Wendy Larson: with the Lord there are no statistics.

Twenty years after her close call with cancer, 37-year-old Wendy Larson is thankful that she didn't lose the time it takes to graduate from high school, then college, develop a career, fall in love and marry, adopt a baby girl and name her Abby Noel.

Still, Wendy's life story will always be marked by her brush with death and her encounter with a personal God in the midst of it all.

Her first lesson in mortality began during her junior year of high school when mysterious bruises started surfacing in unusual places--on her belly, her thighs, and the backs of her arms. When she received the diagnosis from her doctor--a fast-spreading leukemia--she also discovered the proverbial "peace that passeth understanding" three hours later.

Wendy would need it.

Few 17-year-old Americans alive during the prosperous Reagan era could imagine the hardship to come. Less than 24 hours after hearing the bad news, she checked into the University of Minnesota's hospital in Minneapolis. There, intensive rounds of radiation and chemotherapy sickened her throughout the initial 10-week period. When she could eat, the staff nixed pepper, lettuce, and fruit. Wendy remembers that back then they considered those foods bacteria-laden and an unnecessary health threat.

By the end of the treatment she'd dropped 47 pounds and needed a wheelchair because she was too weak to walk. Her hair fell out in clumps. Her body languished. But her family and her church became bolder in the battle.

A dozen relatives visiting her parents' home for dinner one night called Wendy's room at 11:00 p.m. to see if she was awake. By midnight they had circled her bed and laid their hands on her, bringing her needs before God.

Her church organized a special prayer calendar to assign someone to pray over each of her organs, from her kidneys to her heart.

Get-well cards and notes of encouragement flooded in, and the terribly ill teenager asked for each one to be taped on her hospital walls. "They let me know how much I was loved," she remembers.

However, the very first thing she spotted upon waking from sleep was a strategically placed poster on the wall opposite her bed. It showed a mouse pushing a pink elephant. The poster verbiage recapped the words of Jesus in Matthew 17:20: "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move."

After unleashing the most aggressive treatments on Wendv's cancer, doctors decided to try a bone marrow transplant. Only 100 such procedures had been conducted at the university at that time, and the success rate was extremely low. Larson's brother Scott, then age 15, represented a perfect match.

Before the doctors drew the pint of marrow from the back of the boy's hip, they attacked Wendy's cancer one more time with pills, full-body radiation, and the most intense chemotherapy yet. "It all tries to help your body forget what it was doing before the bone marrow transplant," Wendy explains.

The day of reckoning arrived on October 5, 1984--a date Wendy and her family now celebrate like a birthday. At the time, though, they wondered at the dark red bag of marrow hanging on the 1V drip by Wendy's hospital bed and prayed it would take.

Ultimately, Wendy was left alone with the bag that night, and as usual, the dark, quiet hours proved the toughest. "I think nighttime is the vulnerable time when Satan can really take over," she says. Wendy would think about death and ask all the questions that promised no immediate answers. Would the transplant jump-start her body to produce healthy blood? Would her weakened system accept it?

Besides eyeing the pink elephant across the room, she'd sing during those hours to exercise her faith. Her favorite song, the one she sings after sharing her testimony at schools and churches years after her recovery, was a Sandi Patti solo: "We Shall Behold Him."

Wendy Larson, like all of us, hopes to behold Him someday, as the song says, face-to-face. Until then she has a message for others facing giant trials in their lives. "Take it one day at a time," she advises with a passion born from experience. "And never listen to statistics, because with the Lord there are no statistics."

Pam Mellskog is a freelance writer living in Boulder, Colorado.