Can your faith survive life's hardest seasons?

When life falls apart—through illness, divorce, grief, trauma, or unexpected loss—it can leave you wondering where God is and whether your faith is strong enough to endure. If you've ever felt pressure to "move on," questioned why God hasn't taken your pain away, or struggled to believe He's still good in the middle of suffering, this conversation will remind you that you're not alone. Michele Cushatt shares how God met her through unimaginable hardship and how He can strengthen your faith, even when life doesn't make sense.

Episode Summary

Author and speaker Michele Cushatt joins Willow Weston to share how decades of trauma—including divorce, single motherhood, raising children with traumatic backgrounds, the loss of her father, and surviving three battles with aggressive tongue cancer—transformed her understanding of faith. Rather than offering easy answers, Michele shares the biblical truths and spiritual practices that helped her continue trusting God when healing was slow, suffering remained, and life never returned to what it once was.

Together, they discuss why trauma changes us, why healing doesn't follow a timeline, and why our scars don't have to become symbols of defeat. Michele unpacks Jesus' prayer for Peter—"that your faith would not fail"—and explains why, in our darkest seasons, our faith is often what's most at stake. She also shares practical ways to build a resilient faith before the storms come through Scripture, honest lament, counseling, and learning to trust God's character even when we don't understand His ways.

If you've been carrying grief that no one seems to understand, wrestling with unanswered prayers, or wondering if you'll ever feel whole again, this episode is for you. You'll be reminded that healing is often a lifelong journey, that grief and gratitude can coexist, and that your scars may become some of the greatest evidence of God's faithfulness. You don't have to pretend you're okay, and you don't have to walk through suffering alone.

Meet Michele Cushatt

Michele is a bestselling author, speaker, Bible teacher, and cancer survivor who has become a trusted voice for Christians navigating trauma, grief, and suffering. After enduring divorce, single motherhood, three battles with tongue cancer, permanent disability, chronic pain, and the challenges of raising children from traumatic backgrounds, Michele now helps others discover a resilient faith rooted in God's unchanging character. Her newest book, A Faith That Will Not Fail, equips readers to build a faith that endures life's hardest seasons—not because life becomes easier, but because God remains faithful through every trial.

Key Takeaways

• How do you heal after trauma without pretending you're "over it"? Discover why recovery takes time and how telling the truth about your pain is the first step toward healing.
• What if God doesn't remove your suffering? Learn how God's presence can become your greatest source of strength, even when your circumstances don't change.
• How can you build a faith that won't fail? Michele shares practical spiritual practices—including Scripture, lament, counseling, and relinquishment—that strengthen your faith before the storms of life arrive.
• Can your scars become a testimony instead of a source of shame? Find encouragement to see your wounds as reminders of God's sustaining grace and faithfulness.

How This Episode Will Encourage You

If you're exhausted from carrying pain that hasn't gone away or wondering whether your faith is enough for what you're facing, take heart. God isn't asking you to hide your wounds—He's inviting you to trust Him in the middle of them, and He will faithfully walk with you every step of the way.

If this conversation encouraged you, subscribe to the Collide Podcast, leave a review, and share this episode with a friend who needs hope in the middle of her own hard season. Explore more Christ-centered resources for healing and emotional wellness at Collide.

Resources + Links

Michele Cushatt

• Website: michelecushatt.com
• Instagram: @michelecushatt

Follow Willow: Website | Instagram | Facebook

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Hey, there. This is Willow Weston, the founder and director of Collide. And I'm so glad that you hopped on to hang out with me this week.

I hope you're having a fantastic week and that you've been experiencing the love of God surrounding you each and every day, every moment of every day. But I know life can feel hard, and it can come with so many challenges and struggles.

And this conversation that I am about to hand you with Michele Cushatt, she has experienced. She actually, I should say, calls herself a reluctant trauma expert because she's experienced so much trauma in her life.

And she shares in this episode all that she's learned about faith and God through that trauma.

And I think that if you have experienced experience trauma in your life, if you're going through something hard, this episode is going to inspire you to hold on to the hope that God has for you in the midst of whatever it is you're going through. So check it out. Michelle, I'm so excited this spend some time with you and your dog.

My dog, who is right here keeping me company.

Yeah. Awesome. And you're in Colorado. Is that Drew?

I am. I'm in Colorado. I'm halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs, and Today it is 65 and sunny, and tonight we're supposed to get snow.

So that just tells you everything you need to know about Colorado.

Wow. That's amazing.

