The 54-day Rosary novena should come with a warning label: “CAUTION: Only pray this if you are prepared for EVERYTHING to change.” 

Early in our marriage, my husband and I decided to pray the 54-day Rosary novena to discern the direction of our careers and to start a family. For those of you who haven’t ventured into this novena, it’s broken into two halves: the petition portion and the thanksgiving portion. We had no idea what we were getting into.

I remember exactly where I was the day we switched from “petition” to “thanksgiving” in our novena. I was at work and received an unexpected phone call from my husband. He had been laid off by his company. No notice; no severance. This was NOT what we had in mind when we asked for the Lord’s direction. Perhaps a promotion or a new job opportunity. I had some notes on how God chose to respond to our open hearts!

In that small office, as I looked out the window, feeling dizzy with anxiety, the enemy planted a seed of doubt that would fester for years: It’s all up to you. His voice whispered: You prayed, you trusted, and God didn’t come through. He doesn’t have a plan for you—no future full of hope: an inversion of the Scripture verse God had spoken over my life for years.

How could I pray in thanksgiving to God for this?

What followed was a year of strain and hardship, which resulted in us leaving our family, community, and home state to take a job eight hours away. I couldn’t understand why God would send us into what felt like exile, and so my ungodly self-reliance became my closest friend.

It would be eleven years before I brought this memory back to the Lord. For years, I lived striving, trying to white knuckle my faith, my marriage, my parenting. I experienced apparent silence from the Lord about why He had allowed this hardship to befall us, just when we had opened ourselves up to seeking His will. There were years I spent doubting God’s faithfulness, and honestly, doubting His goodness.

Perhaps you are living this today: worried that if you trust God and give Him everything, He won’t come through. Maybe He has a plan for others, but you’re the exception to the rule. 

Maybe you wonder if trusting God is worth the risk? Or question how, in the face of suffering, one can be grateful?

The road of self-reliance is exhausting and lonely. And one that inevitably ends in frustration. As it turns out, I make a lousy idol.

So when a friend asked to pray over me for inner healing, I cautiously agreed. As we prayed together, this memory came back to me. I had no interest in revisiting this part of my story, which I so detested. But the Lord gently prompted me, and so we prayed through it together. I was instructed to ask Jesus where He was standing in the room in this memory. 

I pictured Him standing by the door, and as He looked at me, He showed me the winding, golden path marked out for me to walk toward heaven. I felt Him say in my heart, “The road to paradise is marked with suffering, but we walk it together.” And as we walked side by side, He spoke in His rich, beautiful voice, “I know the plans I have for you … plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). 

Looking back on this part of my life, it was in the greatest turmoil that God used the fertile soil of suffering to mold me. What felt like the vindictive wrath of an unloving God was actually the gentle but insistent pursuit of my heart by the One who “first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

As a result of these hard years, we are now gratefully back home, thriving in our community with three beautiful little girls. In the Bible study, Fearless & Free, Experiencing Healing and Wholeness in Christ, Lisa Brenninkmeyer writes, “God shows up in our lives in thousands of ways, and we only perceive a few of them. It’s not that He isn’t there … We need to fill our minds with truth so that we can combat the lies suggesting that God left us when we most needed Him. The truth? Nothing can or has ever separated us from His love.”[1]

God is working in the waiting, dear sister. He can bring about good from any hardship. He can and will “restore to you the years which the swarming locusts has eaten” (Joel 2:25). He is weaving a beautiful story in your life—one that is woven into the tapestry of salvation history. He is who He says He is, all we need to do is trust Him.

Walking side by side with you,
Tierney

P.S. Want to go deeper? Dive into Fearless & Free for more on healing and wholeness.

[1] Lisa Brenninkmeyer, Fearless & Free: Experiencing Healing and Wholeness in Christ (United States, 2020), 128.

About the author:
Tierney Keogler is the finance manager at Walking with Purpose. She graduated from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2011 where she met her amazing husband. Returning to their home state of Connecticut, they are raising their three beautiful daughters to be avid Patriots fans. When not working, you can find Tierney homeschooling, making homemade pizza, or escaping to the basement for a workout. A convert to the faith as a child, Tierney has a passion for the Eucharist and Our Lady, and prays that each woman will know how loved and pursued they are by the Good Shepherd.