Transcript

Jacy: Jesus Breathed
Season 1: Episode 5

Carol: 0:13

Welcome to the God is Good podcast, where we share stories of those who have reignited their faith in Jesus and experienced remarkable life transformations. My name is Carol O'Brien, and I'm your host for this podcast. If our episodes touch your heart, and you would like to get involved and help us on our mission of moving hearts toward Jesus, please listen to the end of this episode to learn how. Jesus said to them, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit, whose sins you forgive are forgiven, and whose sins you retain are retained." John 20, verses 21 through 23. Hello Friends in Christ. Welcome to this episode. I'm pleased to introduce you to our next storyteller and my friend, Jacy. Jacy's journey is a testament to resilience and faith, marked by dramatic childhood experiences and a series of difficult decisions in adulthood. Her story, though filled with trials, is ultimately one of profound transformation and unwavering faith. When a friend urged Jacy to go on a spiritual retreat she really didn't want to go. Once there, she decided it was time to cleanse her soul of the bad decisions she had made as an adult. The initial outcome was not what she had hoped for, leaving her completely devastated until she had a life changing encounter with Jesus. This encounter marked a turning point, igniting a profound spiritual transformation and renewal within her. Let me stop here and tell you a little bit about Jacy. She is blessed with a wonderful, supportive husband who has been a steadfast partner through her trials and triumphs. Together, they have two amazing sons. Health challenges have never slowed her down, and she very tirelessly serves her church community with love and grace. Without further delay, let's hear from Jacy. Hi, lovely. Welcome to the podcast.

Jacy: 2:29

Hey, Carol. Thanks. I'm happy to be here, and thank you for giving me an opportunity to share my story.

Carol: 2:36

Well, we're excited to hear your transformation, so let's get right into it. It's one that really touches me deeply, having known you as a friend, but not knowing the depths of your story. Can you share your early life with us?

Jacy: 2:50

Yeah, my childhood was rough. I mean, there was a lot of abuse. It's almost too much when you look at where I am now and realize all of the things that happened to me. Let me start at the beginning. I was unplanned, and my parents did wind up getting married, but that was really not the best thing, because my father was very abusive. By the time I was a few years old, my mom had had enough, as she should. But he was a very persistent, very bad, bad person. He would force his way into her apartment and he made sure I was in the room every time he would force his way in to beat her up. It was horrible. I think about that what would that have done to a child to see that? So she feared for her life and he took me and dumped me at my grandparents house, which is pretty much what she thought would happen. She knew that he didn't really want me. I was just a pawn in the whole control thing that he had. So I lived with my grandparents for a while and then they sent me to live with an aunt and uncle in Puerto Rico. And I lived there for a few years. My life was pretty easy and pretty calm. My aunt was very strict. But she was also very loving. I knew that I was loved and that was a really good place to be after some of the stuff I had gone through. Well, in the meantime, my father wound up getting remarried. He tricked my aunt into flying us back to New York for a visit. That was when he told my aunt that"No, Jacy will not be going back to Puerto Rico with you. And no, you cannot say goodbye." So you can imagine at six years old, this is pretty devastating.

Carol: 4:35

Everything you knew, your whole life, it suddenly changed. I imagine that had a dramatic effect on your life.

Jacy: 4:43

Exactly. So when my mom found out that my father had me again, she tried to file for custody with the court. And she was actually granted custody and she brought me to live with her at her parents' house. My father appealed to the court. On paper, it looked like my father was the better choice steady job and a new wife and a house on Long Island and a baby, all kinds of stability. They didn't realize that he was abusive. My mom at the time took care of elderly relatives So she didn't have a job, but her job within the family was to take care of these two elderly women who were family members. And it was the seventies. It was a time where dad's rights were this new found thing. And so, my mom got word that she was about to lose custody of me. So, she did the only thing that she could think to do. She and her parents arranged for her to take a trip with me to Southern Illinois, where her brother lived with his family. And we would essentially hide. Well, live there for a few months I was enrolled in a Catholic school. And my father figured out where I was through various means, both legal and illegal. He and my uncle went and got a whole tour of the school. It just so happened that gym class was letting out at that time And I saw my father and my uncle as we were starting to come down the stairs as a class. I freaked out and I ran up the stairs crying at my gym teacher because I knew he wasn't supposed to be there. Something was wrong. My gym teacher didn't know that these men were here pretending to be something that they weren't. Next thing I know, he's putting me in the car and we start driving. So here's my father driving through this parking lot like a madman, nuns chasing after him, me crying hysterically. He found this narrow gap that happened to be in between two buildings and made his escape. It was just horrible. Can you imagine being seven years old and going through all this? During this entire time of my life, I feel like a ping pong ball. I have no control. I'm being bounced around everywhere. Ping pong ball. That was who I believed myself to be.

