In 2001, at the age of 23, I became a widow. My first husband, Todd, had a massive aneurysm at 27 years old.
At this time, I knew the Lord, but I didn’t know Him in the hard places. Through worship, I learned who God wanted to be to me. I was grieving, but not grieving well. I didn’t know any other widows who were my age, young without children. The ones I did know were in their eighties and felt I just couldn’t relate to them.
A couple years passed, and I began dating a family friend, Blair. He was a fighter pilot who flew A-10s. We dated a short while and married in 2003. Life was beautiful once again. We got pregnant with our first child in New Orleans but had to relocate due to Hurricane Katrina. We moved to Mississippi, had our baby and later, another child. Blair wound up training the next generation of pilots. We were busy with family, church and worship. Things were good, but my grief was building.
In April of 2008, when our first child was two, Blair went out to fly with one of his students. As they took off down the runway, a cable broke, causing the plane to flip with a full tank of gas. Both men were ejected and were instantly killed. I was now a widow for the second time in my life.
I did not have the emotional maturity to process so much sadness, but I clung to The Word and the promise that we are to grieve with hope.
“Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.” 1 Thessalonians 4: 13
Mistakenly, I thought it was my role to only hope, but it should have been to grieve with hope.
It left me in a place of strength, but with a lack of emotional wellness. I was spiritually mature, but emotionally bankrupt. As I gritted it out with scripture, I gained more knowledge, but I didn’t realize how important my emotions were to God. In my mind, He was waiting for me to wave the flag of goodness without being too sad.
Eventually, I moved to Alabama and found a group of women who were loving people so radically like I had never experienced before. They were not only spiritually mature, but also emotionally healthy. They were walking in the Holy Spirit to love people. God rightfully deposited me into their circle, and I learned I was basically keeping secrets from myself. My eyes were opened to the Holy Spirit and that is how my ministry, Never Alone Widows, began. This also helped to open my heart up for another relationship. I had to lay down my secrets and my shame and feel again through therapy.
After I married, I wanted other women to be able to share their stories too. The blood of the lamb is so powerful, as in the verse from Revelation 12:11.
“They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”
I wanted a ministry, an outreach, for women, especially widows, to share their stories in retreats, conferences, and community groups. Never Alone Widows came about to help that younger version of myself. We have 60 local groups across the country, dedicated to helping women with their healing journey and emotional health. By having small, curated retreats, conferences, and creating curriculum, we help them share their stories and hopefully heal by having hope in their grief.
There is no way to quantify what all God has done. I will never know until heaven, all the women who have been impacted through this ministry. We must surrender through the hardest parts of our lives, to the demonstration of the Gospel and what God can do with our ‘yes.’
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