One day, Angel — a busy homeschooling mom, fitness instructor, and woman of vibrant faith — woke up in the middle of the night to a crunching sound in her ear. Then silence. What an MRI revealed would change her life forever: a massive meningioma, a brain tumor that had been growing for nearly a decade, wrapped around the nerves that control hearing, facial movement, and the very functions that keep the human heart beating. Her neurosurgeon described the surgery ahead as a game of pickup sticks. It would take 14 hours and two surgeons working in tandem at Vanderbilt to remove it.
Sharing her story on this episode of The UPside Conversations, Angel told Marion MacKenzie that the physical recovery alone would have been enough to define most people’s story. Angel woke from surgery with complete paralysis on her right side, a facial nerve so stretched it left her eye permanently open, and a prognosis of a year and a half before she could return to fitness. She was back at the gym in six weeks, propped against the wall with dumbbells in her hands. Eight weeks after brain surgery, she was on a stage leading a Zumba class. She credits it simply: “Proximity matters. Get around the people and the environment you want to belong to.”
But Angel’s story doesn’t stop at the physical. When the tumor returned a year later and radiation became necessary, it was persistent prayer — a group of women praying in three-hour shifts for a full month — that followed Angel through her 27 treatments. An MRI after that month of prayer showed the tumor had stopped growing. It has not grown since.
There is also a story beneath the story. Long before the brain tumor, when Angel was just 33 years old, her mother went missing. A month and a half later, her body was found in another state. For 22 years, Angel fought for justice through a system that failed her repeatedly — a district attorney who told her to stop calling, a case that crossed state lines, a grief that had no resolution. She chose to forgive before she felt it. She chose to praise when it made no sense. And 22 years later, a confession came. Her mother’s killer is in prison.
“Forgiveness does not mean trust,” Angel says simply. “But God supernaturally helps us when we obey.”
Angel is the author of Praise Through the Pain: Diagnosis to Destiny, and The Fitness Angel, a fitness show airing on CTN (Christian Television Network), and a living example of what it looks like to choose praise not as a feeling but as a weapon. Her full conversation with Marion MacKenzie is available now on The UPside Conversations.
.png)
