Transcript

Abby: Communities of Love
Season 1: Episode 7

Carol: Welcome to the God is Good podcast, where we share stories of everyday people 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.

Carol: Before we begin today's episode, I want to take a quick moment to say thank you to you, our listeners. We started this mission a few months ago with two storytellers and the goal of moving one heart at a time toward Jesus. Our first episodes surprisingly reached dozens of hearts. We are so humbled that God keeps sending us delightful storytellers and we are now beginning to reach hundreds of hearts.

Carol: God willing, and from what I understand is surpassing the odds, we are poised to soon reach thousands. All of [00:01:00] this growth has been organic because you are sharing our stories with your friends and family. So thank you for helping us move so many hearts toward Jesus.

Carol: Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again. Rejoice have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your request known to God. Keep on doing what you have learned and received, and heard and seen in me. Then the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4:4-9.

Carol: I'm so happy to introduce you to our newest storyteller, Abby. Hers is a story of finding worth in God's love. As St. Teresas of Calcutta said, "The greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, having no one. I have come more and more to realize it is the worst disease that any human being can ever [00:02:00] experience."

Carol: God saw Abby's feelings of being unworthy, unloved, and alone with her decisions. Without her realizing it, He sent the people she needed at the exact right time. Abby transformed from lukewarm to on fire and recently felt a strong calling to share her story. We are so pleased she's here with us today. Welcome, Abby!

Abby: Thank you so much for allowing me to share my testimony. 

Carol: You have a powerful story, and I love that it is about a gradual conversion rather than a big Ah Ha moment. Can you start by telling us about your childhood?

Abby: So growing up, I would say I grew up in a broken home. Broken, not in the sense of I was living between two divorced parents in different households, but broken in the sense that I grew up watching my parents fight all the time. Just bad fights. Sometimes they resulted, with violence. My dad was also an [00:03:00] alcoholic and he had some drug addiction as well.

Abby: So that also played a part in my upbringing and seeing the repercussions of that. That kind of started planting the seed of what I thought relationships were supposed to be like.

Abby: I was also a victim of molestation in my childhood. So that coupled with the fighting and the domestic abuse that I saw shaped my perception of what I thought love looked like.

Carol: Abby, I can't begin to imagine the pain you must have endured as a child. I think you're very wise though to recognize how it all changed your perception of love.

Abby: Doing this podcast, I'm learning so much about how our childhoods impact how well we are equipped or not equipped to make adult decisions. Before we get there, can you tell us if you had a faith foundation as a child?

Faith wasn't something that was really focused on in my family. We knew about [00:04:00] God, we knew we were Catholic, but I wouldn't say that we were praying together as a family. We just checked all the boxes, essentially. I was a cradle Catholic. My mom would take me to mass regularly up until I made my confirmation. So after my confirmation it became up to me whether or not I wanted to go to church.

Carol: I was very lukewarm in my faith life in that I would pray occasionally. I prayed when I was in trouble or when I needed something, but I wasn't praying just consistently.

I spoke a little bit about making adult decisions following childhood traumas. What do you think about that? How would you describe your ability to make decisions after everything that you went through?

Abby: Growing up a lot of my life was bad. It was full of very dangerous, risky, and bad decisions. A lot of it was just through circumstance and just a product of my [00:05:00] environment. Being molested as an example. It was by somebody in my family. I didn't at the time say anything about it. I actually never said anything about it to my mom. She's now passed away, but I was at a place in my life where I just thought it would be my fault. I thought that I wouldn't be believed or I thought that it would be justified in some way.

Abby: Looking back, I would say I probably felt like I wasn't loved and nurtured . So bringing this extra problem to my mom's plate, on top of all the other problems I had seen her and witnessed her experiencing, I just felt like this was something I should just keep to myself.

Carol: It sounds like you didn't have anyone you could turn to, which must have been really hard. Let's transition from childhood to young adulthood. Can you tell us about that time of your life? 

Abby: Growing up in this home where I just witnessed this unhealthy type of relationship and then also being a victim of [00:06:00] molestation, it all put together this thought in my head of what I thought love was. And so I think for me, I was just trying to cling on to anything that felt like love.

Abby: I found myself in a high school relationship with this boy and I just thought it was the best thing ever. I thought it was the best thing in the world. I had somebody that would listen to me and that would talk to me and that would hear all my problems. And everything just seemed great, while ignoring all the other red flags.

