Celebrate Christmas Eve at FAC! LEARN MORE

  • Posted:
  • December 12, 2024
  • Categories:
  • Stories

In the Room: Rediscovering Trust in God

I’ve been attending FAC since my family moved to Calgary in the summer of 1991—when I was 17 years old! Other than moving every 3 to 4 years, my childhood was fairly uneventful. I prayed to receive Christ as my saviour when I was 5. I remember praying the prayer of salvation during family devotions one evening and then praying the same prayer again the next evening. (My parents quickly assured me that once I had invited Jesus into my life He would never leave me, so I didn’t need to keep praying that prayer!).

After moving to Calgary as a teenager, FAC quickly became my home church. My life took a few twists and turns in my 20s, but I always found myself returning to God. During those years, I volunteered in Discoveryland, Harvest Ministries, and Choir. When I met and married my husband, Brian, FAC became his home church as well. In 2008, we became parents when we welcomed 2 sweet boys into our family, and then we became a family of 5 when their sister was born 11 months later! Life was extremely busy with 3 little ones so close in age, but we felt God’s leading and knew we’d been given a beautiful gift when we adopted this sibling group.

We quickly learned that adoption, no matter how young the children are when they are adopted, comes with some unique challenges, and we realized that we needed some extra training to be the parents our kiddos needed. We started making significant changes in how we were parenting and even became involved in training other adoptive and foster parents. Life was challenging but we still felt very strongly that God was with us and the challenges had a purpose.

In the spring of 2015, my mom was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Despite being told early on that the average life expectancy for a person with this type of tumour was 2.5 years, we had some hope that she could beat the odds. She responded well to surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, but by Christmas of that year, it was starting to look like she might not recover from this cancer. Throughout the next year and a half, her condition continued to deteriorate. She lost the ability to walk, then she slowly lost the ability to do anything for herself. My dad cared for her at home until the last few days of her life. She passed away on October 1, 2017.

On nights that I helped Dad with Mom’s bedtime routine, I would hear him end his prayer time with her by saying, “Jesus, we trust you.” By the time she died, however, I was struggling to trust Jesus. Losing her felt like an unnecessary cruelty. As our kids grew, their needs became more complex and I didn’t understand why God had allowed cancer to take such an important person away from us. She was such a crucial part of our support network. In 2019, we celebrated when my dad found a new love and got married, but it also felt like a huge loss because he ended up moving away from Calgary. Both of our primary supports were now gone.

In April of 2020, my husband, Brian, suffered a stroke. As grateful as we were that he was still alive and able to walk, talk, and work, our lives changed again as we adjusted to the ways the stroke impacted him and our family. During this time, our kids were entering their teenage years and we started dealing with some things that were more challenging and complex than anything we had dealt with before.

I found myself pulling further away from God. I didn’t lose my faith completely – I still attended church and I still believed in the existence of God – but I stopped praying and wasn’t finding joy in my relationship with Him. I didn’t know if I could trust Him. The pain of the grief and loss I was experiencing was too much and I retreated spiritually. I continued on like this for a few years, wanting to trust God and return to deeper relationship with Him, but not allowing myself to.

Then came the summer of 2024. We were dealing with a significant mental health crisis in our family, and I began to feel like our family was falling apart. I became depressed and had two dominant emotional states: angry and numb. Through the help of my therapist and our family doctor, I was able to acknowledge that I needed help and started medication. Almost immediately, I started to feel like myself again, and decided that I did not want to continue on as I had been – content to keep God at arm’s length. When Pastor Dave advertised a ‘4-week taster’ for choir, I was interested and decided to give it a shot. I thought that maybe if I put myself in a room full of people united in worship, I could find my way back to God.

At this point, my life took another interesting detour. The weekend after the first choir rehearsal, I ended up in the hospital waiting to have my gall bladder removed! It felt like an unnecessary blip, and I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the pain prevented me from treating the weekend like a spa getaway!

Because it was a weekend, there was only 1 operating room being used, and I was finally prepped for surgery late on Sunday evening. I was wheeled to a waiting area outside the operating room, and found it somewhat unnerving that only about half the lights were on and I couldn’t see many people. I thought, “It’s weird being here all alone.” Two words immediately crashed into my mind: “NOT ALONE. NOT ALONE.” I was overwhelmed with God’s presence and felt tears come to my eyes. It felt like God was telling me that He was with me and that, in fact, He always had been.

Not long after that, we started singing a song in choir called “In The Room.” It talks about how no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, God is with us. He’s in the room! Singing that song in our weekend services was a very moving experience for me. It felt deeply personal, and I started to feel like I could trust God – I could trust Him to always be with me. A few weeks after that, Pastor Kyle preached a message on Psalm 88 and repeated the same truth: no matter what we face, Jesus is with us! Now we are entering the Advent season and I am focusing on Emmanuel, God with us.

The circumstances of my life remain largely the same. Things in our home have stabilized, but life remains complex. I still miss my mom, and I miss having my dad close by. I wish Brian didn’t have to deal with chronic pain and other stroke side effects, and I wish the other challenges we are facing had simple solutions. But I feel hope and joy returning. I am starting to trust God again, and am so grateful that He has promised to always be with me. Isn’t it funny how I needed to learn that God loves me and will never leave me as a 5-year-old, and am still learning that lesson as a 50-year-old?!

That makes me smile, and I think it makes God smile, too.

Thank you, Colleen, for sharing your story!

 

You may also be interested in …