Latest / Witness the Wonder Christian Podcast: Supernatural Christian Testimonies, Miracles, and God Stories / When Trusting God Hurts | Chelsea Fain on Divorce, Church Hurt & Survival

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When Trusting God Hurts | Chelsea Fain on Divorce, Church Hurt & Survival · Witness the Wonder Christian Podcast: Supernatural Christian Testimonies, Miracles, and God Stories

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I felt the life leaving my body. All I could find the strength to
0:04
say was Jesus help me just over and over.
0:06
And when they finally got my vitals stabilized, I was just
0:10
praying Jesus help me. I wasn't filled with anger.
0:14
I wasn't filled with self pity. All of my typical responses that
0:18
I used to have when the hard things would happen to me, I
0:21
didn't have any of them. Today's episode is for anyone
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who trusted God and still found themselves walking through
0:38
something they never expected. Chelsea, what did that season
0:43
immediately after you left your husband look like for you?
0:47
Well, it was very humbling, that's for sure.
0:50
That was probably the initial worst part to me was how
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humiliated I felt because I had spent so long putting on a
0:59
picture that everything was fine, and now my pride was being
1:03
completely wrecked and tore down.
1:06
And especially because of the slander campaign that he had
1:09
launched against me and turning the church eldership against me.
1:13
I mean, at that church, I was a worship leader.
1:15
I was involved in women's ministry and they had told me
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that if I chose to walk through the divorce, that I wouldn't be
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allowed to be those leadership positions anymore, that I was
1:24
still welcome to come to the church and that they would still
1:27
love me, but that I wouldn't be allowed to be in those
1:29
leadership positions. So it just really humiliated me
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and it devastated me. I started walking through the
1:38
divorce process with my daughter and it was really, really scary.
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It was humbling, It was scary. And I found myself having all of
1:48
the ugliest reactions to the Lord through that time.
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And I remember being angry at God.
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I remember loads of self pity and just kind of a lot of
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really, really ugly responses and lots of anger and rage at
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God, of saying like God, I prayed and I begged you for
2:08
years that this would be healed, that this would be fixed.
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And this is where you have me, like, what are you doing?
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Why would you let this happen to me?
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I really struggled with a lot of those thoughts.
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God and his grace was so faithful and so good to me and
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so loving. Now I look back at all of the
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things that I was freaking out about and I was worried about
2:30
things that in our the divorce process with my daughter
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terrified me that I was going to lose my daughter.
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God's hand was on it the whole time.
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He was so good and he was so faithful to me when I was being
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vile to him. And I'm so grateful that he
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didn't like, throw it back in my face and like, yeah, Dulge is
2:50
own Elsie, but he was present with me.
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He met me. He might love that he takes it.
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From us he does. He just takes all that from us
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and he's still patient and so kind and so gracious.
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And like I said, in the midst of me being horrible to God,
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screaming hatred at him, screaming rage at him on
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numerous occasions, He still loved me.
3:12
He still showed up and when I would cry out to him in tears
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and I would open my Bible and sob, he met me every time and
3:20
I'm so grateful for that. So you, you obviously went
3:24
through the divorce. How long was it?
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Because you, you're now remarried, you have a healthier
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marriage and a growing family. You said it was five years ago
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that you ended up leaving your first husband.
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How like how did that transition happen to finding your new
3:40
husband? I, I started going to counseling
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and started getting healing for myself individually after the
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divorce process started. And then I met my husband and we
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had gotten married actually because I met him while I was
3:54
going through the divorce process and we got married.
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Like I want to say it was like 8 or 9 days after the divorce was
4:00
finalized, which I look back at now, and I'm like, that probably
4:02
wasn't my wisest decision. But my husband that I have now
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is, he's just a good man and he takes really good care of me.
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And there's things that I would have never been able to do
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either had I stayed or didn't meet this man.
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And his name is Josh that I'm married to now.
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There's things like now, because my husband has a really good
4:22
job, I was able to quit my job and now I get to be home with my
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kids. And so like with my daughter who
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it's we're split about 7525 maybe 7030% of the time between
4:34
my house and her dad's house, a lot of the time that I would
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have with her if she was in school, I would miss out on a
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ton of that time. But now because of my husband,
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I'm able to homeschool her and be with her.