Carol: 7:02

Oh my goodness, it was one traumatic experience after another. I know you were young, but do you remember God being in your life? Do you remember having a foundation of any kind of faith?

Jacy: 7:14

Not really. I vaguely knew that I was Catholic because that's what I was told. I went to that Catholic school for that very brief time and I remember being really excited that I would be making my first communion. I was in second grade and then the whole kidnapping thing happened and it didn't happen.

Carol: 7:34

So let me understand, because of the court order, your father legally had custody of you at that time.

Jacy: 7:40

He did. And because my mother had taken me out of state, she lost all right to appeal and fight this. So, after I came back to New York, my father managed to convince a local Catholic school I needed to be there to keep me safe from my mother kidnapping me. How ironic is that? But those three years of my life were honestly the best years of my childhood. Even though I was dealing with abuse at home, at school, it was safe. I had a fourth grade teacher who was a nun and that's where I learned the rosary. I actively wanted to go to Mass. I thought that that would be a great place to be and I believed in God and wanted to be there and I started going with a friend. Then my father forbid me from going, so that didn't last very long. But I knew God was there. I prayed in my own way. Whenever I was in trouble, I would pray. But it was rough, God was there, but I didn't really feel Him I never stopped believing, but I didn't really necessarily feel His presence.

Carol: 8:48

So let's talk about when you were a young adult. How would you describe your faith at that point? Were you passionate about God? Were you indifferent?

Jacy: 8:57

I was pretty far away from faith. I mean, I always knew God was sort of there, but I had been let down so many times by so many people in my life. I didn't trust anybody. And I certainly didn't trust God. Why would he let me go through all this stuff? I made my escape when I was 19. I moved across the country with my then boyfriend. It was legitimately just an escape from the abusive household that I was in. It was not a good marriage. He did not support me in any of the things that I wanted to do. But somehow in all of this weirdness of my childhood, I didn't want to be that person who gets a divorce. So I did whatever I had to do to stay in that marriage. I made some really bad choices. And I was so far from the church. I had given up by that point on asking God for help. I was just really trying to stay married. I mean, it sounds ridiculous now because he was so bad for me.

Carol: 10:03

But you were just trying to survive. I've been talking with a number of people through this podcast and I'm finding story after story of how if we don't have love and stability in our childhood, we grow to a point where we're just trying to find something to fill those holes in our hearts.

Jacy: 10:23

Exactly. I just wanted to be loved. And I followed this man to Northern California for his career. I followed this man to Austin, Texas for his career. I kept putting myself dead last in all of it. And then, when I was 26 years old, I became disabled. Within a year of that, he dumped me. I was no longer useful to him.

Carol: 10:47

That must have been so hard. What happened then?

Jacy: 10:50

I moved to Illinois when I was dumped and I met the man who would become my husband. I met the right person at the worst time. My divorce wasn't even final at that point. Although I will tell you we've been married at this point for 25 and a half years. So it was obviously the right decision. When I was pregnant, I started to feel a longing for God. My husband had been raised marginally Lutheran so I got my boys baptized in a Lutheran church thinking I'm trying to move toward faith. Every once in a while, I would be drawn to the Catholic church. As my kids were going through their early childhood years, every once in a while, I'd wake up on a Sunday and say, Hmm, I'm going to go to church today. And I would go, and I don't know how God did this, but every time the priest would be up there in the homily, talking directly to me telling me exactly what I needed to hear in that moment, and it was incredible. That same year, my good friend went on a Cursio retreat. And she came back from that retreat on fire. She said,"Jacy, you need to go on this retreat." So I went several months later. And that first night I was so out of place. I didn't want to be there. I'm looking around going, all these people are going to be talking about God all weekend long. This is going to be ridiculous. But I didn't have a car, and I didn't even have my phone, so it wasn't as though I could just get up and leave. So I'm like, alright, I'm just gonna do this. I had a lot of time to think about why am I here, what am I doing, what am I going to get out of this. So I waited in the line and I went to confession for all those bad decisions I made, especially in my first marriage. And I spilled the beans. Everything that I had done. And I was ready for what you expect when you go to confession-- you expect absolution. It's not what I got. He told me there would be no absolution unless I made monumental changes to my life. Changes that seemed impossible. I never got my first marriage annulled. I was in a civil marriage. Well, there's no absolution if you're living in that situation. I was devastated at that point. Here I was laying it all out, laying my soul out to God at this point. And he didn't give me what I needed.

Carol: 13:20

I can't imagine what you were feeling in that moment. You were prepared to receive that cleansing of your soul and it didn't happen.

