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CATHOLIC LITE

Faith That Can’t Be Bullied by Life

Faith. It does not make things easy.
It makes them possible.

I WAS RAISED CATHOLIC-LITE. We were Catholic, but we didn’t go to church much. In my parents’ defense, we grew up all over the world, moving from country to country (my dad was in the oil business), so there wasn’t a whole lot of predictability in our Sundays. In some places, it was easy to attend church. In others, like Iran, not so much.

I didn’t ponder my faith often, but I knew I loved God. I had no idea why; I just did. We didn’t have Bible readings or Scripture discussions in our home. We believed in God, we knew that Jesus was His Son, and we also thought a third party called the Holy Spirit was very nice. I knew this because when I made the sign of the cross, we listed three things: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Three. Got it. Love ’em. Okay.

Like many things in my life, my relationship with God has evolved throughout a fairly turbulent life journey. It began in my youth with that innocent, unquestioning faith. In my early twenties, it transitioned to a full-on, plates-smashed-against-walls kind of anger and a “breakup” with God (you’ll understand why in a moment). Then it moved into a cautious, slow “dating period” in my late twenties until I was all in with God in my thirties.

I gave my life to God at thirty-nine—totally, utterly, and completely. I mean, not like a monk who gives up every bit of his worldly goods or something, but my heart and soul became His. It was very clear that God had not called me to give up my laptop or cell phone.

So what precipitated the breakup?

The plate-breaking years began in 1989. I was the ripe old age of nineteen when I fell in love, married a wonderful man, and started having babies. In my world, this was the be-all and end-all for a good Southern girl. I was set for my happily ever after. Of course, we were young and struggled as most young couples do—with our finances, our communication, our approaches to parenting, all of it. We were babies trying to be grown-ups and raising two precious little ones, Makenzie and Madison.

In June 1991, our lives were completely shattered. We lost our precious daughter Madison to a rare bacterial pneumonia. She was nine months old. One week she was pressing her sweet face into the curve of my neck and beginning to pull up into a standing position, and eight days later she was in my arms taking her last breath in a tiny pediatric ICU room at Saint Francis Hospital. It happened so cruelly fast.

THROUGH OUR
YOUTHFUL MESS,
WE FOUND
HAPPINESS.

I have the most vivid memory of sitting in Madison’s bedroom one August night, eight weeks after she was gone. Every piece of clothing still hanging in her closet, the plush stuffed animals resting in the corners of her room, but her crib stood empty. I was pushing myself back and forth in her rocking chair, crying a cry so intense it wracked every muscle in my body and sucked up every ounce of air in my lungs. It felt like all the tears I could make in an entire lifetime were flowing in that moment. The pain was so excruciating that I could barely gasp for breath.

It’s been twenty-five years. I can still smell the scent of her room. I can see the vibrant colors of the mural on her wall. I can feel the softness of her sheets and blankets—all of it etched in my mind for an eternity. I still remember how angry I felt that my husband was in the other room, unable to comfort me or even himself. But most of all I was furious that I had loved a God who took babies away from their mommies. I would never breathe normally after this, and I would never again love this God.

My husband and I were forever, dramatically, and drastically changed. Within two months of losing her, we separated. Neither of us knew how to deal with the pain and anger of Madison’s loss.

Then, just four months later, my world was ravaged in an entirely different way. On December 2, I woke up in the middle of the night to an elbow on my chest and a hand slapping down, covering my mouth. A man had broken into my home. His face was inches from my own, his eyes staring into mine. I could feel his breath as he whispered, “If you don’t do what I tell you to do, I will hurt you.”

My daughter Makenzie, three years old, was sleeping next to me. Please, dear God, I prayed, don’t let her wake up. The man allowed me to take her, still sleeping, to her room.

He pulled me back to my room and onto my bed. “Take off your clothes,” he said with a cold, commanding voice.

With tears flowing down my face and my fingers gripped in a praying position, I whispered the Lord’s Prayer over and over. Then, as clear as I have ever heard anything, I heard God: “You are going to be fine. You are going to make it through this. I am here.”

