Transcript

Belinda: In Jesus’ Arms
Season 1: Episode 8

Carol: 0:15

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. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. Philippians 4 verse 13. Today's storyteller, Belinda, served for many years as a highly educated, accomplished social worker and business owner. Her faith became lukewarm while she dedicated many years to serving as a social worker and taking care of teenagers with coexisting disorders. This role required her to be on call 24 hours per day. Leaving that job turned into an opportunity to run her own training institute. And then circumstances caused a life-changing decision. When her eldest son needed her, Belinda made the difficult decision to give up her career and her role as the breadwinner of her family. While her children flourished, she faced her own personal challenges and found herself relying on her faith to navigate through tumultuous times. Studying her faith became a cornerstone of Belinda's strength and newfound missions. She has turned her suffering and her experiences into blessings for others. Today, she's an author of several books, including one on praying with the saints, and a Certified Coach. Please join me in welcoming Belinda to the podcast. Welcome Belinda!

Belinda: 1:54

Hi Carol, it's so good to be with you.

Carol: 1:56

We are so happy to have you here. Before we get into your story, can you tell us what your faith foundation was like as a child?

Belinda: 2:04

Sure. I grew up with two parents who were both Catholic. My mom was a recently converted Catholic. She studied the teachings of the church before she married my dad. She decided that she wanted to come into the Catholic church. So she did that before they got married. And then about five or six months into their marriage they got pregnant with me. I grew up Catholic and had a very beautiful experience of God as a young child. I just knew when I went to church that when I looked up at the cross, I don't know how to explain this, but Jesus brought me directly to our father when I was very little. I would pray directly to God our father. So my earliest memories was knowing our father through Jesus. When I was talking to God, I just always wanted to be a saint. I didn't know a lot of them but I wanted to be one. My mom, even though she didn't guide me with the saints, took me to church and she made sure that everything was done like it was supposed to be done. And the main thing about my mom and my dad was that I saw them practicing their faith. My mom would go to bed with her rosary in her hand. And my dad, for every year of his life that I ever saw him, would kneel beside his bed and he would say his prayers.

Carol: 3:25

That's so wonderful. A strong faith foundation is so important when we're young. It's often difficult to maintain, let alone build upon, as we reach young adulthood though, right? Can you tell us about your faith journey from college into your adulthood?

Belinda: 3:42

So at about 18, I just felt a lot of grace up until that point. And then I felt a tremendous amount of dryness. So when I started having that dry spell, I just didn't feel Him at all. I went from talking to God every day and hearing Him back to not hearing Him at all. I just... I remember I was in my dorm room when I was trying to pray and I was hearing nothing back at all. It was just so dry. After I graduated from college with my master's degree in social work, I was working at a prison. I just drifted. I was moving off into deep waters, away from what I really should have been in. It's hurtful for me because I know that the scriptures say to those who more is given more is expected. And I feel like that was a time when I just wasn't living up to my true identity as a child of God. I just feel like, wow, that was wasted time In terms of what I could have been doing. I never stopped going to church. I still went on Sundays because that had just been so ingrained to me. But I just had all these other notions because I didn't understand the scriptural and doctrinal and disciplinary underpinnings.

Carol: 4:58

We were just talking about how difficult it is to transition from a childhood relationship with God into an adult relationship. Often there are so many worldly forces that can pull us away from our focus on God, What happened for you?

Belinda: 5:13

Well I didn't like the way certain women in my life had been treated. So I didn't have a good opinion of men. And so I was more in a feminist kind of mindset. I grew up very poor. I felt like my dad could have earned more money and because of his lack of self confidence from his father, he didn't. And so I just never wanted to be beholden to a man to support me. I had a master's degree and I knew what to do. And actually I did support my family. I put my husband through college because he didn't finish when we first got married. We had some issues. A whole lot of issues in our life. It was such a long journey because I had a husband who had bipolar and some addictions and then I had an older child who also had neurological problems. My first child had epilepsy. And then he also had severe ADHD. My third child had severe ADD. Then my 4th child had severe ADD. I can't even tell you how if I didn't have God, I don't know how I would have made it through most of my life. There's no way I could have made it through because I had to pray constantly for more patience more strength and more courage.

Carol: 6:23

Goodness. You had so much on your plate being the breadwinner, keeping your marriage going through significant struggles, and then the medical challenges with your children on top of it all. Did your professional success alleviate some of the stress in your life or did it add to it?

