Day Eighteen: County Cork
Monday 18 May
The annual VOX magazine Finding Faith Tour looks very different this year. Instead of a 7-day road trip around the island, this year VOX editor Ruth Garvey-Williams brings you highlights from all 32 counties (one per day plus one for each of the 31 days in May). Contact Ruth if you have a story to share.
Day Eighteen: Blessed not Broken!
A proud Corkman, Tadhg O’Connell was born with osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) known as brittle bones disease. Suffering multiple broken bones, he remembers hearing people describing him as “broken” and gradually became fearful and emotionally disconnected. When some lads offered him cider at the age of 12, he thought he’d finally found the answer. The alcohol eased the knot in his stomach and gave him a new confidence. But gradually, it consumed him until in his early 20s he was alone, addicted and suicidal.
Ending up in hospital, Tadhg got some help and for a while things seemed to settle down. He got married and began a desperate search to ease his sense of guilt and shame.
“I thought I was damned and going to hell,” he said, and spent hours going to mass, saying the rosary and completing pilgrimages to Lourdes and Lough Derg in the hope of gaining forgiveness.
After falling off the wagon, he tried again and tortured the priest with his questions until he finally began to look for answers in the Scriptures. “I wanted to know who Jesus was,” Tadgh said. Reaching out to local Christians, he met up with Bryce from Douglas Baptist Church. Billy O’Mahony in Cork Christian Bookshop also helped by explaining the things he was reading in the Bible.
Eventually, he dragged his reluctant wife to attend a meeting in Bandon. “Our kids came out of the Sunday School smiling and laughing and on the way home, my wife said, ‘I want to know who this fella Jesus is!’ I almost crashed the car. I’d been trying to persuade her for years and after a 10 minute sermon, her heart had turned around.”
“Jesus is my Saviour - without Him I know I would have gone back to the drink or taken my own life.”
Feeling a big jealous of how quickly she seemed to ‘get it’, Tadhg went back to the scriptures. “Every time I read something, I could feel the heaviness was dropping away from me. I realised that my sins were forgiven. Some days it is hard. Two of my kids also have OI (brittle bones) but I know that in all this madness, in my life and in my family, God has a plan.
“A friend told me, ‘You are not broken, you are just a person who breaks a lot.’ Now I feel blessed and I’m looking forward to when I have a new body in heaven!”
This is just a taste of Tadhg’s dramatic story. VOX magazine will bring you more later this summer!
