Blue Bryan, lead pastor of Purpose Church in Hoschton, and his wife Heather have been walking through a difficult season the past two years as Heather battles Erdheim-Chester disease, a rare blood cancer that is incurable, but treatable.
The road has included several treatments, hospitalizations, a brain biopsy, and an 11-month clinical trial that now takes them to the University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital several days each month.
Heather said the Lord has been teaching her in the middle of this valley.
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“I know this is a valley that I am in. I feel like I’m still in the trenches of what I’m learning from this experience and what the Lord is teaching me,” Heather said. “I feel like my valley does not determine the goodness of God, but I do feel like the goodness of God completely defines my valley. When it comes to trauma we’ve been through, when it comes to what we’re navigating now, I just feel like that defines it.”
Blue agrees.
“God’s goodness toward us is not determined by the outcome of this situation or any situation,” he said. “I think that’s important for people to get.”
Diagnosis
Heather was diagnosed in late 2023. The disease can attack multiple organs in the body.
“My cancer has mostly attacked my brain,” Heather said. It has also attacked her bones and caused dizziness, breathing issues and balance problems.
After a brain biopsy, the Bryans were able to find treatment options with a leading doctor in this field at UAB. Now they are on an 11-month clinical trial and continue to wait for results.
“We are stuck waiting for the results,” Blue said. “It’s definitely been a hard road.”
At first, Blue struggled to understand what was happening. He wrestled with whether this was spiritual warfare or whether God was somehow being cold.
“I rejected that immediately,” Blue said. “God and his sovereignty have allowed this for His good pleasure, for His glory and for our benefit. I may not understand, but that was much more comforting.”
Blue said there has been peace in knowing that God is with them and that God is at work.
Learning to surrender
Heather said her own struggle centered on the things she felt God had put on her heart to do and why this was the path He had chosen. But through it, she said, the Lord has taught her surrender.
“He doesn’t need me. I’ll do whatever He wants me to do. It brought life to the surface and what I fulfill in this life,” she said. “It made me just really look at death as well and I have a peace about that. Whenever my time comes, I trust the Lord with that. It brought living to a new light and death to a new life.”
This journey has changed their prayer life in a positive way.
“Quite honestly, there’s days that my eyes cannot read. You know, I struggle with double vision and things like that. But I’ve felt an intimacy with God that I’ve never felt before. When it comes to just His presence and His goodness,” Heather said.
Blue said the trial has shifted his own daily prayer life away from simply asking God to do this or that and toward a more intimate relational time with the Lord.
“Not that I don’t cast my cares upon Him, but that’s not the emphasis,” he said.
‘Even if’
Heather is also sharing her story and God’s love in a unique way. She and a friend got matching tattoos on their forearms that read “Even if,” a reference to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the book of Daniel.
“You know, whenever they were being thrown in the fire, they said we know that God can save us, but even if He doesn’t, He is still good and He is still God and He is still the One that we trust,” Heather said. “And I feel like when it comes to my prayer life and when it comes to my walk with the Lord, that really sums it up.”
This current trial comes after years of other hardships for the Bryan family.
The couple has been married 19 years and has three children — Campbell, 16, Piper, 14, and Beckett, 9. They met while attending Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina. After ministry stops in Greenville, South Carolina, and Dobson, North Carolina, they felt called to plant Purpose Church and moved to Hoschton in 2019. It took five years to launch the church because of a series of life-altering events.
‘Trauma after trauma’
In 2019, Campbell and Piper were attacked by rottweilers. In 2020, a masked man attempted to abduct Piper from their backyard. In January 2022, Heather’s mother died from COVID. In August 2022, Beckett was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. In September 2022, Heather’s father survived a heart attack. That fall, Blue’s father suffered a stroke. Then in December, Beckett was hospitalized with E. coli. Through all of that, Purpose Church launched in February 2022.
“Just trauma after trauma,” Heather said, looking back at that sequence of events.
Heather said she learned two things from those years.
“When it says the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, I really felt like we were under attack. I think sometimes bad things just happen. I’m not going to give all the credit to the enemy, but I definitely felt like we were under attack. The second thing I got from that is that the enemy was threatened by what the Lord called us to do. So there was encouragement in that.”
Blue said life had been fairly easy until they began walking in the church planting pathway.
“We definitely have been through eight years of really hard stuff,” he said.
Even in the middle of Heather’s cancer journey, both say those trials have changed how they see Purpose Church.
God is in control
Heather said the repeated trauma taught her that God is in control of whatever happens there.
“When it comes to the outcome, when it comes to how many showed up, we had to surrender,” she noted. “We had to be active in doing what He called us to do.”
Blue said if they had successfully planted the church after only a year in Hoschton, he believes he would have been prideful.
“I think I would have been prideful and been like, ‘I planted a church,’” he said. “With all that’s happened, there is no doubt that God planted Purpose Church, and that God still sustains and has an impact on people’s lives because God is at work.”
Through cancer, trauma, loss and uncertainty, the Bryans say God’s goodness has carried them.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Jason Queen and originally published by the Christian Index.
