At a camp for young cancer survivors, a fellow camper asked Isaac Newberry a question out of plain curiosity: “What’s wrong with your face?”

Newberry, a graduate student, has an asymmetry in his skull, a side effect of the radiation he received as an infant. 

He went home and asked his parents what the boy meant. They explained that the treatment that saved his life could bring more difficulties later. 

Newberry was a few months old when doctors diagnosed him with rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare childhood cancer. 

The odds of survival, he said, were about 50-50. After a year of radiation and chemotherapy, he was cancer-free. 

“For my parents, it was a very difficult thing to go through,” he said.

Newberry found belonging in the church. Raised in Edmond, Oklahoma, he found his community in the children’s ministry and youth group at Memorial Road Church of Christ. 

“No one in that community really spoke down on me because of those differences,” he said. “Instead, they invited me in.”

Newberry said an old Church of Christ hymn, titled “Had It Not Been the Lord,” about the Lord rescuing his people from the floodwaters, based on Psalm 124, comes to mind when he tells his story.

“Had I not had faith in the Lord, had I not had that community of church, then I don’t know what would have happened,” he said. 

The world offers success, power and beauty as hope, he said, “but through the church and through Christ I found so much identity.”

He said that belonging redirected his life. 

He came to ACU as a physics major but switched to Bible after fall break of his freshman year – not because he disliked science but because he pictured himself in the church or the mission field, “pouring into the community of God.” 

He graduated with a degree in Christian ministry and is now pursuing a Master of Divinity degree.

Dr. David Kneip, associate professor of Bible, missions and ministry, said Newberry shook his hand on the first day and talked to the people at his table. 

“He’s so genuine and so earnest,” Kneip said.

Health problems persisted. For years, doctors assumed his wheezing during exercise was asthma. 

Then he learned he has bilateral vocal cord paralysis: neither cord moves on its own, and both rest partly open, making it hard to breathe in, especially in cold, dry winters. 

Junior year, laser surgery on one cord cost him most of his voice for half a semester. 

Later, doctors gave him a stoma stent, an opening in his neck that he can use when breathing gets hard. 

The passage he said he returns to most is 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul asks God three times to remove a thorn in his flesh. 

Paul never said what the thorn was, Newberry said, but he relates to it. 

“My physical differences can be seen as a thorn in my flesh,” he said.

 He has asked the questions anyone would. What if he hadn’t had cancer? What if he looked like everyone else? What if he could breathe easily and be a super athlete?

He hears God’s answer to Paul as the answer God gives everyone who struggles: “My grace is sufficient, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” 

For Newberry, that means grace is enough “even among all the difficulties,” and his weaknesses “don’t lessen me, but instead they strengthen me and can be used to encourage others.”

Kneip said an example of this is Henri Nouwen’s The Wounded Healer: we are all wounded, and like Jesus, we can heal out of our woundedness. 

The challenge, he said, is to face suffering without letting it define a whole life: “It is a thorn, but it’s also just a thorn. And I have the rest of my flesh.” 

What he said he has learned from Newberry is “a willingness to accept reality.”

Newberry said his advice to anyone struggling with how they look or how others see them is to put their trust in Christ and build on a church community, not just friends and campus life, which are not enough when storms come.