Embracing Change: God’s Plan; Not Ours
Living the Dream
Frank Angotti served as a helicopter pilot and aircraft commander in Vietnam before attending Southeastern Oklahoma State University where he met his wife Karen in 1976. The two were engaged four months later. Frank’s career as a pilot enabled Karen to do what she loved—raise a family. First came Lisa Marie in 1978, followed by sons David and Jonathan.
In 1990, when FedEx moved the Angottis from San Jose, California, to Memphis, Tennessee, the children were ages 12, 10, and 5. The family settled on a 10-acre property in a suburb east of downtown.
In a book Karen wrote about her family,1 Karen described their life as idyllic: “Vivid, verdant greens brush breathtakingly across an azure sky. …My gaze shifts downward to the clamor of young voices at the base of the trees. Faces flushed and gleaming, three blond-haired, blue-eyed munchkins are spinning and twirling on a rope swing hanging from the trees.”
“When we came here, we had this little piece of heaven on earth,” Frank says today. “We had a barn, and we were planning to buy Lisa Marie a horse for her 13th birthday.”
Life-Changing Moments
All the Angottis were bitten that summer by tiny ticks the size of the head of a pin. As Karen wrote, the children explored the forest “with relish—capturing frogs, turtles, and insects, fishing in the pond, and searching furiously for Civil War bullets and treasure.”
Only 5-year-old Jonathan escaped the symptoms of Lyme disease brought on by those ticks. Everyone else became ill that fall and winter: first David, who recovered after a months-long search for a diagnosis and treatment, then Frank and Karen, who recovered relatively quickly, and finally Lisa Marie, who did not respond well at all, even after FedEx flew her and her family via air ambulance to a specialty hospital in New Jersey.
While she made some strides forward during the first few years of treatment, allowing her to complete high school and one semester of college, by the time she was not-quite 19, her symptoms forced her to bed permanently.
Her case is an anomaly. Most people with such severe symptoms do not live. Lisa Marie has lived with extreme pain affecting every square inch of her body for what is now 34 years. And her parents have remained by her side throughout that time.
Life on Mission
Karen Angotti has probably researched Lyme Disease more than any other non-medical professional. She has stopped at nothing to get her daughter the best symptom relief possible. “It’s a disease that is not studied as much as it should be,” she said.
Both parents provide daily physical care to their daughter, along with emotional support to help her through the worst of the pain. It is a level of pain even Frank—who was burned over more than 20% of his body when his aircraft was shot down in Vietnam, and who still suffers from the remnants of Agent Orange exposure—finds difficult to describe.
“I could not have imagined anything worse than Vietnam. But I think the Lord used Vietnam to prepare us for something worse. In family situations, health situations, the men sometimes wimp out. For a Christian man, that’s not an option. People ask me how we do it. It’s not us, but what Christ can do through us. Karen’s ministered to so many people over the phone when they had nowhere else to go. She’s sent out cards by the hundreds to encourage people.”
Lisa Marie, though bedridden, also sends cards, prays for others, encourages her “pain pals” (a private social media group) and writes poetry. Many of her pieces follow the pattern one sees in the Psalms—crying out to God, finding His nearness, and proclaiming His praise in the midst of suffering.
“At one point,” Frank said, “Lisa Marie asked, ‘What purpose am I serving?’ I think about the poetry she’s written and the inspiration she is to anyone who knows her. The things we do for Christ live forever.”
“What we’ve all learned,” Karen said, “is that God is incomparably powerful over all things and promises strength for endurance for all who will wait for Him.”
“I always thought we’d go on mission trips when we got older,” Frank concludes. “You learn to pay attention to where God has you. He has your mission for Him—good works He’s planned for you to do. This life is but a vapor. It’s so short. What matters for eternity is all that matters.”
Read more about Lisa Marie's story from her perspective.
