Speaker touches students’ lives with
powerful message of hope and faith

By John Shaughnessy

Debby McCalley looked into the faces of the youths, knowing they had received more heartbreaking news that someone from their school community had died.

Sitting in her wheelchair, McCalley worried that the talk she was about to give to the students at Bishop Chatard High School in Indianapolis wouldn’t offer them the hope or the consolation they needed.

After all, what do you say to young people who have faced the deaths of a recent graduate to suicide, another recent graduate to an accidental shooting and a fellow student who died in a traffic accident—all within four months?

As McCalley prepared to address the students last fall, she figured the only thing she could do was share her own struggles of faith as a youth. She recently shared her story again with more students.

“When I was a sophomore, just 16 years old, I noticed I had more trouble walking than my friends,” recalled McCalley, a member of St. Pius X Parish in Indianapolis. “My parents took me to a large hospital called Mayo Clinic to discover why I couldn’t walk well or climb stairs. I found out I had a degenerative muscle disease called muscular dystrophy.

“At 16, my future was to be in a wheelchair. I asked God why, what had I done to deserve this, and asked him to take it away. If he answered, I didn’t hear it. I couldn’t believe that the one life I had been given would be lived as a crippled-up person. I knew that a God who could do that to me wasn’t a God I wanted anything to do with.”

Watching the students, McCalley saw that her blunt honesty had captured their attention.

She continued her story, mentioning that her disease worsened when she was a sophomore at Butler University in Indianapolis. Again, she said, she prayed to God to take the disease away. When he didn’t, she figured she had to deal with her disease without God, she told the students.

“Life continued, I got married, had two kids. Just after Katie was born, my husband decided to leave and get a divorce. At this point, I realized it wasn’t about me any longer. I had two small children to raise. It was about them.

“I tried God one more time, but this time instead of asking him to take this disease away, I asked him for the strength to endure it for the girls’ sake. That was it. God helped me. He wasn’t going to take this disease away, but he was going to help me deal with it.”

That moment, that acceptance, changed her life, said McCalley, who is now 50.

“With God’s help, my outlook changed almost immediately, and I began reading all I could about God, his will and his promises,” she said. “Be assured, God did not forget about me or any of us. Over the years, we’ve heard the phrases ‘life after death’ and ‘everlasting life’ and ‘living with God for all eternity.’

“That’s what God had planned for us. The story of life doesn’t end with death. It just changes with death. Life becomes better after death.”

McCalley’s words connected with the students, including one teenager who called it “the most powerful talk I’ve heard,” according to Mary Schaffner, Chatard’s director of campus ministry.

“Everything that’s happened in the past year has been a teaching moment for us,” said Schaffner, who invited McCalley to speak to the students. “Not just to teach about Catholic principles on death, but how to live our lives with dignity.” †