Georgia Tech track star Shanta Smith will never forget her last hurdle.
            With one leap, she plunged into the valley of the shadow of death.
            But she refuses to fear anything – especially her future.
            “This is the ultimate test for me,” she said.

Last fall, Smith, a former FCA intern and camp huddle leader, owned school records and several ACC titles in the 400 meters and triple jump events and was looking forward to her senior season.   The Miami native had spent the previous summer hobbling around on crutches waiting on a stress fracture to heal and had just started to jog a little in September.   

After months of rehab, she couldn’t wait to run and jump again. On one of her first tentative trips back to the track, she decided to work on the 400 hurdles.  But not long into her practice, she took a nasty tumble.  As soon as she hit the ground, she knew her knee was badly injured.  She couldn’t help but groan. Not again! She had just recovered from the stress fracture. How many months of rehab would this take?

Smith hoped for the best, but soon learned the worst.  Team doctors determined she had indeed, severely injured her ACL, but an MRI revealed something else, too – she had a tumor on the femur behind her knee.

Smith remained calm and shrugged it off when she told her mother.

“They said they found ‘a mass’,” she remembers.  “I told my mom about it, but I wasn’t worried. I really didn’t think it would be cancer.”

It was.

Because of the severity of her injury and the location of the tumor, Smith had to have a total knee replacement. Instead of starting her senior season, she began chemotherapy soon after the surgery. The vivacious 23-year-old track star would never leap over another hurdle. Instead, she began learning how to walk with a prosthetic knee as she battled the fatigue and sickness of chemo.

But Smith, who had interned for FCA at Georgia Tech and had led huddles at FCA camps at both Black Mountain, N.C., and St. Simons Island, Ga., amazed others with her composure and incredible faith.

“I think if you polled the Georgia Tech campus, Shanta would be a hero in the Hall of Faith,” said Jonathan Rainey, Tech’s assistant FCA chaplain. “Around Tech she is known as an inspiration. Everyone looks at her and sees what hope in God looks like.”

When her friends and teammates shook their fists at God and asked, “Why Shanta?” she smiled and asked, “Why not?”

“The main thing I’ve been able to witness to my teammates about is just trusting God,” she said. “A lot of people were wondering why it had happened to me. And I was like, that’s not the question to ask. Why not me? I think I was set up for it. I know why me. People know I’m a Christian and I can tell them what He’s done in my life.”

Smith said the Lord had carefully prepared her heart for her current battle.  Not long before her cancer diagnosis, Smith admitted she was in a spiritual lull.

“I was kind of going through a place where I was like, ‘God are you even listening to me? I had to keep reminding myself that God is for me and not against me, that He has plans to prosper me and not to harm me, to give me a hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11). I kept internalizing that, and then I found out I had cancer. If God had not put that in my head before, I would have been devastated.”

Smith began her battle against cancer with plenty of experience in pressing through difficulties. She had excelled in track her sophomore and junior seasons, but it had not come easily. She had pushed herself so hard in practice she rarely made it through one without throwing up and was an example of incredible determination to her team, said Tech track coach Nat Page.

“She really persevered through all that,” Page said. “She’s very upbeat and very bubbly and the kind of person who will go out and do what it takes to get something. She always had a deep faith and really believed that if you kept pursuing what you’re after, it would come.”

Page noticed that when cancer came instead, Smith’s deep faith never wavered.

 “I knew it was because of my faith that this happened,” Smith responds. “I had heard of people who, when they heard they had cancer, would fall on their face and cry and ask God why. But that – having cancer – didn’t bother me. What bothered me the most was having a fake knee!  I’m not afraid to die. It wasn’t like God turned his back on me or was against me. I knew He was for me.”

            Smith read Isaiah 53:5 over and over (“By His stripes, you are healed.”) and she clung to His promise in Jeremiah 29.  There were times last fall when the effects of the chemo were so harsh she would taste metal for days and the painful sores in her mouth were almost unbearable. There were nights she couldn’t sleep and days she was too tired to even stand.  There were times when she couldn’t pray. She was simply still and knew that He was God.

            “Sometimes I couldn’t pray for myself,” she said. “I knew others were praying for me. I’ve learned patience, as in being able to sit and wait on Him and not pitch a fit.”

            Rainey said Smith has been an active member of the Tech FCA huddle since it started three years ago. “She was always the first one there to help set up and the last one to leave,” he said. “She is so humble. She really has a heart for girls and loves to minister to others. She is always smiling. Even when she was doing chemo and was so tired she could barely walk, she came to FCA. It might have taken her 20 minutes to walk in, but she was there.”

Smith said those FCA huddles and Bible studies kept her going and encouraged her to keep trusting God. Her teammates did, too.  Not long after Smith was diagnosed with cancer, a teammate who was also going through a tough time encouraged her to read the book of Job.  “From Job I learned not to let people condemn me,” Smith said. “Just because you’re going through something doesn’t mean God is punishing you. It’s just a test. And I’ve seen God in a brand new way. Like at the end of Job, he was saying I’ve heard other people’s testimonies about you, but now I know You in a brand new way.  And then now, contentment. That wasn’t something I learned from the cancer, but it has come right after. I’ve learned to sit and wait on God.”

Side effects from the chemo treatments forced Smith to drop out of grad school, but she felt the Lord lead her to start her own company, Spoiled by God, to encourage others. She already has a website: www.spoiledbygod.com.      

“It was a concept I thought of when I was younger,” she said, “because I’ve always thought, God you spoil me so bad! Even this situation was God spoiling me because all my medical bills have been taken care of by the school, and He has taught me so much through this. I know Him so much better now.”

Smith received a clean bill of health in February. She is now officially in remission. She refuses to fear the cancer might return; she’s too busy with grad school and her website.  And though the cancer is gone, her impact on others continues.

“She is so courageous,” said Derrick Moore, Georgia Tech FCA campus director. “When I think of Shanta, I think of not only a young woman of great faith, but of tremendous courage. She truly believes God. Others see that and their lives have been changed.”