The Kind of Miracle I Was Waiting For

By Ayoposi Ojelabi · Published: 12 March 2026

At the beginning of my illness, accepting my condition was one of the hardest things to understand.
Not because I did not believe the diagnosis, but because I thought acceptance meant giving up.

For a long time I believed something else would happen first.

I expected a miracle.

I remember sitting in front of the television watching miracle services, waiting for the moment when the man of God would say, “Stand up,” and I would. That was the kind of miracle I was expecting. Immediate. Visible. Final.

It never happened.

What I Was Waiting For

For years I kept waiting.

Through the steroids that made things worse. Through the IVIG that gave hope and then stopped working. Through the plasma exchange, the Mycophenolate, the cyclophosphamide, the Rituximab. Through the bone marrow transplant and the lung collapse that followed. Through ten months in intensive care across four hospitals. Through alphabet charts and feeding tubes and machines that breathed for me.

Through all of it, some part of me was still waiting for the moment that would change everything at once.

That moment never came.

But something else did.

December 20, 2024

On December 20, 2024, my consultant sat with me and my wife and said the words I had been dreading for months.

They had tried everything medically. There was nothing more they could do.

I had expected that moment to break me.

It did not.

What I felt instead, and I have thought about this carefully many times since, trying to understand it accurately, was peace. And then something that felt like the beginning of a fight rather than the end of one.

Something shifted in that room that I cannot fully explain except to say that when medicine stepped back, something else stepped forward.

I realised later that what had happened was acceptance.

Not surrender. Not giving up. But the moment I finally stopped waiting for something to arrive from outside and started working with what I actually had.

Looking back now, I can see how much energy I spent in the years before that moment resisting the reality of the illness, waiting for a different kind of intervention, measuring every week against the miracle that had not yet come.

But it was not too late. It is never too late for that shift to happen.

What Acceptance Actually Did

Once I stopped fighting the fact of the illness, I had more energy.

Not physical energy. That was still limited. But a different kind. The energy that had been going into resistance and denial became available for something else.

Working with my medical team rather than waiting for them to be overridden by something supernatural.

Noticing small improvements rather than dismissing them because they were not dramatic enough.

Setting realistic goals rather than measuring myself against a version of recovery that was never going to arrive the way I had imagined.

Acceptance did not mean I stopped trying. It meant I could finally try in the right direction.

Acceptance and Recovery Are Not Opposites

For a long time I thought they were. I thought if I accepted the illness I would stop believing in recovery. That accepting limits meant abandoning hope.

What I found was the opposite.

You cannot recover from a condition you are still refusing to acknowledge. Once I stopped using energy to fight the fact of the illness, I had more to direct toward actual improvement.

Acceptance meant recognising where I was.

Recovery meant continuing to move toward where I hoped to be.

These two things support each other. They do not cancel each other out.

What People Said

People said things to me during this period. Some meant well. Some did not fully understand what they were saying. But the message was often the same, that accepting the illness meant I had stopped believing.

Some said I no longer had faith. Some said I was settling. Some thought that if I was not loudly refusing to accept my limits or constantly searching for another cure, I must have given up.

That is not what acceptance is.

Acceptance is not passivity. It is clarity.

Fear says that if you accept your condition, nothing will change. Acceptance says this is my reality today. I am still open to improvement, healing, and even miracles, but I am not going to postpone my life while I wait for a particular kind of change to arrive.

Acceptance does not cancel miracles.

It simply means your life is not on hold while you wait for them.

The Kind of Miracle I Was Waiting For

I still believe miracles exist.

But I understand them differently now.

The miracle I was waiting for, immediate, visible, final, did not come. What came instead was something quieter and harder to name. A consultant saying medicine had run out of answers. A peace that followed where despair should have been. The beginning of a fight I had not known I was capable of starting.

The improvement that followed was not dramatic. It was slow, uneven, and still ongoing. IVIG every two weeks. Small changes that only I can measure. Functions returning gradually to parts of the body that had gone quiet.

But it moved.

And it moved because something in me finally stopped waiting and started working with what was there.

That I have come to believe, was the miracle I was actually waiting for.

It just did not look the way I thought it would.

Further reading and getting in touch

If this piece resonated with you, you may find it helpful to explore more of my writing on recovery, faith, and identity.

You can read more essays on the main Writings page, or spend time with pieces like Recovery Without Performance and How I Continued Writing After CIDP Took the Use of My Hands. If you would like to see the books I have written, you can visit Books by Ayoposi Ojelabi.

If you would like to be in touch or to share a thoughtful response to this essay, you can use the Contact page.