Of course, I'm up here in Bellingham, Washington, which is kind of in the upper left, and so many people connect Colorado to Washington, almost like sister states or something.

So, yeah, I've been up there before. I love it up there. It's beautiful.

It is beautiful. Well, I've never been to Colorado. I have to come down and visit you.

Okay.

I. I have so many things I want to ask you. Of course I've stalked you to know all the things that I. I want to dive into.

You say you're a reluctant trauma expert, and I definitely understand the reluctant part. No one really wants to be a trauma expert. Can you invite us in a little bit to how you got expertise in being a trauma expert?

Yes. Well, by experience. So I am not an expert in the academic training term. You know, I haven't gone to school.

I'm not a counselor or anything like that, but I've had a. An abundance of life experience with dealing with trauma, and it includes, you know, I have in many ways, a relatively easy childhood, quote unquote.

However, my dad had a very hard history of early childhood abuse and neglect, so he had his own trauma history. Which even though he came to know Jesus when I was about six months old, that still followed him.

And so, you know, there was some of that secondary trauma in our family growing up. He was also a Vietnam vet, so you can imagine that coming in as well. And.

And then I got married in my 20s and married a pastor and looked like my life was, you know, following a very well ordered plan to, you know, serve in ministry with my pastor husband. And then six years into that, found myself dealing with an unwanted divorce and single motherhood.

And so here I was in my late 20s and had to go through what I call divorce is really a ripping. It's a ripping of your heart and your life. And talk about traumatic. And then fast forward.

I met a man at our church who had two boys and I had one boy. So we thought, won't that be fun to have a blended family? And we threw us all together.

And so you just add step family dynamics with all of those wounds. That's some additional traumatic experiences. But really the most significant would be when I was 39 years old, I got a phone call from my doctor.

I had an ulcer on the side of my tongue that refused to heal. And we get those. Didn't think it was anything. I'm a very healthy person. But that day when he called me, it was two days before Thanksgiving.

I found out I had squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue. Cancer of the tongue. I didn't even know something like that existed. I had no risk factors, I had no reason.

I mean, I was a 39 year old woman who did triathlons and half marathons and was super healthy. Cancer of the tongue, the mouth, the throat was usually the 75 year old men who smoked constantly and drank whiskey. That wasn't me.

So that started my cancer journey. That initial diagnosis was cancer cut early, where it was kind of a best case scenario. They did surgery, removed it, told me that they got it all.

So we kind of put cancer to the side, never expected to see it again. Except we were wrong. It came back three years later and then came back another eight months after that. So I've had it three times.

The final time that I had cancer of the tongue, it was much more aggressive and advanced.

I basically was given two weeks to kind of get myself ready for what would be a nine hour surgery where they removed 2/3 of my tongue, cut open my neck about 6 to 8 inches, took out my submandibular gland, multiple lymph nodes and blood vessels and things like that to try to Rebuild my tongue, then did an incision on my arm and my leg to try to rebuild all the pieces and parts they took together. And then after I stay in the ICU and given about four weeks to recover from that, they started external and internal radiation and chemotherapy.

And without unpacking all of that, let's just say when you start shooting radiation at the face and the neck and the throat and the esophagus and all of that, the consequences are dire. And so by the time all was said and done, I had a feeding tube for about six months, a tracheostomy for almost two. I had burned from nose to chest.

You can, you know, you can see me. I even see I have all kinds of burn scars on my neck and. And these are on the inside as well, not just the outside.

And was literally taken to the brink of death. I was 5 foot 7, weighed about 110 pounds, and was barely, you know, on the brink.

And, you know, they said we had to take you to the brink of death in hopes. In the hopes of saving their life, maybe. Fast forward. All I have to say, that was kind of the initial acute crisis.

It took me at least two years to recover from that. But it has taken me all the years since.

It's been eight years since that last, to recover spiritually, emotionally from the trauma of that kind of significant medical trauma as well as this. Now I live with permanent disability and chronic pain because my body no longer works like it used to. Those are the highlights. Willow.

But in the middle of all that, I lost my dad from terminal pancreatic cancer. So I'm going through cancer. He's going through cancer. He dies. I get my third diagnosis 10 weeks after his funeral.

And in the middle of that, we also adopted three kids with a very hard history. They were 4, 4 and 5 when we took them into our house. But that just brought their three stories of trauma into our household.

So you can imagine that's just a big old pot of trauma soup. Let me tell you. It's just a lot.

