By Jasu Diaz –
Born with spinal muscular atrophy, Jamey Carrington lives in a wheelchair.
“In all of my 18 years on this planet, I’ve never walked, I have never fed myself, never bathed
myself,” he says on his YouTube channel. “I don’t know what it’s like to feel the grass below my feet or jump on the trampoline.
“But I believe in my Savior Jesus Christ.”
Jamey found that, contrary to what the devil promised, the pain of being deprived from fun and everyday experiences didn’t heal through Satan’s offerings to anesthetize through porn, marijuana or “crawling in a hole listening to Radiohead.”
“I don’t want to wallow,” he explains. “I want to rejoice.”
Jamey Carrington was born in a Christian home in the Southern United States. His mom noticed he couldn’t sit up at the age when other babies could. He didn’t crawl like other babies; he did Army crawling, using his arms to drag himself forward. She was a nurse and became concerned.
A barrage of tests led Mom and Dad to the doctor who listed off all the possibilities. “Of all the diseases and conditions that your son could have, the worst one is this one,” he said soberly. It was spinal muscular atrophy.
They hadn’t heard of it.
After more tests, the devastating news got delivered. It was spinal muscular atrophy.
“This was one of those things that can either break a family apart or bring a family closer together than ever,” Jamey says. “I’m so thankful that my family did not break apart.”
As he grew up, Jamey didn’t understand: he watched other kids play at the park, climb the jungle gym at school, compete in sports. Why couldn’t he do any of those things? “I would go home to my mom, where I would be crying,” he remembers.
Cynical atheists would use Jamey as a case study to justify abortion: since this life is all there it, quality of life is everything.
But Mom was a Christian, so she put a positive spin on the unfortunate condition.
“My mom said that it was a gift,” he remembers. “That’s what I was raised to believe: it’s a gift. Seems like a pretty crappy gift to me, right?”
The devil fed him lies: God didn’t love him. It was a curse, a deprivation, a limitation. Numb yourself from the painful existence. “Satan said be mad at God because he gave you this,” Jamey says.
“For a large part of my life, I felt like I had no direction, no purpose, like I was aimlessly
wandering trying to find purpose,” he admits. “I felt like in a way my life almost didn’t even
Matter. I mean I couldn’t experience all these amazing things everybody else was experiencing.”
All that was left to him was to mask the pain with the devil’s offerings.
But after a few years, he noticed that those false hopes did nothing to heal the pain.
“I realized that the more I believed those lies, pain didn’t heal away, that pain stuck around and it still ached,” he says. “It still hurt.”
Since his family were believers, he watched Christian videos, and finally a few of them sparked true faith in God. “I finally turned the ear towards God and listened to what he had to say,” Jamey tells. “He said I can give your pain a purpose.
“God can turn anything around.”
Let that sink in. Look who’s saying it.
“If I didn’t have God, I don’t know where I’d be,” Jamey says. “I’d probably still be addicted to porn. I’d probably want to unalive myself. I’d probably want to crawl in the hole and lay there and listen to Radiohead for the rest of my life. I don’t want to do that, even though I like Radiohead.
“I don’t want to wallow,” he adds. “I want to rejoice.”
