When You Don’t Receive the Miracle—But Know You’re Being Sustained

“We’re 37 years into this and we have not received a miraculous healing, but we received a miraculous sustain.”

Nov 05, 2025

Below is part of a conversation with Tom and Mary Belote, a husband and wife who have been faithfully caring for their son, Matthew, for 37 years.

As a toddler, Matthew suffered a life-altering brain injury that left him severely disabled.

Through raw honesty and deep wisdom, Tom and Mary reflect on what it means to trust God one day at a time, to wrestle with His sovereignty, and to overcome guilt by receiving His forgiveness.

If you prefer listening, you can listen to/watch the full conversation on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

Tom: Matthew was born in 1986. And the Army sent us to Africa for a year assignment. We took him over, he was just six months old. And then coming back to the States, we had an assignment in D.C.

And while we were visiting Mary’s family in Wisconsin, Matthew, as an 18-month-old toddler, got into the pills that you take after you leave the Malaria Zone and swallowed enough of them to cause him an anoxic injury – lack of oxygen to the brain – and it shut his heart down.

We rushed him to the ER, and they were able to save him. They worked on it for 45 minutes to try to keep his heart beating while the medicine was trying to shut his heart down.

So that was January 20th, 1988. Early on, the first few days, we didn’t know what was going to happen. They said he could have a full recovery or he could be really brain damaged. But after about five or six days, obviously he was not going to come back around.

So that obviously changed our lives dramatically. So we had a beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed toddler. Now we have someone who’s very severely disabled with very little function.

And we were in crisis for about five years. He cried for two years, literally day and night. Obviously very tough. Mary would just sit with him on the couch all day long trying to move his arms and legs, keep him quiet, keep his blood pressure and his heart rate from elevating. I’d come home from work and take over.

After about three weeks of this, we realized we were not gonna survive. So we asked for help in our church bulletin for some ladies to come help out and one Saturday about six or seven ladies came over to the house, saw Matthew, and were just overwhelmed. They just couldn’t handle it except for one lady. Eleanor came back for 10 years.

Mary: The first time she sat with Matthew for half an hour while we went for a walk. She said it was the longest half hour of her life. She had raised eight children, all that knew the Lord. And so she was no spring chicken, and now she was starting over with this toddler.

By the time our daughter was born, Eleanor was the only one who knew all about Matthew’s care and could take care of him while I was hospitalized for a week before our second child was born.

There was some thought when you end up with a disabled child that there is going to be a flood of people, like social workers and hospital people, that will all rally around you to help figure this out. And that doesn’t happen generally.

And the name Eleanor signifies community. So she and a best friend listened to me while we walked. She had children about the same age as mine and we wore out three strollers walking. She never told me what to do. She just, if anything, showed me the love of the Lord and listened and loved us — loved our whole family.

So it was these two people that represent the community and then the praying community that has sustained us. When this happened, an immediate prayer went out. We were affiliated with ministries and immediate prayer went out for miraculous healing of Matthew. We’re 37 years into this and we have not received a miraculous healing, but we received a miraculous sustain.

How did this impact your relationship with the Lord?

Mary: It’s hard to consolidate 37 years of walking with the Lord. But it’s just one day at a time. I think that’s one of the biggest things. Somewhere along the line, John Piper’s book, Future Grace, so impacted me. He talks about the future being the next minute, the next hour, the next thought.

And when Paul says, ‘My grace is sufficient for you,’ it’s sufficient for that next future, but it might be the next minute.

Like Tom said, I was holding Matthew 16 hours a day. And one time, I was laying on the floor on a mattress next to him at night, trying to keep him comfortable.

And guilt is a powerful, powerful motivator – not always a good motivator, but a powerful motivator – but even motivated by all the guilt that I was feeling and trying to resolve that in my own foolish human way by sacrificing on Matthew’s behalf, I called out, ‘How long can I do this, Lord?’ And it was almost like an audible voice that I heard say, ‘I only asked you to do it today.’

And I want you to know, over 37 years, there have been a lot of times when I have called out the same thing and the answer is always today. I can do it today. I can do this today. Whether it’s wait 12 hours in an emergency room or spend the night in the hospital or call yet another doctor. I can do it today. Today I can do it.

His grace has been sufficient. His grace has been sufficient. When I look back, I would have never had the grace to think of doing this for 37 years.

Tom: So the story is that God has provided. He has been faithful. It’s not been easy, but early on, the ministry that helped us was Joni Eareckson Tada with her family camps. We went to one when Matthew was probably about three or four. And it was very healing, because there were parents there who had similar stories. And that was just a great week. We went back about two years later.

And some of the same people were there again and they said, ‘Hey, Tom and Mary, you guys look like you’re doing better, last time you guys were a mess,’ because we were.

Mary: By that time we already had another toddler in tow. And we have two great kids. We have two great daughters after Matthew. And so I always say they’re great in spite of it all, because we were a mess.

And I don’t know how they turned out so great except that the Lord did it. The Lord brought people into their lives, gave them a heart for fitting in a family that was, you know, trying to figure out what it looked like to serve the Lord.

I can remember sitting very early on in the counselor’s office and being honest and saying, ‘I don’t know if I want to serve this God that can whip the rug out from underneath me and require my obedience.’ I mean, that sentence says so much about where I was in my beliefs about God’s sovereignty, in my beliefs about obedience, in my beliefs about what God is about in our lives.