Michelle, you mentioned trauma soup, and it sounds like you've lived 10 lifetimes of trauma. And I think one thing that's really interesting about what you just said is that it's. It's taken time for you to recover from trauma.

And I think that's so true in. In all the time I spend with women who are sharing their stories. In fact, there was one, one woman in here yesterday chatting with me.

It's almost like we're surviving trauma.

And then if we were sort of Lucky enough to survive and move past it, then we're now having to almost revisit how it's impacted us, shaped us, damaged us, wounded us. And so often women don't do that. Men don't as well. But so often we just move on. But we never really move on. I've been thinking about that a lot.

Like, we're expected to sort of move on. You, you made it through cancer, but then you're left with all the. The other damage and all the other wounds.

What's your best advice for women who have experienced trauma like you have, and now it's time to recover from the effects of it? Where do they start? What do they do?

Well, you can't do it alone. I would say that's where you start when you go through significant losses like this.

We typically feel like we need to stuff that down to some extent, especially people of faith. If we're people who are following Jesus, we.

We know we have the good news, and we think that because we have the good news, we need to be happy all the time. So we can't acknowledge or share or admit the fact that we've gone through something really hard that's wounded us. Right.

But that's just not the example we see in scripture. That's not what we see in the Bible. So to begin with, one, we need to be able to tell ourselves the truth. But two, we need to not do it alone.

And that means we need to find safe people to be able to say, this is my story. This is what happened to me. I'm struggling or I'm hurting or I'm wounded.

That said, when we talk about safe people, I'm a big believer in good, solid counseling, especially when it comes to trauma. Emotionally focused therapy is I highly recommend, especially when wounds have happened at that very intense emotional level.

And so I'm a huge believer of that. I'm actively involved in my own counseling, and we just can't do it on our own.

And so I think telling ourselves the truth, not adding shame to our suffering by telling ourselves that we should be okay by now, we should feel better. I don't think that helps us.

And then making sure that we don't do it alone, that we surround ourselves with the right people and relationships that can help offer us support as we walk through it.

Absolutely. We have a counseling program here at Clyde, so we're. I'm amending everything you counseling.

I think it's really interesting because there seems to be almost in Christian culture and. And maybe outside, but this sort of like, expiration date we put on when people should be over things.

And it's kind of like, well, you know, you've been sad about your miscarriage long enough or, you know, people will, will say or act or, you know, you've talked about the pain from your divorce for a year now. You should move on.

And I think that sort of leaves people where they have to go really inward and do grief and sort of trauma therapy on their own without really being real. That. No, but I'm still having a hard time with this, these hard things.

They, they, you know, because even as you said earlier about the process of recovery, I mean, there is some healing that happens, but the truth is, is we will never fully recover on this side of heaven. These things mark us. So we carry the wounds. I, I think of Jacob in the Old Testament wrestling with God and he's left with a limp.

He walked with that limp the rest of his life. But it, that limp wasn't just a reminder of his suffering, it was an ongoing reminder of God's presence. Right.

And so even though we quote, unquote, recover, we never, we never fully heal. And I'm. This is going to sound really radical in some ways.

I'm glad we don't, because the fact that I carry these scars remind me consistently of one, my dependence on God's rescue and two, his ongoing faithfulness to me. Like I. The scars that I carry ongoing are a testament to God's deliverance.

It's, you know, Jesus when he appeared to the disciples after he resurrected and he showed them the scars on his hands and in his side. God didn't have to leave him with scars, but the scars were evidence of the work that God had done.

And so, you know, this, this process of healing, we're still going to have to accept the fact that what we've endured has marked us and become kind of threads in the tapestry of our story. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I love that.

Before you brought up just now your scars, I was going to ask you if you ever look in, when you look in the mirror and you see the scars that you, you show me today, do you, do you see something that you don't like? What do you tell yourself when you're scars in the mirror?

Both. It depends on the day. I mean, the truth is my body is really beat up.

And as a woman and especially living in our culture where everything's about appearance, I look in the mirror some days and I can see all the scarring. I can see how My mouth looks different. My body just looks different. I mean, where my feeding tube was, I still have a opening there.

So it looks like I have two belly buttons. Here's some inside information for people, you know, and it's hard to not look at it and see the flaws. So I have to.

I have to wrestle that and fight that all the time to not let myself feel less than a woman simply because my body has been so ravaged by, you know, my health challenges. At the same time, I also can turn the corner and say, and this is what I'm learning to do. And this is.

