessary. Since it was Christmas, all of that had to wait until the holiday was over. It goes without saying that it was a very hard Christmas. Just after Christmas, we called our good friend who was a surgeon at Mayo. We read the scan to him, and he echoed what the rheumatologist told us. He didn’t think it was cancer. He had me scheduled in his office the next week. The night before my appointment with him, we still didn’t even know what he did for sure, so we googled him and found out that he wasn’t just getting me in the door, he was the exact doctor I needed to see. He scheduled me for a biopsy the day after my appointment.
We found out that I had a rare tumor that grows on a nerve called a Schwannoma. My tumor was growing on my vagus nerve. The vagus nerve reaches from the neck to the stomach. It regulates many things in the body, and it also has many other nerves attached to it. Mine was near my vocal nerves. We found out my results on a Tuesday, and surgery was scheduled for that Friday.
During all of this, Chris was getting worse every day. He had confusion and difficulty with decision making. He was living with a flood of anxiety, and he had even stopped driving. On Wednesday, two days before my surgery, he went for his MRI. When the MRI was over, He asked for a copy. Chris looked at the technician’s computer monitor and saw the image of a brain that caused him to think, “Wow, that brain is seriously messed up.” A friend immediately drove Chris and his copy of the MRI to the neurologist. Chris told the doctor that he was scared, and his exact words were: “It would scare me to death too.” When Chris asked what it was, the doctor replied, “Probably cancer.” The doctor told Chris that he had a massive tumor on his brain that needed to be removed as soon as possible. He then said his process of referrals would take about three months and that if Chris had a friend at Mayo, now was the time to call him.
Chris got home and I called our friend at Mayo with Chris’ results. I read Chris’ MRI notes to him. His response was sure and steady: “Nothing has changed. God is still faithful. Let me make some phone calls.” The news sent shockwaves throughout our family and friends for a second time. Our children were numb when we sat them down to discuss the possibility of cancer for the second time in a matter of weeks.
Our friend at Mayo connected Chris with a neurosurgeon. We got a phone call from his nurse to set up Chris’ first appointment while we were in one of my pre-op appointments on Thursday. The first available appointment was the next day, on the day of my surgery. So, after Chris kissed me goodbye in the surgery waiting room, one of our friends, who is a nurse, walked him to his appointment in another building.
After surgery, my voice was a whisper. I knew vocal damage was a possibility, but I hadn’t had time to prepare for it. My doctor did a great job removing the tumor, but he had to shave a little of the vagus nerve to get all of it. The vocal nerves run off of the vagus nerve. As a result, I had nerve damage.
I went into surgery on Friday morning. When I came out, Chris was already scheduled for brain surgery the following Friday. The day before, he did some physiological testing that lasted hours. It almost broke him. He called crying. He couldn’t tell them the difference in a dime and a nickel. He came home broken and crashed into bed.
One week after my own surgery, my mom drove our daughter and me to the hospital to check Chris in for his surgery. Chris’ surgery was successful. Actually, calling it a success was an understatement. Chris had a nurse that said his results were nearly miraculous. Chris came out of surgery with more clarity than he’d had in a long time, thanks to the surgery and the steroids. His tumor and cyst surrounding it were the size of a racquetball. One doctor said he could have had as little as three months to live. We got the results not long after that his tumor was also benign.
While Chris’s surgery had immediate positive results, mine did not. My recovery was long and hard. I couldn’t be heard in a noisy room. I couldn’t teach a whole lesson to my daughter. I couldn’t order at a drive through. I couldn’t make phone calls. I can’t talk to my grandma. I didn’t have the breath to read a whole book to my children. I couldn’t sing, which was my longest earthly passion. I started losing my hair, not because of cancer but from the anesthesia of multiple procedures. The night it started coming out in handfuls was a difficult night. The trauma of it all came crashing down on me. Life had been heavy. My body was not recovering well from surgery. My breathing was labored. The inflammation in my eyes, which led the doctors to first find my tumor, was resurfacing. I felt like I was loosing the battle. But today, I can confidently say that the enemy of our souls is a liar and no matter how dark it seems, he does not get the final word. He is not creative. He just speaks lies and then he speaks them over and over again. He preys on our fears, but if we stand strong in the Lord, he does not get to win. That was one of the hardest, darkest seasons of my life but God brought me out stronger than I was before.
I spent almost three years in and out of the hospital. I had around 11 procedures, ending with a thyroplasty to place an implant next to my paralyzed vocal cord. The full recovery took some time, but my voice landed in a much better place. I sounded like me again. I could resume teaching. I could take my place back in our church services, and on the heels of my recovery, we finally purchased a piece of property for our church. As I write, ground is breaking on our property. A chapter of difficulty is ending. None of it ended quite the way we intended or maybe even hoped, but it has ended in a good place. We are alive to parent, to pastor, and to love. Our children still have us. We can still fulfill our destiny. What God has done inside of us in the process has been incredibly miraculous. We are better for the journey and excited for what is to come for us, for our business, and for Destiny.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been a challenge to keep our joy and still lead our children, our church, and our business. Grieving the loss of my voice was a huge obstacle for me. It took a long time to process the loss.
What’s next?
We are in the process of building a building for our church. It will enable us to do ministry on a much bigger scale. We plan on having more programs for children and the community.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mysimpledevotion.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tomlinson.jodi/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mysimpledevotion/
