Discovering you have cancer at age 16 is an experience that sticks with you. Ask Christie Hill.  

Hill had visited the doctor after experiencing swelling in her legs and difficulty breathing. Thinking it may be an enlarged heart, her cardiologist did an echocardiogram. That’s when they found the tumor with fluid surrounding it.

Hill knew about God. Her family attended church, but she didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus. Her relationship with her parents had been a struggle in recent weeks. A natural question emerged. 

“It took a few more years, but I think God was starting to draw me to himself,” Hill said. “I remember asking God, ‘Am I being punished?’”

Doctors performed an emergency surgery to remove the fluid from around Hill’s heart and began her on a chemotherapy treatment. She missed her entire junior year of high school and lost her hair due to chemo, but Hill believes she owes her life to the work of God.

“God saved my life that day so he could save my soul three years later,” said Hill, whose husband, Quintell, was elected last November as the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina’s first black president. “It was grace I didn’t deserve. He saved me then, so he could use Quintell and I together to impact people.”

Two decades after that formative experience, Hill and her husband are three years into planting Multiply Community Church, a multicultural church in Monroe, N.C. A mother of two, a small-business owner, and children’s ministry director at Multiply, Hill brings a unique perspective to the couple’s ministry.

Although she grew up in a Methodist church, Hill had little clarity about the gospel growing up. This began to change when she started dating Quintell. Early in their long-distance relationship, he had sent her a John MacArthur Study Bible with a note. He simply wanted her to know Jesus.

“I may have said I knew Christ, but it was probably obvious that I didn’t have a very strong understanding of who He was,” Hill said. “He sent me that Bible, and I read it. He just continued to pour into me.”

In October 2006, Hill attended a local revival, where after months of Quintell’s encouragement, she gave her life to Christ. 

“Looking back, I’ve seen God change me – it’s night and day,” Hill said. “If you talked to people who knew me in college, they wouldn’t believe who I am today.”

The couple were married the following July. Having only lived away from home for a few months during college, one of the toughest parts of serving alongside her husband was the realization that God could – and likely would – move the couple anywhere. 

The moving began right after the honeymoon, as the Hills loaded up their belongings and moved to Wake Forest, N.C., to attend Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) right after their honeymoon. Six months into their new marriage, the Hills started trying to have children. The running joke at SEBTS was that the apartment complex where they lived, named Flaherty Farms, was often called, “fertility farms” because babies often followed once a couple moved in.

“We expected it to happen, but it never did,” Hill said. “I remember days, months, years of heartbreak waiting for something to happen that just didn’t.”

Knowing the expenses involved, the Hills still weren’t considering adoption. But the couple did begin the process of becoming foster parents.  They went through the entire process and almost became the foster parents of a couple of boys. But the Hills never got chosen.

But in early 2011, God surprised the Hills with news of the potential adoption of a little girl. Once again, though, they were passed over for another couple. Soon, however, the other family backed out. They were given another opportunity to adopt the baby girl.

They prayed all weekend about the potential adoption, knowing they didn’t have the money to complete it. Before the Hills could call the adoption agency on Monday to let them know they couldn’t take the girl, they got a message on their phone. The mother was in labor. Could they take the baby? At that point, God spoke clearly to the young couple.

“The Lord knew she was ours,” Hill said. “We didn’t have money. We didn’t have a car seat. We didn’t have bottles. We had nothing. We just were obedient. The Lord made it clear that Moriah was supposed to be ours, so we just took the next step.”

God provided the needed money, clothes, a car seat and everything else the Hills needed.  

“When we came home from Florida (where the adoption occurred), we would get knocks on the door, and people we didn’t think had any money just handed us a check for $3,000,” Hill said.

A few years later, God did a similar miracle as the couple adopted their second daughter, Kharis. Again, the couple didn’t plan on adopting. But when a call from an adoption agency came and a young girl was looking for a biracial Christian couple to take her baby, God started nudging them again. They didn’t have the $36,000 needed for the adoption.

Yet God did. 

“We just trusted the Lord, and He has provided,” Hill said. “We’ve never needed anything. We’ve never missed a bill. The Lord is faithful.”

God is still faithfully providing. As a church planting family, all four members have pulled together to start Multiply Community Church in Monroe, N.C., where Quintell serves as pastor. Christie Hill serves as the church’s children’s ministry coordinator. She also runs a small social-media management business at home.

“I think the Lord calling us to adopt gave us the faith we needed to plant a church,” Hill said. “Seeing the Lord work through the adoption and trusting him through it led us to now being able to trust Him and be obedient to plant a church. Both have required faith. Both are things that only the Lord could do. There was nothing we could do on our own.

“God has used all of our lives to get us to where we are today.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE – Tobin Perry is a freelance writer with more than 20 years of writing experience with Southern Baptist organizations. He can be reached at TobinPerry.com. This article originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of the Biblical Recorder magazine.)