2022 C.A.N Sisters' For Such A Time As This Girls Retreat

These past two years of my life have been filled with some of the greatest mountain top experiences and some of the darkest valleys. They have tested my faith in ways I didn’t even know were possible and taught me lessons and wisdom I couldn’t have learned any other way. If I had known that bright, sunny July morning back in 2020 all that I was about to go through, I don’t think I would have been brave enough to even get out of bed that morning. However, I had no idea what I was about to face and so I woke up on July 26, 2020 as if it was just another ordinary day. I helped my parents pack up all our camping gear into my dad’s car and the three of us set out on the road for home.

I had been planning my third ministry retreat that whole year, which was scheduled to take place in only a few weeks in the very campsite where my we had been camping that weekend. I had the sermons written, worship songs picked out, a detailed schedule planned out, and a group of about 5 or 6 teenage girls who had already signed up to come. So far, everything seemed to be working out perfectly according to my plans. Then the crash happened. At about 2pm that afternoon, as we were coming around a sharp curve in the road a car that had accidentally swerved into our lane came out of nowhere. There was nowhere for either of us to go nor time for us to slow down let alone stop and so we collided head on. My dad was killed on impact, my mom broke about two thirds of her ribs, and I broke my femur in three different places. In only a few seconds my life, along with that of the rest of my family's, was drastically changed. The 2020 C.A.N Sisters’ Girls retreat was canceled so we could spend the rest of the summer planning my dad’s funeral, recovering from our injuries, and adjusting to life without my dad.

Over the next year I was in so much shock that it wasn’t until the next summer, almost a year after the crash, that my grief began to really hit me. My heart finally began to realize how broken it was. A thousand different questions began to come up as I spent time in the quiet of the early mornings before work alone with God. I still loved God with all my heart and was doing my best to follow His guidance for my life, but I couldn’t help but doubt His heart towards me and question whether I could trust Him. My heart felt like I had been abandoned and betrayed by Him. However, at the same time, I knew the truth that He had taught me all my life through His word and the people He had placed in my life. I was ashamed for being angry with Him and for doubting him. I hid the deepest, most broken parts of my heart from Him and the people around me. I pretended that I was okay and pretty soon I had almost managed to even convince myself that it was true. However, God saw past all my masks that I used to hide all my pain, doubts, and brokenness behind and He thwarted all my plans to hide and let the wounds harden my heart towards Him and the world around me. Instead of being repulsed by my pain and questions, He was drawn to compassion for me and all that I had been through. He comforted me in my grief and began showing me all the ways that He was going to use my story to bring hope and healing into other people’s lives.

About a year after the crash I felt the Holy Spirit prompting me to start rereading through my sermon notes that I had written the summer before for my retreat. They were about the book of Esther, a story of a young woman who was taken against her will from her family and home and forced to join the harem of the powerful king. The king was impressed by her and so he made her his queen. As I reread this story, along with the sermon notes I had written to accompany it, I was amazed to see all the ways that I could relate to Esther. Like me, her life had taken an unexpected turn in a very scary and heartbreaking direction. We both had no control over the situation and were separated from someone we loved. I was separated from my dad and Esther was separated from all her friends and family.

As the story of Esther continues, her life gets even more stressful and painful. The king had chosen a very corrupt, evil man named Haman as his second in command. Haman demanded that all people who happened to pass by him on the city streets bow down to him to pay him respect. However, Modicai, Esther’s cousin and adoptive father, knew what type of man Haman was and refused to bow down to him. This made Haman furious and so he tricked the king into signing an edict that commanded that the Jew in all of Persia, including Mordecai, Esther, and their whole family, should be killed on a single day of the following year. Since Esther was already in the palace and no one but her and her family knew she was a Jew, Mordicai asked her to appear before the king in his inner court and plead with him to spare their lives and the lives of their people.

At first she said no because anyone who appeared before the king in his inner court uninvited, even his queen, would be put to death unless he held out his royal scepter to them. However, Mordicai was eventually able to convince her to take a leap of faith and trust that God would go before her to make a way. God’s name is never mentioned in the entire book of Esther and at first it seems as if God has abandoned Esther and the rest of His people to be brutally slaughtered and utterly annihilated. But as we look closer and press through to the end, we can see that God was with her and her people in the midst of all their pain and uncertainty. The king is merciful to Esther when she appears before him in his inner court and saves her people. Modicai said to Esther when pleading with her to go and appear before the king on behalf of their people, “‘For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?,’” (Esther 4: 14).

Sometimes life takes a turn for the worst and we find ourselves wondering whether God had forgotten or abandoned us. We ask why a good God, a God who loves us, would let our loved ones be taken from us and our hearts be broken to the point that we don’t know how we are going to be able to keep fighting. One thing that has helped me not lose heart in the midst of my deepest pain and grief is seeing that, like Esther, God has placed

me in this circumstance for such a time as this. He has allowed this to happen so that I will know what it feels for my heart to break, for the person that I love most to be killed in front of me and for me to wonder how I am going to make it through another day. When other people experience a serious loss, I will be able to comfort and minister to them in a way that no one else can. I may never fully understand why God lets these things happen or why we have to wait so long before He wipes every tear from our faces, but I do know that He is familiar with our pain. He knows what it feels to grieve and be overcome by pain and fear. He knows what it feels like to look death in the face and wonder where God has gone and whether he loves you anymore. Jesus doesn’t sit up on His throne and watch at a safe distance while we bleed and weep on our own. He is right there beside us holding us, weeping with us and carrying us when we no longer have any strength left.

While He was hanging from the cross, He cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27: 46). Jesus knows despair. He’s walked through it before us so He knows how we feel and just what we need in the midst of our own despair and suffering. In his letter to the church of Corinth, The Apostle Paul wrote, “blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through

Christ we share abundantly in comfort too,” (2 Corinthians 1: 3 - 5). God teaches us how to be compassionate to others and how to comfort them in their pain by first comforting us in the midst of our own suffering.

During my preparation for my 2022 ministry retreat, I discovered new meaning in the book of Esther and the message that God had given me in 2020. I began to see that through losing my dad, God had given me more insight into His word and what it really means to walk with God through the deepest pain and grief. God had placed me in that circumstance for just such a time as this, giving me the words that only He knew the girls that had come to my retreat needed to hear and He had given me those words through my own suffering.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about The C. A. N Sisters’ Ministry, leave a common below, check out our website, or email us at cansistersministry@gmail.com.