I've been doing this for a couple years, but I'm still learning to actually appreciate this body that carried me to hell and back. Right? This body. It's amazing that this body survives what it did.

And so the way I turn the corner when I look and see the flaws on my physical body is go, but look what this body did. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here. There's really no reason that I'm here.

The fact that I'm having this conversation with you right now, Willow, is nothing short of a miracle. There was a good month in there during my treatment when my vocal cords were so burned I couldn't even make a sound.

All my communication had to be on a dry erase board. I'm sitting here doing a conversation with you with a mouse that's been completely remodeled and vocal cords that have still burn scars on them.

What a gift. And so sitting there and looking at our scars and saying, not just look what happened to me, but look what Jesus helped me overcome.

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I love that you're getting out the highlighter pen and saying, I'm still learning. Because you're inviting us in real time to say you've experienced terrible things. You were taken to hell and back.

And sometimes you look at your body and it's hard to see what's happened. But you're also reframing. Like, the importance of reframing and reminding yourself. But look at what God has done.

And I think we all are invited into that work.

Yes, it's hard work. It's very hard work. And the key is both are true. My body is broken. It doesn't look the same as it did.

You can go on Google and search my name and find podcasts and interviews and things I did before my speech changed. My voice was much nicer back then.

And when I go back and hear those old interviews and what my voice used to sound like, I feel a grief all over again. What has been lost. So what I'm trying to say is it's not either grieving over the past or embracing what the overcoming what God has done. It's both.

And we need to make space for both. It's both and not either or.

That means for the person who lost a marriage, let's say they can grieve the divorce and also say, but look what God has done and where I am now. And they're both true. Right. For the person who has a child who is like a prodigal child. Right.

You can embrace the fact that there's this loss, this child that you had so many hopes and dreams for that's not doing what you want. And yet embrace the reality that God knows exactly where they are today. You know, you may not know where they are.

You may have lost touch, but God sees them and he's faithful, and both are true at the same time.

Such a good word. You just wrote a book on faith called A Faith that Will Not Fail. What inspired you?

Well, there's a story in the New Testament between. It's right before the Last Supper, the disciples and Jesus are gathered around the table getting ready to do the Passover, right?

So they think it's a feast. Jesus is the only one that really knows at that point that that night is. He's walking toward his death, right. That something big is going to happen.

Well, this is all happening. He pulls Peter aside and we think of Peter as being the leader of the New Testament church. But he was a very flawed human being like we are.

He pulls Peter aside and he looks at Peter and he says, and Peter's name was also Simon. Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as sweet. Very simply, Jesus is saying, the devil's going to eat you for lunch. Get ready. The.

The ceiling's going to fall. You know, Satan is coming after you, Peter. And I'm like, that's some crazy bad news. Like, that's intense.

So he looks at Simon, says, simon, Simon, Satan is asked to sift you asleep. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith would not fail. And there's a couple really important things to pick up on there.

One, Jesus let Peter know that it was gonna get worse. I mean, things are gonna get bad. Normalizing the reality of testing and challenges and suffering too.

But guess what, Peter, even before the bad thing happens, I've prayed for you. That's a big deal. Jesus prayed for Peter before the worst night of his life.

But the most important thing is the third thing, and it's what Jesus prayed for. Jesus said, I've prayed for you, Simon, that your faith would not fail.

So at the night when the bottom dropped out, when everything fell apart, Jesus prayed. But he didn't pray for his health. He didn't pray that he would not get cancer. He didn't pray for his marriage. He didn't pray for his family.

He prayed for his faith.

So when I saw that story and after kind of experiencing what I have, it occurred to me and powerful sense that when the world is falling apart, when the bottom is falling out, we think that what is most at stake is the cancer diagnosis, the marriage, the child, the financial situation, the job. We think those are the things that are most at stake.

And Jesus wanted Peter to know and wants us to know what is most at stake when our world falls apart isn't those things. They're important. What's most at stake is our faith. What's really most on the line is what we believe to be true about God.

In those moments when you share that, I'm wondering if you can think back to a time when you were going through hell, through all the trauma of cancer, where your faith felt threatened. And what was it that helped you to hold on to faith through that hell?

There were multiple times, not just one, because this has been a long. 30 Years of loss after loss. There's been multiple times, multiple instances of that when I was going through the physical suffering of cancer.

And let me tell You. I did not. I did not realize I used to be a nurse in a former life.

I did not know a human being could experience that level of pain, physical pain, and still survive like we. We're talking next level. When that was happening, part of my wrestling is, why wouldn't God relieve that?

