Transcript

LeighAnn: Striving for Jesus
Season 1: Episode 6

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. And we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who were called according to his purpose." Romans 8 verse 28. Welcome to this episode of the God is Good podcast. I'm happy to introduce you to a new friend in Christ. LeighAnn has a beautiful heart dedicated to caring for and healing others. As a preview to what you will hear today, LeighAnn's story is a journey that began in childhood and continued through a life dedicated to overcoming the pains of the past. A desperate focus on striving and achieving so she could prove her worth came at the expense of a relationship with Jesus. Family crises and the death of a loved one brought her to a point from which only God could save her. But before we get into the depths of her story, let me tell you a little bit about LeighAnn. Following a powerful experience with the birth of her son, she was called to the profession of nursing. After years in her career, she took the courageous move of combining her faith with her nurse's heart to build a coaching business called Crosswinds Collaborative. Through this inspired effort, LeighAnn now serves women going through significant transitions, feelings of low self worth, and feelings of being overwhelmed. And that journey has led her to us today. Please join me in welcoming LeighAnn to the podcast. Hello, LeighAnn!

LeighAnn: 2:08

Hi, Carol. It's so great to be here. Thank you so much.

Carol: 2:12

Oh, I'm so glad you're here. In the opening, I gave a quick introduction to your story, starting with a difficult childhood. Is that something you can share more about?

LeighAnn: 2:21

Yeah, I'd be happy to. I did grow up in a broken home like a lot of people. My mom was a single mom. She worked tirelessly three jobs. She also suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and depression. We didn't have a lot and there was a lot of turmoil and dysfunction that went along in our house. It made the home feel unsafe and really lonely for me. I was the youngest of four. I lived with a sense that I was a burden to my mom and my family for so many years because I was the youngest and because we were barely making it. I felt like if I wasn't there, would their lives be better? Would it be easier for them? So that was a hard thing to carry as a child.

Carol: 3:05

Wow, that's hard. I'm both surprised and disheartened that that was your awareness as a child. Speaking of your childhood, what was your faith foundation?

LeighAnn: 3:17

I was a believer. I was more or less what I call a stick figure, one dimensional believer because I knew there was a God, but my faith didn't go past that. I didn't know that there was anything more than that. I had no idea of the power and access that I had to the spiritual blessings of relationship with Jesus. We attended church from time to time with my grandma but I never really felt a solid foundation nor that I belonged there.

Carol: 3:47

I've never heard that phrase before. A stick figure, one dimensional believer. It's so fitting though, isn't it? When there's no relationship, it's all one sided, one dimensional. You said you thought you were a burden. In your young mind and heart, how did that affect the way you felt about yourself?

LeighAnn: 4:05

I think you touch on a really good point because all of my striving and all of my accomplishments were really rooted in proving myself and proving my worth. If I can just show them I can do that, then I'll earn the love that I was so desperately seeking. Again, I didn't realize that there was relationship in Jesus and God. I just thought He existed and we just needed to believe in Him. But what I was searching for was that value and worth that He had already placed in me, which all I had to do was go to Him to discover it. But I wasn't walking with the Lord. My older sister, Allison, was always a faithful believer and she was influential in planting so many seeds through the years, even though I wasn't really listening. I know that she was always planting those seeds. So in spite of my early struggles and the home life being difficult, I was just striving and pressing on. If I just do this one more thing, then I will earn that love and affection and attention and I won't be abandoned or rejected or all of those things.

Carol: 5:08

I think we do this as adults sometimes too."If I can just do or have this one thing, then I'll finally be happy." Too often we get that thing or that accomplishment and realize it was never what we needed in the first place. So you were working hard. What happened?

LeighAnn: 5:26

I just thrived... on the surface anyway. I was a class president. I was taking college courses in high school. I had friends. I was in sports. At 18, I thought I had the world on a platter. I was graduating high school and just getting out of Dodge getting out of the small town. I was going to live my life. I was enlisted in the army and enrolled at UConn, which is the State University in Connecticut I was going to Military training. I was at MEPS, Military Entry Processing System, in Springfield, Massachusetts. I found out on the day that I was supposed to be going to training, I was expecting my first child. Everything got turned upside down. All my plans changed suddenly. Instead of attending military training in college, I was binge watching a baby story on TLC. I just needed to know everything there was about pregnancy and labor and delivery. This was going to be what was happening to me and I just needed to educate myself. So I used the baby story on TLC to do that, which is cute now that I think of it. I I was kicked out of my house for being a teen mom, unwedded teen mom, kicked out. I ended up having to find a place to live. I stayed with my grandma for a time, worked three jobs, hustled, hustled, hustled.