Belinda: 6:40

I had been working as a program director in a long term facility. I'd been working with teenagers-- teens who had what we call coexisting disorders chemical dependency and mental illness. These teens were in a long-term residential facility where I was on a beeper 24 hours a day. I just couldn't get away from it. And I couldn't get up in the morning. I was so tired and I checked on my depression symptoms. I was eating okay. I was sleeping okay. But I couldn't get out of bed every morning. It took me half an hour praying to the angels to just get me up. And I literally worked myself through mono. That's how disordered my life was at that time. My husband had his degree then and I got to quit that job. I got to start my own business. So I went to work but for myself. I set up trainings for other professionals to come and learn about addictions because I was establishing myself in my profession as like a small expert in addictions. And I would put on trainings to licensed clinicians. I would prepare people going for their chemical dependency certifications. I was making most of the money. I was running the training institute and my husband who was alive then was helping me with the insurance stuff. He had lost his job so he was working with me in what I thought was our business. He didn't see it the same way but at least he was helping me. I had just had my third baby in December and started training again in January.

Carol: 8:19

So you had a lot depending on the success of your business-- your family stability and your identity as a professional. And it sounds like your faith journey had continued to stall, become lukewarm. What happened to change all of that?

Belinda: 8:35

My son, my oldest, had been asking for two years for me to homeschool him. And I just didn't see that at all. I couldn't understand how I could get from here to there because I was earning most of the money. I just didn't feel like it was a stable situation for me to just leave that and also like I said I had been highly trained. So, It was a huge decision. And when the only Catholic school turned my son down, he had been a straight A student in a magnet program, and they turned him down. I just thought, no, I'm not putting him in a school that has metal detectors. I don't feel like that's good for his physical safety. I felt like God was saying, it's time now, you need to homeschool your child. So I relied on the grace of God. I gave up the training institute. I came home and I homeschooled my children.

Carol: 9:25

It must have been a really incredibly hard decision. Once you made it, how did it impact your life and your family's lives?

Belinda: 9:34

That year, we just started having a totally different life. My oldest son who was in 8th grade started studying chess. My middle son ended up going through two grades in one year because he wanted to catch up to where he should have been. It all worked out and it went fast and furious. And because I came home to home school, I started learning my faith. I started having that deeper conversion of really giving everything to God. And so it was like more of a gradual process but that brought me deeper into being committed that every single day I was going to do the rosary. And every single day I was going to do the liturgy of the hours. And I had my children praying the liturgy of the hours with me. That was kind of how it went from moving out of the worldliness into a home life that was based around prayer, around learning our faith together, me and the children. And then reading these saint books which I had never read. I'm going to cry and think about it because the lived experience of being faithful to teaching your children how to pray. Because that's what I was doing. You go to mass, you come out you're on fire for God, and you want to live that and show other people who he is. And so you go back to the scriptures and you pray and you stay close to him. And God rewarded me by showing me that by just trying to teach my children how to pray, I was teaching them how to pray with the scriptures.

Carol: 11:03

Oh I love that. When you trusted God and made that difficult decision, he brought you even more blessings than you expected for your life. Teaching your children to pray with the scriptures builds such a solid foundation for them. But I imagine just because it was the right decision it still must have been hard on you. Being an accomplished professional was an important part of how you saw yourself. What changes happened to you personally through this time?

Belinda: 11:33

People would say to me, Oh I could never homeschool my children because I don't have any patience. I'm like, well, I'm right there with you! I mean, that's the testimony to God right there is that I could homeschool my children. It was very, very difficult. So I leaned on God a lot. I prayed all the time. And what I discovered was another vocation. He put upon my heart that yearning to pray for other people in in intercessory prayer. All those years of suffering were connected to praying an intercessory prayer. I had this, I don't want to call it a vision, but It was like an image one time where I could see myself dying and all these people coming to get me. And I knew that they were all the people that I prayed for. So that was what was happening during all those years of homeschooling. Giving up the identity that I had as a social worker and a professional person and just letting God lead me through lots of difficult times. To the point where with my husband I actually had to leave a domestic violence situation because the verbal abuse and emotional the physical intimidation. It just got so bad that I was having physical problems as well as a lot of emotional and mental anguish and spiritual stress that, oh I'm supposed to stay in a relationship with a person who's just attacking me every three days now. What can I do God? What can I do? A priest told me that the church does not teach that you have to stay in abuse. That's not what God has for his children is to be abused. So when I left, that was like jumping off a cliff again. I didn't even have my licenses anymore. I had to get my licenses back. I had to try to find some kind of work. The process of leaving was very difficult. Whereas my husband had left me many times and emotionally pretty much all the time because he didn't have what he needed having the particular diagnosis he had. Yeah. He had left me several times. When I left him then he was very angry and he just really came at me full guns. And so I had to start like a whole new life. I started teaching again at the college because I've been teaching in that first part of my life, post-Masters. So I got a teaching position so I didn't hardly have to leave, because it's adjunct, my 2 children who were still homeschooling. So it's just been God leading me into and out of situations that I had to totally depend on him.

