Kim Ballantine Lost Her Voice at 40. On Saturday She Speaks at Arise Women’s Conference.

Kim Ballantine is the author of Hot Tea and Apricots and one of the speakers at Arise Women’s Conference 2026, on Saturday 17 October at Delta Community Church in Duncanville, Vereeniging. She lost her voice within days of turning 40, lived for years without speech, and got it back. I interviewed her on Pray On It Thursday on JustGospel Radio, and this is what she told me.

Hours after a specialist told her the condition was chronic, Kim picked up a piece of paper and wrote this:

“I will speak again. You don’t know how big my God is, how determined I am. One day I will have a story to share.” Kim Ballantine, the note she wrote after her diagnosis

I have interviewed a lot of people, and I can count on one hand the ones who made me forget I was on air. This was one of them.

The day her cords closed

It started with a dry cough around Valentine’s Day. By her birthday it was worse, and then her vocal cords closed so hard and tight that she could not breathe. She passed out in the bath and ended up in hospital. Losing your voice is one thing, she told me, but not being able to breathe is something else entirely. What came out of her after that were guttural sounds, nothing like controlled speech.

She spent years on sign language, a whiteboard and a notepad. At one point doctors wanted to cut her vocal cords. She said no, because to her that would have taken away hope.

Where that note came from

People have called what Kim did resilience. She has never believed that. Recently she was reading about the gifts of the Spirit and landed on the gift of faith, and something clicked: that was what she had been given, an ability to stand up in front of a damning diagnosis and refuse it. Her line is that a doctor can give you the diagnosis, but the final outcome is in the hands of Jesus.

Then she said something I keep thinking about. If you are in a hard season, ask for a gift of faith. He gave it to her so generously, and she insists it had nothing to do with her being wonderful.

What she lost besides her voice

Kim was an industrial psychologist. Everything she did ran through her voice. The hardest part was not being able to tell her children she loved them, not being able to answer their questions or the phone, and not being able to defend herself when people decided a woman who could not speak was something less than a person. She remembers being told to get out of a place because they did not serve “deaf idiots.” She lost her business and her ability to earn. Some friends slipped away, she says, afraid of what they were looking at or wondering if it was contagious.

Her answer to how they survived is simple and she repeated it: do not do life in isolation. Her church, her children’s school, her family, her dad, her brothers, her sister-in-law. They needed a village, and they had one.

Rob, a laptop and a covenant

Her husband Rob had to speak for her at times, and the marriage went through a very difficult place. He struggled to lip-read and never made it to the sign language lessons, so everything was written. He bought her a laptop and said, please write. She wrote and wrote to keep him inside her world.

Two years in they made some decisions. They would never know the why, but they knew who the author and finisher of their faith was.

“We had not been called to a contract, but a covenant.” Kim Ballantine

The vending machine problem

This is the part of the interview I would play for anyone who has prayed for years and watched nothing move. Year after year, Kim said, disappointment erodes vision. She had the note, she had a vision board, and she had stopped believing it would happen. Then in the middle of worship, in complete silence, she felt God ask her whether she could let her healing go. Could she love the healer more than the healing?

It confronted her, because she realised she had been treating God like a vending machine. So many prayers in, and you get your answer out. That was never her intention, she said, but it was her behaviour. She repented and laid the vision down. Whether she ever spoke again, whether she grew old and watched her children grow up, she would trust him. She did not call that easy, and I did not push her to.

How the whisper came back

Five or six years in, Kim was diagnosed with breast cancer. She says there is a whole miraculous story in how God guided them through that, and that her voice started to return in the middle of it. As she explains it, the loss had been linked to the cancer all along. Abnormal proteins from the cancer set off an immune response that took out her whole vocal complex, and when that happens the function usually never comes back. Hers did. She credits God, and she is clear that medicine was part of it too. In her words it is both and, not either or.

The first sound came in a car. Her dad was driving her home from oncology past the zoo, and she was writing questions on her whiteboard for him, one per set of traffic lights because he could not lip-read. She was frustrated that a robot had changed before she could finish writing, and then a very faint whisper came out. She got the fright of her life. Some people around her had already noticed and decided not to tell her.

It took almost two years of whisper before she had intonation, inflection and her full voice. She still has plates between her vocal cords, which is why you will hear her take big breaths, and she had speech therapy to learn to control it all again. Her surgeon had given her a tracheostomy years earlier, so she went to see him once she could. She covered the hole at the base of her throat and whispered, “Hi, it’s me.” He burst into tears and said it was impossible. She asked him to close it. He has presented her case at conferences since.

That is Kim’s own account of her medical story, and the full version is in her book.

What those years taught her

From losing her voice to being fully functional again took more than ten years. She admitted she often thought of them as wasted. She does not anymore. God is redemptive, faithful and kind, she told me, and you cannot box him into your theology or your timetable. She has been told that God is the kindest person someone has ever met, and nobody can shake that out of her. He restores, and then restores again, and in her case beyond anything she could have hoped or imagined.

What she is bringing to Arise on Saturday

The conference theme is A day in the Lord’s presence changes everything, and the main scripture is Psalm 84, the passage about those whose strength is in God and whose hearts are set on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baka, they make it a place of springs. Kim speaks twice. In the first session she shares what their journey looked like and what they learned. The second is about how to stand when you come through the valley of weeping.

Her answer to what standing means is practical, and she says so herself, because she is a business and life coach and wants the how. Stand on his word. Stay in his presence and do not move until he moves, the way Israel followed the cloud. Take charge of how you think, because how you think drives how you behave. Hold on to gratitude, which does not depend on circumstance. Be honest about the valley instead of pretending it is not there, and keep dreaming beyond it.

“Our circumstances are just a chapter in the book. They’re not the whole book.” Kim Ballantine

There will also be time to pray for women and minister to them, which for me is half the reason to be in that room.

Kim’s prayer for the woman who thinks God went quiet

At the end of the interview I asked Kim to pray for listeners who have lost something or are stuck in a valley. She prayed that those who do not know Jesus would turn to him, that those in a hard place would see breakthrough and the latter rains, and that every season would end up with meaning, joy and glory in it. She finished with a word she loves. Testimony, she said, means do it again, so she prayed that everyone who heard hers would ask the Lord to do it again for them, with the same authority and power.

Arise Women’s Conference 2026: the details

If you do not have a ticket by Saturday morning you are going to have a little FOMO, and I say that as someone who will be there. JustGospel will be at the conference, so come and say hello.

The book: Hot Tea and Apricots

Kim’s memoir tells you why it has that name right at the start. You can get Hot Tea and Apricots on Amazon, on Kindle, on Takealot, or at any good bookstore, which will order it in if it is not on the shelf. Kim told me readers have ranged from teenagers to a man in his nineties, and that it picked up a memoir of the year award last year. It would make a decent Christmas present for someone who needs it.