Jacy: 13:28

Yeah, exactly. It was absolutely devastating. How could I even be here anymore? How could I continue? And I actively started trying to figure out how to escape.

Carol: 13:40

Now, isn't that interesting? You used the same word, escape, when you talked about wanting to get out of an abusive house. And then fast forward, you're in an environment where you thought was going to be loving and protective, and maybe it was, but you couldn't see it at that point, and the first thing you needed to do was"escape."

Jacy: 14:00

Right. And I wanted not just out of the retreat, I wanted out of my life because what's the point anymore if I can't be forgiven? I went to bed that night, just crying and crying. The next day I thought to myself, okay, well, I must have misunderstood. I knew my faith well enough to know that that's not how this is supposed to work, or so I thought. And I sought out the priest again. And he spent another long period of time with me. And I was still devastated, but he said,"Jacy, I'm going to help you through this. I'm going to help you get through the annulment. You just have to trust, but I'm going to help you." Well, I was still pretty devastated. I was still on the retreat, but I was going through the motions. We were in a room with the exposed Blessed Sacrament and we were praying the rosary. In the same room, there was a portrait of Jesus. I was sitting there, with my rosary beads, when all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something odd. The portrait of Jesus was breathing. Like when you're outside on a cold day and you see the breath. That's exactly what I was seeing. I'm looking around like, wait, is anybody else seeing this? Because this was weird. And this just didn't make any sense. Somebody else has got to be seeing this if this is happening. And every time I looked around to see what other people would be seeing, nobody else was noticing this. And every time I looked back at the portrait, his face was becoming more and more physically there. So he went from being a flat portrait with a breath coming out of him to a three dimensional person in the portrait, breathing.

Carol: 15:44

What a monumental experience. It must have been life changing.

Jacy: 15:48

It was. When I looked back at him in this three dimensional being, I realized that he was there somehow for me and a peace just washed over me. It was a peace that I didn't fully understand. Like I didn't really even understand the implications of it yet. I just knew somehow Jesus was there. He stayed with me for the entirety of that rosary. And then as we closed the prayers. I looked back and He was gone. But it changed me. I went from being at the lowest point in my life to realizing that no matter what this process is going to look like, it's going to be okay.

Carol: 16:31

I love that. What I see is that the healing you were seeking began. It didn't come in the form you expected, but God was working for your good.

Jacy: 16:41

Exactly. And then here's the really interesting thing about all of that. I was enrolled in classes to get confirmed. We were talking about the sacrament of reconciliation and the part in the Bible where Jesus breathed on his disciples. And I just started bawling because up until that point, I hadn't quite realized the exact significance of the breath.

Carol: 17:09

Let me read the scripture again. John 20, verses 21 through 23."Jesus said to them, Peace be with you. As the father has sent me. So I send you and when he said this he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit whose sins you forgive are forgiven and whose sins you retain are retained." As we're wrapping up, is there anything else you want to share about your story?

Jacy: 17:39

Yeah, I wound up meeting with the priest who had been on the retreat, and he started me on the paperwork for my annulment. He drove almost an hour one way, just to get to my house to do the Pre-Cana classes with my husband and myself. The annulment went through and my husband and I married in church on our 12th anniversary, which was really special.

Carol: 18:01

You're so right. That's very special and beautiful. Jacy, you've clearly been touched by the peace of Jesus. Thank you so much for sharing. I hope our listeners are inspired by your story. Many of us have wounds from childhood that directly impact the decisions we make as adults. Your story of love and peace is a reminder that God has a plan for us that is good. It may take us a while to follow God's will, but it's never too late to literally or figuratively feel his loving breath on us.

Jacy: 18:35

Thank you, Carol. My hope for anyone hearing this is that people will realize God's there. Even when you think He's given up on you. He doesn't, He doesn't ever give up on you. And that is what has gotten me through some very difficult times in my life.

Carol: 18:54

Thanks again, Jacy. We welcome everyone who would like to become involved in this movement. We're moving hearts towards Jesus, and there are really great ways for you to get involved. One way is by becoming a storyteller and sharing your story. And second, we humbly ask you to consider donating to the podcast via a small one time or monthly donation. The funds will help us produce the podcast and even allow us to offer some spiritual retreat scholarships. You can do both of these things at GodIsGoodPodcast.com/joinus. All of your support, whether it's a donation, a like, a follow, or even sharing the podcast with a friend, is so appreciated. It really helps us move as many hearts as possible toward Jesus. Until next time, friends, remember, God is good.

Jacy: 19:49

All the time.

Carol: 19:50

Amen.

Jacy: 19:51

Amen.