Carol: 14:04

Your life is such a faith-filled reminder that relying on God doesn't mean that our lives won't be messy. God doesn't promise us perfection or an easy life but that he will be with us always. And it may take some time for us to realize, but God always works for our good. How has this period mixed, with both suffering and blessing, impacted your life today?

Belinda: 14:28

I continued homeschooling until just finished year before last and I started writing again. I had written three books and now I'm getting back into my field. I'm realizing my students need to do these therapeutic lifestyle changes because they're going to prevent burnout. They'll never get to where I got if I can just help them set their life up. To where they're taking care of themselves before they go out there into this very burnout prone profession. So I wrote a workbook, my Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes workbook, and I self published that book. This is creating a comprehensive plan for a calm ordered life. And as I'm writing the book for my students I'm realizing, oh a lot of people are going to be able to use this. I'm also going to write a Catholic edition of that here soon. So I looked at coaching and now I'm getting my certification. I'll have that and then I'll have my two licenses in social work and I'll continue serving in this way.

Carol: 15:24

It does seem that God is using all of your life experiences plus the desire you've always had to help people to create opportunities of growth for you.

Belinda: 15:34

Yeah. That's God. He made me that person that always wanted to help people have a little less pain in their life. So it started when I was in high school discovering that I could be a good helper of other people. That's why I went into social work. I remember, and I still have it, there's a poem by Emily Dickinson about if I could help one robin into its nest again, I would not have lived in vain. So whether it's through prayer and fasting and almsgiving in the intercessory part. Or whether it's through practical means like writing, teaching, coaching, speaking, all my other missions. These missions are God's ways of me helping other people to have a little less pain in their life and grow a little closer to God every day. So I want you to have that personal relationship with Jesus. I want you to read the scriptures. I want you to go to Mass as much as you possibly can because he is your strength. He is your rock. I read something where Jesus told st Gertrude that the Saints are the most powerful in their intercession on their feast day. I always knew that I was supposed to let other people know about this. So now I wrote a book in November of 2024 that was published about this very topic. I structured it to where you have a little bio on the saint and you have a prayer with our father With that saint on their feast day. That book is called, Pray With Us: A Saint for Every Day.

Carol: 17:03

That's so wonderful! We'll definitely have to look out for that book. Let me read your favorite scripture. Of course, it's the one we opened with, Philippians 4 verse 13: I can do all things through him who strengthens me. Why is this your favorite scripture?

Belinda: 17:21

So whether it's coming out of poverty as a child and going to college by my bootstraps. I literally had to get all my own FAFSA, everything filled out myself. Like get myself into college. Be the first in any of my family, extended family, anybody to get any degree whatsoever. And I go all the way to Masters. Or living through a long life with a husband who had severe problems and was abusive. Or homeschooling children when I never ever thought that's anything I would possibly do. To coming out of all that and building a totally new life with God. It's all through the strength of God. I can do all things. I know that I can because I've lived through some of the worst things people could live through. And because of His strength, I have gone through it. So it's always meant a lot to me because like I said, if I was going through all these hardships in my life, the only thing that got me through was His strength.

Carol: 18:18

Speaking earlier of your books where can we find them?

Belinda: 18:22

They're all on Amazon, but they're also on the publisher, Our Sunday Visitor, OSV, Catholic Books. So you can get it there. You can also get those on En route, e n r o u t e, En route Books and Media.

Carol: 18:35

We will be sure to put the links in the show notes. Thank you, Belinda, I think your story is really remarkable and one that is really going to touch a lot of hearts. For you, our listeners, if you would like to get involved in our God is Good Podcast mission, there are easy ways to do so. You can become a storyteller and share your story or you can donate to help us produce even more episodes and fund retreat scholarships. And please click follow on your favorite podcast provider. All of these will help us move more hearts toward Jesus. Thank you so much, again, Belinda. We really enjoyed having you on the podcast!

Belinda: 19:16

Oh I'm so glad that I could be here. And I'm praying for anyone who's listening to the podcast and anyone who will read the three books that I've written or take advantage of coaching or anything. I'm always praying for all of y'all. So hopefully God will give you the strength that He's given me and you just keep going through one thing after the other in the arms of Jesus. That's where we belong.

Carol: 19:38

Amen. Until next time, friends, remember, God is good.