God was there, and I did get through that unimaginable experience. My rapist was caught that night and, to this day, is serving a life sentence in prison. But my life was changed in a way I never imagined possible, and I became a woman I didn’t know. I was fearful of everything and felt scared just navigating daily activities. I spent countless hours in therapy. I was a disastrous mess of a human being.

In the years to come, I would fall in love, get married, and have another daughter. But I would find myself in an ugly cry again and again. I would later be diagnosed with Stage 3, triple-negative breast cancer while my new husband, Craig, was in Bahrain with the Navy. We would battle addiction and have struggles in our own home. My mother would have a ruptured brain aneurysm that would nearly take her life, and I would lose my baby sister unexpectedly to breast cancer.

So, in all these trials, how was I supposed to find joy?

As you can see, joy wasn’t exactly flowing into my life. But this is exactly why I know the life-saving power of seeking joy. Through losing my sweet Madison, a divorce from a good and kind man, and a rape that would go to a full jury trial, joy came in the form of my three-year-old bundle of love, Makenzie. (I was twenty-three, she was three, and we would raise each other for a while. But, boy, did we have joy.) Through all that followed with my new husband, my mother, and my sister, I found joy in humor and people and countless moments of unpredictable truths.

I don’t bring up the topic of joy lightly, and I know it’s not always easy to seek joy or allow laughter. My heart has been broken so many times, in so many tiny pieces, that I have at times felt certain it would never heal. I’ve been sure the sun would never shine again and that I’d never get out of bed. Maybe you’ve felt the same.

There is no play-by-play guide to being joyful when you’re in pain. Hurting is hurting. I know that feeling of not being able to stop crying, of having wept so much that it seems like your body shouldn’t be able to produce one more tear. I know how it feels to be furious at the world, helplessly thinking over and over, This can’t be happening. This isn’t real. I know how it feels when you think that you’ll never recover, that you’ll never emerge from the darkness, and that your life is most certainly over.

THERE IS NO PLAY-
BY-PLAY GUIDE TO
BEING JOYFUL WHEN
YOU’RE IN PAIN.

I’ve been there. I understand. If that’s you, I hear you.

But I want you to know joy can be found inside the tsunami of pain. My prayer is that my stories help you see that joy isn’t always where we expect it or how we expect it, but it is there in tiny, unexpected ways.

Our stories, the good and the bad, make us who we are. They give us character. They allow us to identify and empathize with others—to connect, on big and small levels. I don’t believe any of us were born to sit back in silence and just exist. We weren’t created to live lives of sadness, anger, or depression. We weren’t made for blaming, withholding forgiveness, or being negative. We were made to find the gift of joy.

But how do we spot it? When I had cancer, I found out that joy is laughing so hard about your ugly new chemo hat with your friends that one of you pees in her pants. Joy is realizing you don’t have to cook for two months because someone set up a meal train for you. Joy is the moment, years after you’re completely healthy and people expect you to start cooking again, when you proclaim that you’ll never roast a ham again because, actually, you hate to cook. Moments of joy are often sprinkled into the most unlikely places.

In my forty-nine years of life, I’ve learned that joy and pain often go hand in hand. I believe I have experienced more joy than many people ever will because I have experienced more pain than most will. But that’s why you can believe me when I tell you: even if everything is falling apart, you can find laughter again.

Once I understood this, I knew I had something to share, something for God to use. God loves working through flawed, messed-up humans. (Don’t believe me? Read the Bible!) And our God is more than just the nice, fatherly figure I learned about in my “Catholic-lite” days. He gets involved. He heals. He loves to bring us out of the brokenness, to give us a new story, a new beginning. He’s the King of the comeback story. (I mean, there will never be a better comeback story than Jesus. Literally and figuratively.)

WHEN WE
CHOOSE TO SEEK
THE JOY, IT’S
ALWAYS THERE
TO BE FOUND.

Life is a wild, magnificent journey mixed with lessons, loss, pain, and beautiful, astonishing joy. In your own pain and seasons of tears, how will joy and laughter sneak in through the cracks? How will they surprise you, or give you the relief you didn’t think you’d ever have again? Let that hope spark up in you. You’ll have joy again. Here are a few stories of how it happened for me.