Abby: If maybe I had seen something different, I would have realized. Being in this relationship that was unhealthy, although maybe I didn't realize that at the time, resulted in me having a pregnancy. That pregnancy resulted in an abortion.

Abby: And after that, not only did I stay in the relationship, but it also produced two other children out of wedlock.

Carol: Were you still afraid to talk to your family about what was [00:07:00] happening in your life at this point?

Abby: Oh yeah, this relationship that I was in was definitely not one that my parents approved of, at all. So I kept doing it. That was probably out of spite. That was out of rebellion. And even after I had terminated a pregnancy, I still stayed in that relationship. I still chose to be in that unhealthy situation and part of it was probably pride. Also in having to have to go to my mom and admit failure, admit that I was in this relationship that I probably never should have been in.

Abby: And so I didn't say anything. I just kept my mouth shut and I just endured it all. I remember I was four months pregnant with my second child with this person. And I didn't want to say anything. I didn't want to say anything to anybody.

Abby: I was in denial. I didn't want to do this. We were supposed to be getting married because I thought that was going to be the fix. Right? Like, Oh, get married. And that's going to change everything. And so here I was, now I found myself in my second [00:08:00] pregnancy, I was supposed to be getting married.

Abby: My mom had been on me. She was saying, you need to plan the wedding and do all these things. And why haven't you done it yet? And I just, I couldn't. I just didn't feel the motivation.

Abby: So I went to my priest and I said, I know this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing. I can't marry this person and this is why.

Abby: And thankfully, he said, "Well, then don't. Don't marry this person. Marrying this person is not going to be the best thing for you."

Abby: And so we prayed about it together. Then I went home and I told my mom everything. I faced with the fact that I might be a single mom of two very small boys.

Carol: It's an incredible testimony that God put this priest into your life. And also, that you were finally able to tell your mom what you were really feeling. Did you feel like this was a turning point for you?

Abby: I never got this like big booming voice from God where I just was like, Oh, okay, I get it. It was very gradual. I feel like [00:09:00] I knew God is there. He never left me, but maybe I didn't feel like He was listening or he was reaching out to me. Or I wasn't reaching out to him rather.

Abby: God's love was there through all of this messiness in my life, right? Through the childhood and through the relationship and then even after the fact with facing that I might be a single mom of two boys and this might not work out.

Abby: Just looking back in some of the choices that I made, there were so many times where I put myself in so many dangerous situations; I put my life at risk by just doing all of these crazy things. I acted out in so many different ways. I could have been arrested. I could have really been hurt. It's only by the grace of God that I wasn't.  

Carol: So how did your life look different at this point? What changes, even gradual ones, were happening?

Abby: I would still say I wasn't at the point where I felt like I had had my quote [00:10:00] unquote conversion. I was just going to church, because I had one boy and pregnant with another. And it was important for me for them to grow up in our faith.

Abby: I met this wonderful woman and she invited me into the Ladies Altar Society, and it was this wonderful ministry where I just met these amazing ladies and they were just so filled with God's grace and His love.

Abby: He really was working through these women. I just remember being around them thinking they have something that I wanted really bad and I couldn't tell what it was. They all took me under their wing and they were there for me.

Abby: That was the very first steps I started taking into having a deeper faith life. I started going to Mass regularly. And it made it a little bit more easy to face the fact that all of the decisions that I had made were probably not the best decisions, that this isn't what God's plan was for [00:11:00] me.

Abby: So, fast forward. I have the second baby. He's days old. And, that individual comes home and he starts packing up all of his stuff. I knew I wanted this, but now it's actually happening and I'm freaking out. I thought it was going to be on my terms. It's not. He's doing it. He's getting all of his stuff. I'm just like, don't leave. What are we going to do without you? We have a small baby, you can't leave. Obviously that doesn't work out, and he leaves, and I remember being on the floor sobbing. I started praying and I just prayed for God to be there with me.

I got on the phone after that and I called some of those people from the Ladies Altar Society and I told them what had happened. They said, well come to the church tomorrow at 10 and we'll talk. So I show up at the church and one of the members is there. And she has these gift cards. And then another person shows up and they have diapers. And somebody else has [00:12:00] wipes and all these necessities. And they were just there, and they prayed with me and they prayed for me. It was this overwhelming flood of love.