Carol: 6:44

So you just did what you knew to do, right? It's the way you had been coping with challenges your whole life. You hustled. And I imagine your life was going to change even further.

LeighAnn: 6:55

Yeah, My son came, and his dad and I got married. We literally put our heads down and the rest is like a blur. We just hustled. We worked. We strived. My husband also had a very difficult childhood. So we were both running away from our childhoods. We did everything that we could possibly do to keep our kids from having the same experience we did. It was so hard starting out without anything, with very little support. Everyone around us is young and living the freedom lifestyle and you're just doing what you have to do to keep up and survive.

Carol: 7:30

Given that you and your husband had a similar childhood experience, did that help in creating a foundation for your marriage?

LeighAnn: 7:37

No. My husband and I had a challenging marriage. We started off pretty awkwardly. We had a lot of critical, judgmental episodes. It just wasn't that picture perfect honeymoon start. And so that kind of played into the years. The only thing that really kept us connected was that desire to give our kids that roof over their heads, that family life that we didn't have. And so that was really our focus. And that kept us going for the years that we weren't chasing the Lord.

Carol: 8:10

I'm curious how you got from that experience where you guys were struggling so much to now where you've been together for a long time.

LeighAnn: 8:18

Oh, yeah So that's the thing, right? So we hustled and were married for nearly 20 years. Lots of ups and downs, both of us trying to stay focused on the family goals and what we wanted for our family. It was the winter of 2021. My mom was hospitalized with COVID 19 and my marriage was officially in crisis. Everything was falling apart. Everything I'd worked so hard to prevent by being a good wife and a good mother and a good nurse and all of the things like it didn't add up. I couldn't believe it. This is everything I was running from my whole life. During that time, my husband was sleeping on the couch at his mother's apartment and my mom was dying in the hospital while I was unable to visit her. And I had never felt so alone and honestly, so destroyed. I lost nearly 20 pounds during that like three weeks of time. It was so much pain and grief and disbelief and shock, and trauma. My mom died in January of 2022. I had only been able to see her twice while she was in the hospital because she had COVID. That is when everything stopped. I was hardened to everything. My spouse wanted reconciliation and tried to support me when my mom died tragically, but I was like hardened to him. I was just in survival mode. For anyone who has experienced betrayal or brokenness in your marriage, nothing can compare to that pain and on top of grieving the loss of someone so close to you. That's when I couldn't do it anymore. I think I needed to have everything stripped away. Where I just, I couldn't without God.

Carol: 10:08

That moment you realized that all that running, that striving was bringing you further from the one who had the answers all along?

LeighAnn: 10:16

And honestly, Carol, it took almost 20 years before I made that connection. That all of this driving wasn't getting me where I needed to be I didn't believe it until I saw how God had been chasing me and showing himself to me in so many ways in the last 20 years. And, and I just was,"No, no, no, I got it." I just was either ignoring it. I didn't, I wouldn't see it. It was right in front of me in all the ways right back from when I was 19 having a baby and an inspiring nurse gave me direction of my life. My son just saved my life in so many ways. Around the time that I was enlisted in the military, it was during 9/11, and 90 percent of my unit was deployed, but I was, able to stay home and mother him and be with him instead of being deployed with all the other mothers. I was saved from going to Afghanistan. So he saved me in so many ways. And that's how God works by just working all things together for the good of those who love him. Even if it doesn't make sense in the time. All of these things like God was there the whole time.

Carol: 11:20

So you had this painful but beautiful moment when you realized that God had been working your whole life for your good, even though you couldn't see it. So is this where a new path began for you? And if so, how did it happen?

LeighAnn: 11:33

So I told my husband, and I didn't think he would do it, to call Allie my faithful sister, who had always been planting seeds through the years And he did. He got off the phone with me and called my sister. She prompted him to seek God, and he did that. He not only sought God, he powerfully leaned in, and he hasn't been the same since. He used to be critical of religion and never had any interest in church. Now he was bringing me to church and reading me daily devotionals. He would read to me the Bible Over time, I was able to slowly heal and open up. I could see how the Lord transformed my husband right before my eyes. The Lord works miracles, and I was just softening to that reality. Softening to that there's more to God than just, the stick figure belief that I had. So I jumped in with my husband. It's kind of bittersweet in that it took us so much time to get there, but the Lord doesn't waste anything. And it's so beautiful when the two of you can do it together. We are so blessed beyond measure that we both are deeply in love with the Lord and who he is and his character and our lives are led by him.

Carol: 12:52

So it sounds like you've transformed from a stick figure believer into a full fledged God is the center of your life kind of figure. It's very rich and it's very beautiful. How do you maintain that? What do you do to nourish and nurture that faith?