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And so there's been so much blessing that's come out of this
4:50
season and being remarried with my husband, with Josh now and he
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just takes really good care of me.
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It's been since March of 2020 now, almost six years time.
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And when I married Joshua, we went through some hard stuff
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because I had so much trauma and PTSD that I was recovering from
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that. It was started off really,
5:19
really rocky. I was so desperate to just be
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loved and to have that affirmation.
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That's probably one reason why I did rush into another marriage
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is because I wanted to feel safe.
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I wanted to feel protected. But in that time I started going
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back to the church that I'd grown up in and was really
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scared to go back and go to church because I thought people
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would judge me because I already had that last church.
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You know, I felt very abandoned by them.
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And so I'd already suffered from the rejection of one church and
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I was really nervous to go to another one and receive the same
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thing. And at that church that I had
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grown up and that we are going back to, I had grown up on the
5:57
worship team at that church. And I went maybe about a year of
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re attending at that church where I did not want to be
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involved in worship team. I was going through my healing
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process emotionally and spiritually.
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And then after I had gone through a lot of of healing in
6:14
that time, I felt the tug of the Holy Spirit on my heart saying,
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you need to present your worship to me again.
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You need to, you need to do that.
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You're hiding your gift that I've given you.
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You're hiding it because you're ashamed and embarrassed.
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There's that pride poking his head back up again.
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And when I finally submitted to that and I went to the worship
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pastor and asked her if I could be on worship team again, they
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just treated me with so much love and so much tenderness and
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just welcomes me in with loving arms.
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I remember the first time I walked in on the first worship
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rehearsal that I was coming back on, I started crying because I
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was so ashamed of what people would think of me being on
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worship team. The shame was so heavy.
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I was was crying before I could even walk through the doors of
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the sanctuary to go rehearse. And Pastor Jenny walks up to me
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and hugs me and she just said we're so happy that you're home
7:14
again. It just wrecked me.
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But it wrecked me in a beautiful way and brought so much healing
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to my heart. I went through a lot of
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emotional healing and spiritual healing during that time.
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There's about a a year and a half time period of just where
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God was so tender with me and used the people around me to
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bring so much healing of a lot of the shame that I was dealing
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with from having walked through a.
7:41
Divorce. I think that's beautiful that
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God not only is restoring your healing and restoring the areas
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of your life that were damaged through your marriage, but also
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he brought you to a church to heal you from the church hurt
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that you experienced at the last church as well.
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Really cool how he doesn't just work from one area when we're
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when we're wounded, he works on all the areas.
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And I think it's beautiful that he brought you to a place that
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was a good example of modeling what Christ would look like in
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that situation. To embrace thought of that,
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that's. What Jesus would do?
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It's so I've not I have not put that together that as God was
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healing might meet emotionally from like the shame of the the
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divorce and everything that God is also healing me from the
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wounds of the rejection of that church.
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I'd not thought of that until this moment that you just said
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that that was really beautiful. Thank you.
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It's. Back back up in our story here,
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you got remarried and then early last year you guys got pregnant.
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Yeah, we found out in as actually right at the end of
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December of 2024 we found out that we were pregnant and
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January 9th of 2025 was our first ultrasound appointment.
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We're not trying to get pregnant.
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We were we were claiming to be done with our family.
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We thought that our family was complete.
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We had our little at the time my son was was one and so we were
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not planning this baby. And so when we found out we were
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pregnant, we were super excited because it was complete surprise
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going into that appointment, January 9th of 2025, filled with
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the hope and excitement. And then we found out in that
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ultrasound that the baby had passed.
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That was really hard on us emotionally.
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But I, I had this fire in me that thought because my body
9:29
still had not passed the miscarriage, still hadn't
9:32
recognized that I had a miscarriage.
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I was still feeling sick every morning.
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So I was like, I'm going to pray for a miracle.
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I'm going to pray that God saves this baby and brings life back
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into my womb and restores this baby's heartbeat.