Abby: It's kind of funny because my life was so messy. And God was just giving himself to me through these ladies, showing me all of these parts of God through kindness and mercy. There was no judgment; it was just God's love working through these wonderful women.

Abby: And I think if I had to pin it on anything-- that was my moment. That was my conversion where I knew that God was there. God had always been there. He was meeting me where I was at, and that was enough for Him. I wasn't going to church all the time. I wasn't praying all the time. I wasn't partaking in sacraments. I wasn't going to Adoration. But I was enough for God. I felt in that moment that God had left the [00:13:00] 99 to come back for the one. I felt like I was that one sheep and God came back for me and he had been there the whole time. He had never left.

Abby: So, that gave me the courage to say, Okay. You know, this is my life now. I'm officially a single mom of two very small boys.

Abby: And so it was hard but these women made it less hard. I think I finally realized it was community that I had needed and that I had been longing for. God sent me these people to show me that he's there and he's working through the hearts of others right through their hands and through their feet.

Carol: Oh, I so love the contrast of your story. Your family community, which should have been your strength, wasn't.

Abby: So God sent you an unexpected community of love. He was subtly moving your heart through these ladies. It couldn't have been easy for you though, being a single mother of two. [00:14:00] How did this bring you to the next part of your story?

So I guess fast forward about two years later. I just put down two very rambunctious toddlers for bed. And I was very tired. I was finishing up my last semester of college.

Abby: And I felt this overwhelming need to pray for a future spouse.

Abby: I thought, that's weird. So I said, "Okay, Lord, if you want me to be single the rest of my life, that's okay. Totally okay with me. I accept that as your will. But if you do have somebody in mind for me, I want him to be a godly man. I want him to love you above anything else. The way I love you above anything else. Second, I want him to love my children as if they were his own. And I want him to be smart and I want him to be funny..." and I'm just going through this bucket list of things. I didn't even finish it. I just fell asleep.

Abby: And so the next day, [00:15:00] I'm going to the church again with my LAS ladies and we are going to frost cakes for a big fundraiser we do for Mother's Day. Little did I know, our priest at the time was already working on getting me set up with-- spoiler alert -- my husband.

Abby: Our priest had called my husband and he said, "Hey, there's this girl at church. She's really sweet. Why don't you come over to the office? She's going to be frosting cakes tomorrow and you can tell me if you'd be interested in dating her. Long story short, I connected with my husband on the phone that night and we went on our first date two days later, and the rest is history. We got married about a year and a half after we had met.

Abby: It's really funny because when we were dating, I was very intimidated by him. I thought, oh my gosh, Is he like too religious for me? I have all this baggage and I just don't know if this is really gonna work out. I think it was like [00:16:00] our second or third date he said, hey let's go get some kolaches and go to confession. And I thought, oh no, I don't want to do that at all. I had not gone to confession since my first confession as a second grader.

Abby: I said okay, hoping he'd forget about the confession part, but he didn't. So I'm going to my second confession ever. It was the most wonderful, beautiful, powerful confession I ever had. I fumbled through it, but I confessed everything to this priest. I just let it all out.

Abby: I think my husband was worried because I was taking so long. I come out of the confessional and I'm just like bawling and the look on his face.

Abby: He's like, shock, concern, confusion, right?

Abby: And I told him everything. This is my story. This is me. And I even ended with the caveat, you can just drop me off home and we will just pretend like this never happened and it'll be okay.

Abby: But he didn't and so I always tell people when I meet them, my [00:17:00] husband saved my life. He is helping to make me holy every single day. 

Carol: So again, God was quietly working in your life, even if you didn't realize it at the time. How did this man, whom would become your husband, save your life?

Abby: It's through God, but my husband really truly did save my life by taking me to confession that day. To everything else that happened in my life, he surrounded me with all of these people that he was friends with again, just a church community, right?

Abby: He was a youth minister and he had all these friends and had this huge community of people. They were so nice. Nobody was judging me that here I am this single mom with two kids . They were just so welcoming.

Abby: And you would think that would be amazing, but it really freaked me out. I got really in my head, because I just thought to myself this isn't genuine. They're only doing this because they're his friends, and because they have to, but they don't really care about me, they don't care about the kids.

