hope & healing for your journey through the unexpected
The story we never expected to live may be the story that offers hope to someone else. May these stories strengthen you as you endure unexpected challenges.
“My best friend, home with us, was all I’d wanted. When the whole world shut down, we found abundance in a pandemic: an abundance of time together as a family.
The Lord met us where I least expected it: in the walls of our own home, under the same roof, all four of us living life together, inseparable.”
Continue reading Peyton’s story.
“Sam was about five months old when I began to admit Motherhood was not the bliss I’d been promised in the shiny magazines adorning my doctor’s office during pregnancy. I found myself sleep-deprived and angry, nearly all the time. One day I worried I was becoming someone who might uncontrollably shake her baby and end up hurting it, so I called my best friend and asked for help. She told me she’d been seeing a lady in our church for counseling and thought maybe I should try meeting with her as well.
This is one of the best decisions I’ve made as a mom, but twenty years later, I can also see how it’s a way that God met me in the middle of some difficult circumstances.”
Continue reading Janna’s story.
“Mustering up courage for life’s pivots isn’t pretty. It’s not built in the circumstances of comfort or smooth trajectories of what we once imagined life to be. No. Mustering up courage is a holy reordering and unraveling of what we think we are made of and God’s re-shaping of who we were made for.”
As life unraveled, Monet found God to be faithful to hold her family’s questions, resistance, grief, and even doubt.
Continue reading Monet’s story.
Before I even opened my eyes, the knowing was there.
“I’m pregnant.”
Some call it intuition, others God’s voice—this deep knowing we experience on the rarest of occasions.
We are left with an unshakeable assuredness—a knowing of what’s true before the data is there to back it up.
Continue reading >>
Erica Baldwin discovered the depths of God’s goodness when, at the age of 33, she was diagnosed with an incurable, life-threatening genetic connective tissue disorder. She gradually traded in her faith in the good life for trust in a good God.
“God has used this diagnosis to replace my fragile faith with firm hope. What was once circumstance-based trust is now confidence in God’s character and in His ways. Though tomorrow is not a guarantee for any of us, VEDS has made me acutely aware of my mortality – but I do not fear the future.”
Continue reading Erica’s story.
Trauma changes us, but it doesn’t have to define us.
“I’ve come to realize my anxiety doesn’t define me, nor does my anxiety medication.”
“We are not just souls or hearts, but also brains and bodies—and as He cares for us, ought we not to care for them as well?”
Continue reading Meghan’s story.