Tessa searched around the world and found Life

”I may be half blind and spastic now, but I know who I am and where I’m going.”

From hiking through the vast plains in Mauritania to feasting in Israel to meditating under a sacred tree in India, Tessa van Waardenburg (42) from Giessenburg explored everything, but ultimately found Jesus. In this special interview, she tells her poignant story.

Tessa says: ”I was not raised Christian at all. The church and Jesus? You had to stay far away from that. That really couldn’t be it.” So what “it” was for the adventurous Tessa was the big question on her mind. ”Why are we here? What is this life? I started looking for answers in all religions and I dove into everything. All revolving around that one question: Why am I alive?”

From the age of seventeen, Tessa went out into the world, traveling. ”Travel I think is so cool, it changes your perspective. For example, an African can see things 180 degrees differently than a European.” Her time on a desert island led her to new insights. ”I was sitting there, with absolutely nothing. I realized: you don’t need anything at all to be perfectly happy.” When Tessa is in India, she is confronted with the harsh reality of this world. ”I just watched kids die at my feet there. Then you’re never quite the same.”

”I realized: you don’t need anything at all to be bruisingly happy.”

In between traveling, Tessa is getting her propaedeutic degree at the art academy in Rotterdam and studying SPH (social work) for 1 year. She quit the latter study to take a trip with her then-boyfriend. ”We traveled from Spain to Ghana: overland, through the Sahara with donkeys and camels.” She has never forgotten the vastness and emptiness Tessa saw around her during that trip. ”Later, my life became very weird and small. Then when I think about that emptiness and size, it puts everything into perspective. There was really nothing there at all.” After this extraordinary trip, Tessa continues to study psychology in Rotterdam.

Between her ears

A huge brain tumor in her head. Tessa was 26 years old when this was discovered. ”I had been tired very quickly for quite a long time and really just wanted to get rid of that. I also went to a psychologist to see if the fatigue wasn’t just in my head. Eventually it was, but in a way that nobody wants.”

Tessa’s tumor was rare. So rare that doctors had to communicate with America about how to remove the tumor. ”If I wanted surgery at all, because I could also choose to die. I probably would have had a few more months.”

But Tessa chose to live. ”The doctors didn’t know what was going to happen after the surgery. The perspective was basically that I would be in an institution all my life. It was still a questionable surprise in what way I would be disabled.” She remembers the moment before the surgery exactly. ”I knew: I may now be taking my last steps ever. I absorbed life intensely in those last minutes. Living on planet earth, that we have that, is actually something very special, I realized. I thought about those sperm cells that have been fighting very hard to go through this. And just before it was going to happen, I looked around me one last time, because I might be blind after the operation.”

”Living on planet earth, is actually something very special, I realized.”

After the surgery, Tessa was like a vegetable. She had total amnesia, was half blind, half paralyzed and she could no longer talk. ”The feeling of lying there like that I’ll never forget. I had to start learning everything all over again, everything was totally unreal.”

During her rehabilitation process, doctors told Tessa that she would no longer be able to do certain things, but Tessa refused to accept that. ”I wanted to live on my own, but there was no one to say to me, ‘Try it, maybe you can do it.” Everyone told me I wouldn’t be able to.” Fortunately for Tessa, she knew what she was entitled to through her studies and found a place in Giessenburg where she could live. ”I think even then there was Someone in me who had a different plan: the Lord God.”

”I suddenly had to live on my own as a pretty disabled 27-year-old woman. I felt very lonely, because I couldn’t go to parties anymore and the world trips were completely history. People stayed away for that reason, too. That was really a Gethsemane experience for me.”

High Tea

When someone from her village invites her to a church high tea one day, for Tessa it is an invitation that is very far out of her comfort zone. Out of loneliness, she goes along anyway.” At that High Tea, a girl my age preached a sermon of sorts and she told me that I am loved, and that it doesn’t matter who I am, what I do and what I achieve. I am a child of God, no matter what. In that moment, I completely fell in love with the Spirit of Jesus. My whole world changed during that High Tea and I discovered that I was looking for Jesus all along, because he ís life. Something changed in my consciousness where it no longer mattered where I was or who I was with, as long as Jesus was there. ”

What Tessa experienced at this High Tea felt to her like a very deep love and like really coming home. ”I knew a lot of spiritual books and because of that I knew the Bible, but I had never seen Jesus as someone who really exists…”

No matter what

After High Tea, Tessa was still severely disabled and her life remained limited. Yet the beauty of life now unfolded to her in the smallest moments. ”Then when I went for a walk around the park here in Giessenburg I did so with full awareness of the beauty of God. I would think, ”Wow Lord, what a beautiful tree and what beautiful blades of grass.” I experienced that Jesus can always make life no matter what. If you have Jesus, then you have everything.’

”If you have Jesus, then you have everything.”

Today, Tessa is totally lucid again. She still lives on her own, in “her” beautiful Giessenburg. She is able to express her love for Jesus daily in her painting. ”Jesus is the inspiration for my paintings. I also paint about Bible stories and creation, but when I do that, I actually paint Jesus as well. He is an inexhaustible source.”

She says: ”When I recovered from my coma, I saw how incredibly developed the society I had ended up in. The first thing I wanted to know then was: what am I doing here? So I asked my earthly father, ‘Dad, why are we actually alive?’ To that question, he looked at me sweetly and said, ‘Honey, I have no idea.’

”And now I may be half blind and spastic, but I know why I’m here and where I’m going. I am alive because there is a father who loves me.”

Although Tessa has been able to learn a lot from the stories of the Bible since she knew Jesus, she would love to learn more about her God. For that reason, Tessa is going to do a DTS with YWAM (Youth With A Mission) in 2024. For this DTS, Tessa needs money. Therefore, she sells her paintings and asks for sponsorship. Want to know more? Then check out Tessa’s website or Facebook page for more information and her Artist portfolio.

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