Abby: There it [00:18:00] is again-- rejecting God's love. But here God is giving me all of these blessings through more people. All of these friends through this wonderful man I just met.  

Abby: So I remember we were engaged at this point and an ACTS retreat is coming up and he says, I think it'd be really cool if you go on this ACTS retreat.

Abby: A lot of the girls from our friend circle-- they're going to be there. I don't want to go to a retreat, but I feel like I have to now. 

Abby: So the whole time during this retreat, I'm just talking to God, I'm praying and saying God, what do you want? I'm not getting anything out of this retreat. So it's the last day of the retreat and they're giving a talk about community.

Abby: And the person that's giving the talk is my husband's best friend. She's amazing. She was one of the nicest ones in that whole group and also the one I was the most standoffish because I was in disbelief that somebody could be this kind and loving.  

Abby: So she's giving the talk about community and she talks about me in it. She talks about meeting me and about [00:19:00] community and how it's affected her life. That's when it just hit me over the head and I was just like, okay, God, I get it.

Abby: I realize that all of these people that God was sending me-- this man, his friend circle, the ladies altar society, my church community, the priest that had helped me get through everything. That was God sending me all of these things through these people who were there to help me deepen my faith. 

Abby: I had to realize that God came back for me, that he left the 99 to come back for me. I was worthy of his love, regardless of my upbringing, regardless of the decisions that I made, regardless of where I was in my faith at that time.

Abby: God had never left me. I had always been worthy of his love, and he was showing that to me through these wonderful people.

Carol: So God used this faith community to show you your worth and confirm his love for you. What does your life look like now? How has God called you to go forth from here? 

Abby: The challenges are [00:20:00] still there, right? But they're just different types of challenges than what I experienced, 15, 20 years ago. It's different now. Me and my husband got married. We have five children now. We're involved in our parish community.

Abby: We've both had our own sets of challenges individually and as a husband and wife. Both of our moms passed away within a year of each other. That was something that we really had to lean on our faith and lean on each other as a married couple.

Abby: Also just the day to day life of us both working, having five children, and trying to squeeze everything else in, but always ensuring that we're keeping God's center .

Abby: So I think today things look a little different for us. I feel God's called me to share my story, to tell other people that God loves you. He loves you even when you feel like you're unlovable. He loves you when you fall. [00:21:00] He loves you when you make mistakes. He loves you when you're praying all the time. He loves you when you don't pray at all. God is there. He's present. And if you just have a little bit of hope and a little bit of faith, that's all you need. You might leave God, you might want to turn away from him, but he'll never leave you and he'll never turn away from you.

Carol: So your favorite scripture is the one we opened with. Philippians 4. I'll read just a few of the verses again.

Carol: Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again. Rejoice. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Keep on doing what you have learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me. Then the God of peace will be with you.

Carol: It's such a beautiful and rich scripture.

Abby: It is. Even just verse four, right? Rejoice in the [00:22:00] Lord always, I should say it again, rejoice. And even in those moments where you think, ' Why should I be rejoicing at, this awful thing that happened?"

It's just all of those moments where I just felt like I needed help and I didn't know what to do and just having that little bit of faith that God would hear me in that time of need.

Abby: And he did . And my life is so much greater. And, it's all because of Him. I'm just so thankful. Thankful for Him, and for just even the crosses that I've bared. Because it just has shown me how good He is.

Carol: Thank you again, Abby. I love your story because I think that so many of us feel unworthy and unloved at different points in our lives. And through your communities, you truly found the peace of God.

Carol: I'm also moved by the people who came into your life. We may never even realize how a small gesture of kindness [00:23:00] and love can so dramatically change someone else's life. It may cost us very little, but it can be worth more than gold to someone who is desperate for compassion and love.

Carol: Abby, I know your story is going to move at least one heart towards Jesus and I'm sure it's going to impact many more hearts than that.

Abby: Yes. Thank you so much for allowing me to share God's love through, through these words.

Carol: Of course!

Carol: And we welcome everyone who would like to become involved in this movement of moving hearts toward Jesus. We'd love for you to become one of our storytellers and share your own story. You can also get involved through a much appreciated donation to help produce the episodes and fund retreat scholarships. Go to godisgoodpodcast.com/joinus for more information and until next time friends. Remember God is good.

Abby: All the time.

Carol: Amen.

Abby: Amen.