In this morning’s (Oct. 31) clip, Selena Gomez and Francia Raisa were strong in their convictions that their relationship with God is what got them through kidney transplant surgery over the summer.
“The only answer I have is God, honestly,” Raisa, an actress and Gomez’s best friend, said when asked where she found the courage to donate her kidney to the singer. “If I didn’t have my relationship with God, I don’t think I would have been able to.”
Gomez added, “What I believe is that it does happen for a reason. I think a huge part of my discernment and my honesty and my truth has been because I’ve had a relationship with God.”
Gomez and Raisa sat down with the Today show’s Savannah Guthrie to divulge intimate details surrounding Gomez’s kidney transplant over the summer, where Raisa donated her kidney to save Gomez’s life after complications with her autoimmune disease Lupus. Gomez was diagnosed with Lupus five years ago.
Gomez revealed that while she became increasingly ill, she ignored it – unable to acknowledge what was happening to her body. “I don’t think I made the right decisions because I didn’t accept it, and that’s extremely selfish and at the same time, really just unnecessary,” Gomez told Guthrie. “I’m not really proud of that.”
“It sounds like you’re being really hard on yourself,” Guthrie interjected. “To me, it seems like, weren’t you just a young woman who wanted to just not have to be sick?”
“Sure,” Gomez acknowledged. “Yeah, that would be easier if I just accepted that, but I am definitely the hardest person on myself.”
Raisa stated that she and Gomez went “six months without speaking,” as Gomez explained, “I went away to a facility. I took some time off. I needed to get my mind right, be healthy. I removed myself from everyone in my life. Just the fact that you have people in your that can understand where you are, not judge you for it, not make you feel bad for it.”
“It was a huge lesson of friendship for me,” Raisa added," and trust because it’s easy to feel offended or want to be there. It’s just, they need to go through their own thing."
“I don’t want people to think that it’s a sad thing that I went through,” Gomez clarified. “This, with Francia, or with anything in my life. Because at the end of the day, I think all the stuff that I went through made me and defined everything that I am right now. I think that it’s a really beautiful thing, and I have to remind myself that. It’s not a negative experience.”