You know, God could say a word and relieve my pain. God said God could do it with a snap of a finger. Why won't he bring me relief? I still don't have an answer to that question.

But you asked me what I could hold onto. A year or two before, somebody had sent me an olive wood cross across made out of olive wood.

And I remember laying on the couch when I was in so much pain and holding that cross, and I would just rub it my thumb.

And there was nothing magic about the olive wood cross, but it reminded me of the fact that even though I didn't understand why my pain remains, that I had a God who was willing to enter into that kind of intense physical suffering himself purely out of love for me. And I found, found a companionship and an empathy from him. Which sounds crazy that God would have empathy, but he does.

And empathy from him that even though my pain didn't go away, I knew I wasn't alone in it.

How important do you think it is that we try to fight for that kind of faith before we're in a storm?

Well, it's kind of like, you know, you want to have when a storm is coming, let's say, you know, depending on where you live in the U.S. if you live, you know, near an ocean, it may be a hurricane here in Colorado, it could be a tornado or a massive snowstorm or whatever. When you are preparing for that, that's not the time to build a house.

You need to have a house before the storm comes, not in the middle of the storm. And I think of that in terms of faith as well that, you know, in the New Testament, there's the whole story of the wise and foolish builders.

The one who built their house on the sand and the one who built their house on the rock. They were building the house long before the storm came.

But in that story, it said very clearly, when the storm came, the house on the sand collapsed, but the house on the rock stood firm. So the building, the foundation was set before the storm came.

But what's so interesting too, about that whole story is both houses faced the same significant suffering. One stood, one fell. And it wasn't even about the roof or the walls. It was about the foundation.

And that's why it's so important for you and I to get really, really grounded in good, solid theology and truth before the storm comes.

It's so.

I guess I don't even know if the Word's motivating, but I see trauma and hardship and struggle come upon people, and you almost think, you know, when you think about your friends who just aren't going through a hard time, and we get kind of comfortable and we get, I don't know, lackadaisical about our faith, about God, whatever it is. And then something comes at us, and all of a sudden we, like, we need God so desperately.

And it just, it's motivating to hear you talk about, hey, now's the time. Actually, don't get comfortable. Actually get out the hammer, get out the nails, like, build a foundation now while you're not going through a storm.

It's just, it's absolutely. I. Earlier years, I had felt God prompt me to memorize 2nd Corinthians 4 as well as Philippians 3.

Those were 2, and I didn't know necessarily why, but I just felt prompted to memorize them. And. And let's be clear, it's not like I have tons of free time. So that was actually an effort to sit and do that.

Well, as I'm going through this, the end of 2 Corinthians 4 is so we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. And this whole chapter talks about facing these hardships that were crushed but not.

Were persecuted, but not abandoned, were crushed, but not in despair. It talks about all of that kind of stuff.

Well, when I was going through my hardest seasons of suffering, the fact that I had memorized these passages meant that they were easily accessible. I was in no position when I was laying on the couch, unable to lift my own head to start memorizing chapters of the Bible.

At that point, I needed something that was at the ready, and thank heavens it was, I was able to, in those moments, pull those out by memory. I have, and I've said this, I said this to a friend even recently, and I'll say it forever, probably.

But there have been times where just the accessibility of Scripture literally saved my life. Right. And so having it at the ready.

Now, for those of you who are in the middle of a hard season and you don't, you haven't had those practices, I don't want you to sit there and go, it's too late for me. It's too Late. I should have memorized. No, it's not too late. And that's why at times all you can do is just find one verse.

That's the other thing I would do is find a verse and put it on a three by five index card and just keep it handy, hold it in my hand because again, I had no strength to go and do a three hour Bible study. I was that physically depleted. But I could hold an index card and remind myself of truth.

You in your book, share 10 practices that help us deepen our faith. Can you invite us into what a few of those are?

Yes, absolutely. Just. There's so many. We've got the practice of lament, the practice of worship, the practice of humility, the practice of relinquishment.

Let's talk about relinquishment. And relinquishment is, you know, letting go to some extent. However, I'm, you know, there's a cliche, let go and let God.

I, I'm, I'm averse to cliches because when you're really suffering, cliches don't really help you. But the practice of relinquishment is, it is helpful.

Learning to loosen our hands requires us to trust the heart and the character and the faithfulness of God. That's not easily done, right? So part of the practice of relinquishments is getting to know the God who can be trusted.