And to finally find a good counselor, because it took a lot – I rejected a lot of them – but I connected with one, a really godly man who really helped. And then to be honest and say that, and it didn’t blow him out of the water. You know, he didn’t hand me any pat answers. He let me wrestle with all of the things that that one sentence involved.

Tom: So it was hard to reconcile a loving God that would allow this. And I’ve had an anger problem. It runs in my family, but also I own that. But I was very angry for many years by God allowing this. And that was manifested in my job with coworkers and others, even my family. Just the anger was there.

So I’ve taken care of Matthew for many years. And then in 2008, due to some respiratory problems, he got a tracheotomy tube which then required an even higher level of care. Someone must be awake with him 24 hours a day.

And it was like, God, really? Do you really know what’s going on? Do you really know what we can tolerate? You say you won’t give us more than we can handle, well, wake up God, because we’re there.

But thankfully, the state of Maryland gives us 12 hours a night of an LPN. We couldn’t survive otherwise without them. And part of God’s sovereignty is we’ve had the same two nighttime nurses for 17 years. And that’s unheard of in home care.

What have you come to more fully understand about God through all this?

Tom: When you sign up to follow God, watch out. He can take you places you never would have dreamed.

So I think of the line in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when they’re talking about Aslan, and they say, ‘Is he good? Yeah, he’s good, but he’s not safe.’

That line resonates with me because God takes you places and allows things to happen that you could never imagine and certainly never want or never desire.

Mary: We certainly have had to work out a theology of suffering. I think, throughout all time, people ask the question, ‘How can a loving God allow suffering?’

So we had to work out a theology of suffering that we could live with. And in the counseling room when people are undergoing suffering, I am not quick to hand them any kind of theology of suffering because it’s a wrestling with God that they sort of have to figure out on their own.

I was looking at Tom’s notes and one of the things he says in his notes was, ‘God allows suffering for discipline.’ That’s part of the theology. I’m not sure that I would use that terminology anymore. I would say God uses it for our maturity.

I know that as part of the theology of suffering, I have to deal with God’s sovereignty. He is sovereign. He is sovereign over all. And He has a much bigger picture than I do. And so I am not always going to understand His motive at any one snapshot in time.

Through scripture, through prayer, through sitting with Him, I can understand an overarching motivation of His and how He deals with people and His design through time, but at any one given moment, I cannot say this is what God is doing in your life. I hardly understand what He’s doing in my life at any given moment.

So that’s been a big, long work of the Spirit – and good authors, in addition to sitting with scripture.

Tom: And I have to give Mary a lot of credit to be able to overcome the guilt because that was real.

Early on when this was first happening, a Navy chaplain came to our house and he had a disabled child born, I think his fourth or fifth child, but he said to Mary, he said, ‘You can blame yourself the rest of your life and be no good to your family, or you can forgive yourself.’ And obviously that was a long process. So I give her credit. I was not much help with that process. So she worked through that on her own.

Mary: Yeah, that’s another theology that has had to be worked out, the theology of forgiveness. I think initially I was mostly motivated by, I will not let evil win. I will not let evil win. So if what that chaplain said was true — that evil could use this to rob me, Matthew, family, the world of anything that God had intended — I would not let evil win. That was a big motivator for me.

And then, you know, the scripture says there’s a guilt that leads to death and there’s a guilt that leads to life. And trying to sort that out. If I follow this thought, if I follow this too far down the line, is it going to lead to life or is it going to lead to death? And if it’s going to lead to death, then it is evil and I will not let evil win. That was a big motivation and process of taking every thought captive.

And not everybody agrees with my theology of forgiveness. Tom just said that I had to forgive myself. I don’t see that the Bible teaches anything about forgiving self.

So I would say that my journey has been a journey of appropriating the forgiveness of God – that I have had to learn ever more of His love and of His forgiveness and to decide to receive it to the best of my ability. It’s not anything that I give myself. It’s His forgiveness entirely that I have to figure out how to receive, how to appropriate, how to use all that.

And being a counselor you get to attend a lot of good seminars and one was a seminar on forgiveness, and there was one line that I took to substitute for the idea of forgiving myself and that is: I had to come to terms with the truth that I was a person who could act in such a way that this was the result.

And it gave me very specific things to repent of. Not a global, I hurt my son. I didn’t hurt my son. I was negligent in heeding the word about the danger of the medicine and taking that seriously. And that I can repent of. I can’t repent of, well, I’ll never let my children be hurt. That’s not a good guilt, that’s a guilt that leads to death.

And initially, there’s the whole, I was responsible for this, so I’m not worthy to receive that forgiveness. I mean, the obstacles may have looked different than the obstacles look today, but there are always obstacles to receiving the abundant forgiveness, grace, love, and gifts from God. The problem is never in the giving of them. It’s in the receiving of all that we’re given.

Listen to or watch the full conversation on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

Thank you for being here,

Katharine

P.S. Eternal Echoes is free today. But if you’d like to partner with me in passing on faith and wisdom to future generations, I’d be so grateful if you consider supporting my work. I thank you truly, kindly and sincerely.

Eternal Echoes

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?