The ambulance’s engine raced while parked outside waiting for its small passenger. The infant’s twin was moved to the nursery while nurses and doctors worked to save the baby’s life.
“I was born with sacral agenesis,” 32-year-old Betsy Bolick recounts. “It is a rare birth defect. I was missing three parts of my lower sacrum. I had a dysfunctional bladder. My feet were paralyzed. I was born with no calf muscles and my face was misshapened. It was very bad. My doctor feared the worse and insisted on going with me in the ambulance. Unsure I would survive the ride, he did not want me to die alone.”
But Betsy did survive. She testifies that God did not just “allow” her to live or only “extend my life.” She believes God always had a plan. She says it is her calling to be a “megaphone declaring His grace and mercy.”
Betsy stopped counting the surgeries she endured as a child after the number reached ten. Doctors corrected her club foot, performed surgery on her jaw, and worked tirelessly to fix her bladder. Beside her –– supporting her –– have always been her parents, her twin sister, and her other two siblings.
The podcast “It’s a family matter.” is a production of Baptist Children’s Homes and hosted by BCH president/CEO Michael C. Blackwell.
“I spent much of my young childhood believing I was normal,” Bolick tells Blackwell. “I had no idea that I was different. I felt loved. My dad called me his little princess. And I believed it. But one night, my family and I were in Walmart and a little girl tapped me on the shoulder and asked, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I was six years old.”
Today, Bolick stands four feet, eight and a half inches tall. She says that during much of her young life she wondered if God messed up in creating her –– wondering why she was so flawed, deformed, or “belonged in a circus.”
“In my freshman year in high school, a young man said some hurtful words to me and I ran to the bathroom, fell on the floor and cried out to the Lord,” she recalls. “I screamed, ‘What do you want from me? You’ve taken everything. What do you want?’”
She says the voice was clear and the answer was powerful, as her Lord replied, “I want you. I want all of you. I want every piece of you, every part that I’ve created.”
“I realized then that I was not a circus clown or a deformed little girl, but I am the daughter of the King,” she says. “In those moments, I moved from the darkness into a marvelous light.”
Betsy’s mom is a nurse and was her daughter’s full-time caregiver when Betsy was a child. One particularly hard day, grasping for hope, her mom prayed for her two-year-old, “Lord, would you do a great work in Betsy’s life? Will you display your mighty works in her?”
“God began a stirring in my family’s hearts,” Bolick says. “He assured them He had placed a purpose in my life.”
Bolick entered college and was encouraged to be in ministry. “I started asking God, “What do you want to do through me?”
She says the Lord answered, “I made you small but I am more than enough. I want you in your smallness to make me big to a lost and dying world. You will be my megaphone –– a testament to my great and mighty works.”
And so Betsy Bolick began Small Enough Ministries. Her purpose is to love, lead, teach, and equip women to embrace the hope and redemption only found in Jesus.
Her twin sister is an assistant women’s soccer coach at Appalachian University in Boone. She invited Bolick to start a women’s Bible study.
“She told me that she would bring the athletes if I opened the Word,” Bolick remembers. “She said, ‘You know God made you small and that He is enough. Would you make Him big to these women?”
Seven athletes received Christ. Her ministry has extended to conferences and now she is on another college campus teaching women about Jesus.
“He has done so much in my brokenness,” Bolick says fighting back tears. “I’m so grateful that God has allowed me to walk this road because I know Him deeper, I love Him more.”
Listen now:
In January 2020, “It’s a family matter” featured a five-part series with Dr. Gary Chapman –– author of “The Five Love Languages.” The first episode takes a close look at the nature of each love language.
In the second episode, Dr. Chapman and Dr. Blackwell discuss how God connects people through the love language of “quality time.” The third episode explores “acts of service” and the fourth episode covers “the love language of gifts.”
In the final episode with Dr. Chapman, he and Dr Blackwell investigate the importance of physical touch.
To hear the five Chapman episodes or Betsy Bolick’s episodes, visit www.bchblog.org/podcast or go to your favorite podcast provider and subscribe to “It’s a family matter.” There is no cost.