John 17:3, Jesus says, this is eternal life. To know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom He have sent. This is eternal life.

So in other words, eternal life isn't following all the good things and avoiding the bad things. Eternal life is knowing God, knowing Jesus, knowing God. And so relinquishment requires us to know his heart and his character.

And some of that's through His Word, some of that's through experience, some of that is through relationships and hearing what other people say about God. But knowing him to the, to the extent that you can loosen your hands and trust that his character will hold firm even when your world falls apart.

Really good. So many, so many gems of wisdom.

Michelle, you mentioned the collision with Peter and this, this sense that Jesus just prayed for him and prayed specifically that his faith will not fail. I love that so much and actually don't even recall that, that piece of that story. So I want to go back and read it today.

But in a lot of ways, Peter failed over and over and over again. Ultimately, his faith didn't fail. How can failure in our lives actually be used to grow us in our Faith.

And this ties into the practice of humility as well. I think what failure does is forcing us to face the reality of our need of saving. Right.

It faces the reality of our desperate condition and the fact that no matter how hardworking we are, no matter how good we are at memorizing scripture, no matter how faithful we are to attend church or whatever, at the end of the day, we still are in desperate need of a God's salvation, of God's grace, of God's rescue.

And so failing, failing at times is the best classroom for us to one, learn about our need for rescue, but also to learn about the God who does the rescuing.

Okay, the best classroom, I like that. But the one I won't sign up to.

I know. I mean, I'm. I'm kind of a recovering. Not kind of. I'm a full blown recovering perfectionist. So I do not like failure. And yet. And I've.

I've talked to my grown sons about this. I have a son who's in the Air Force and he's an officer in the Air Force, second lieutenant. And, and I tell him, I've told him this for years.

Leaders are made in failures, not successful successes.

When we are always successful, when we do everything right, when we check all the boxes and feel really good about ourselves, we even subconsciously start to convince ourselves that we don't need saving. And pride is always a block to relationship with the one true guide.

Well, it's. It's so amazing to talk to you. And I know we could talk forever. I think it's really interesting.

Much like Peter, I would imagine that you never thought, especially when you're going through everything you've gone through, you probably didn't realize the degree to which God would use your story to impact other people's lives. Does that just blow you away sometimes?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's really no reason he should use me. I am, you know, I. My faith has been fickle. Many times I have questions and doubted.

Many times I, you know, I am a broken woman who does not always handle life circumstances in a faithful way. And yet, I mean, that's. That's like the miracle of the gospel, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

That God says, you know, I think about Paul, Paul writing this in Romans 8, that what then shall separate us from the love of God? So trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword.

No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. Not our efforts, not our Goodness, not our righteousness. We are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

So, yes, it blows my mind all the time that God would use this. But I want to point out what he's using is not my performance. What he's using is my suffering, my failure, my brokenness, my trauma.

That's what he's using. He's using the things that in many ways should be my shame. And he's using it for his glory.

Well, and that's what he used in and of himself. By his wounds, we are healed. It was exactly suffering that brings us healing and rescue. So.

Absolutely. I mean, that's a miracle.

I. It is a miracle. I love your story. I love what you're doing.

I know there's going to be people who are listening to this today and they want to get a hold of your book. So how can they connect with all that God's doing through you?

Well, you can get a faith that will not fail anywhere. Books are sold now, so Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, Christianbook.com anywhere. But if you want to connect, I have tons of free resources.

Resources I'm all about resourcing people who are in hard places. That's kind of. I speak about faith and suffering. That's kind of my thing. I didn't ask for it, but that's the mission God has given me.

You can go to my website and find all kinds of free resources as well as links to buy the book, which I would love it if this resource was helpful. And that is michellechat.com it's Michele with one L and Kashat with two T's at the end.

Michellechette.com and you can find everything you need right there.

That's awesome. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today, Michelle.

Thank you, Willow. It's been a privilege, friend.

I'm so glad that we got to spend time together. Hearing the wisdom that Michele had to share with us today.

I don't know about you, but I love that in all that she's been through, she says she's still learning and. And she's reframing what her scars mean, what they are. I love that on some level she's being honest, that it has been so, so very hard.

And on another level, she sees that God showed up and miraculously saved her in the ways that she needed saving. And he's here and he's with us, and he can help us endure the hardest of things.

So I don't know what you're having to endure right now, but I hope that you can hold on to faith that he is with you and that he has beauty and good and health and life for you. So keep colliding and we'll catch you next week.