LeighAnn: 13:08

We are all in type of people. It's kind of funny and we laugh about it. But if we say we're going to do something, we do it. We go all in. So we signed up for every single class we could get our hands on. We never miss a church service. We go to every single thing that the church puts on. We're volunteering. We're raking leaves. We're planting seeds. We're making chili. We're on the worship team. We're doing anything we could do. You know, we have that heart and it's all a hunger.

Carol: 13:38

I so love that it's not your spirit that has changed. It's just the direction. You're still striving, but you're striving toward the Lord and you're doing it together.

LeighAnn: 13:49

But we did have a fear of what if we fall back? What if we backslide? We don't want to lose this. It's just over three years. We are at the same place. Our fire is still burning so hot for the Lord.

Carol: 14:01

So how do you maintain that fire?

LeighAnn: 14:04

We stay on fire by pursuing him through letting him continue to sanctify us. And for me, that looks like a lot of inner healing that I have to do to release limiting beliefs and release the old ways that I used to behave. I used to let myself be objectified by people, run over, used up, taken advantage of, and I wouldn't say boo about it. I would just let it happen because either I didn't feel good enough or I thought it didn't matter. But now I demand a certain excellence for myself because of who dwells in me, right? So I'm not letting those things happen to me anymore because I know the glorious, righteous King who dwells in me, I am a temple for Him.

Carol: 14:50

I love that. And I love that you have taken all of your experiences and all of that love that you've received, and now you're pouring it into your business, and then helping other women achieve that same joy and fulfillment.

LeighAnn: 15:03

Yeah. My husband and I both have a mission and a purpose in our life to really bring as many people to Jesus as possible. In fact, I did start my coaching practice for people like my mom. I think my mom worked so hard to give us love in spite of her likely experiencing so much burnout herself. I always admired her compassion and loving heart knowing that she was coming from a place of lack she tried her hardest. I think about how my mom's life, my sibling's life, and my own life could have been different if my mom had gotten coaching or just had support that she needed. I've been a women's health nurse for nearly 20 years and in that space I have been blessed to walk with women as they experience the joys of new beginnings and of course sharing in the pain of crushing loss. So I learned a lot about women and what they need to live in their self worth and live in their confidence, their God confidence. Our lives just become unsustainable with the expectations we put on ourselves. I really wanted to use my nursing expertise and my coaching training, my love of the Lord, just to create something that can help walk with women as they learn to grow in their awareness of their God worth, their God given purpose. And my coaching is faith fueled. We work on shifting mindsets and showing up authentically, learning self compassion in a safe, supportive space. That's what I'm passionate about.

Carol: 16:32

So before we close, do you have any advice for our listeners?

LeighAnn: 16:36

I think my takeaway would be if you want to be in relationship with the Lord, take some time and ask the Lord, what is getting in the way of me receiving what you have for me?" What's blocking you from being able to really receive his love? And see what comes up for you. Be gentle with yourself because God is so gentle. He's not gonna lambast you with a lot of things all at once. Sometimes it's just one thing. And, relationship with Jesus is amazing and it's available to all of us who believe in him.

Carol: 17:10

That's so great. I was thinking about one of the things that we had talked about earlier with those blockades, and I think we unintentionally do it to ourselves. We have these God-sized holes in us and we're filling it with everything but God. And so if we just stop trying to fill it, God will take up that space and create some beauty within us. Your favorite scripture is the one that we opened with. Romans 8, 28, which expresses that even in difficult situations, God is actively working for our benefit and our spiritual growth."We know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who were called according to his purpose." LeighAnn, your life, your journey, and your mission show that you live the scripture out in your everyday life. So the name of your coaching business again is Crosswinds Collaborative. How can our listeners find you?

LeighAnn: 18:04

I have a website. It's www.crosswindscollab.com. So that's, C-O-L-L-A B.com. It's short for collaborative. I'm also on Instagram and on Facebook. You can find me at crosswinds collab.

Carol: 18:21

Thank you for sharing your story, LeighAnn. I know that I have been moved by your story, and I'm sure it will move at least one heart toward Jesus.

LeighAnn: 18:29

Thank you, Carol. It was great to be here. And I really appreciate this space to share some of my story. I do hope that it helps move one heart closer to Jesus.

Carol: 18:39

I'm sure it will. We welcome everyone who would like to become involved in this movement. There are really great ways for you to get involved. One is by becoming a storyteller and sharing your story. And second, we humbly ask you to consider donating to the podcast. Thank you to those who have already taken the step to donate. The funds will help us produce the podcast and even allow us to offer some spiritual retreat scholarships. You can sign up as a storyteller or donate 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.

LeighAnn: 19:30

God is good. Thank you, Carol.