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We had another appointment after a week to just kind of confirm
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things were going to happen. We got the same news, but I
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still my nothing had passed. My body was still thinking it
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was pregnant and so I kept praying.
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I said God, I know that you can bring a miracle into the bit
9:59
life of this baby, but your will be done God, your will be done.
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When I think back to like when I was going through the divorce,
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my responses to the hard things that I was going through in that
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the divorce process where I was angry at God, I was feel the
10:13
self pity. I got really apathetic at times.
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It was totally different this time around.
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Where is this child that I was so excited about out had died
10:24
within me. I wasn't angry at the Lord, I
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wasn't in a pity party and I was filled with faith and hunger for
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a miracle from God. I prayed and prayed and prayed
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again. I didn't get the answer that I
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wanted and late January of 2025, my body finally started passing
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the miscarriage. It in that process I had severe
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complications with that. I started massively hemorrhaging
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my husband. My whole family is actually at
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church that morning. I stayed home because I didn't
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feel good and it was in that time where I started massively
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hemorrhaging and I got in the shower because it was
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uncontainable hemorrhaging. I just thought my body's just
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finally recognizing the miscarriage.
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I got in the shower. I had in the little Kitty bath
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next to me my one year old son in the shower and within minutes
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my vision started blurring. I started slumping to the floor
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and I recognized I said this is bad, this is not normal and I
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crawled across the bathroom, grabbed my phone, called my
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husband who's a nurse and thankfully he was 2 minutes
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away. He rushes in, does all of the
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nurse things that he knows what to do, calls 911 and is able
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when the EMT's get there where they were able to stabilize me
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enough. But when they got there, my
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vitals were so critically low that the doctor ended up telling
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me that if it had been another 15 to 20 minutes before my
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husband got home, that I likely would have passed from it
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because I had lost so much blood so rapidly.
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They took, I went to the hospital and they tried two
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different times to stop the hemorrhaging without surgery.
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They couldn't stop it. And so they finally rushed me
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into an emergency surgery where they were able to stop the
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bleeding. And throughout that entire time,
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while I I felt the life leaving my body, I knew I was that I was
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facing death. All I could find the strength to
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say was Jesus help me, Jesus help me, Jesus help me just over
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and over and over. And then when they finally got
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my vitals stabilized from the EMS, it was just, I was just
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praying Jesus help me, Jesus help me.
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And I again, I wasn't filled with anger.
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I wasn't filled with self pity at all of my typical responses
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that I used to have when the hard things would happen to me.
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I didn't have any of them. It was just this intimate crying
12:55
out. So the father of just help me.
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And then when so when all of that passed and I was finally
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able to come home and I was in my recovery stage in my lowest
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of the I mean, I couldn't even stand up off the couch by
13:08
myself. I it was it was bad.
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I was so weak that I could barely do anything.
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So in my weakest state, that is when the Lord showed up and did
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a tremendous work in my heart and He started as my body was
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physically recovering and I was in the state of rest, the Lord
13:29
started taking me through this healing journey emotionally and
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spiritually. So whereas I had already, and
13:36
like the previous year and a half, two years, walked through
13:39
a lot of emotional and spiritual healing with my church, this was
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totally different. This was sweet intimate time
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with the Lord where he started taking me back in my memories
13:50
and in almost like I was seeing like a movie playing in my in my
13:56
mind. God was taking me back to scenes
13:59
and situations when I was in the abusive marriage, when I was
14:04
going through the divorce and he was showing me those memories,
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but where he was at in all of those memories?
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One I remember really vividly. I remember this vivid memory of
14:18
me with my back against the wall with my ex-husband in my face
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punching the wall behind me. The Lord showed like a sphere
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and written on this sphere where all of my prayers that I had
14:30
been begging the Lord for was like this little bubble of
14:34
protection around me that and so it was memories like that where
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God was showing me this is where I was at in all of those things.
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I never left you. I never abandoned you even
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though you chose to ignore me and walk into this situation.
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I walked into it with you. I was with you in every moment
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and everything. This moment of fear, I was with
14:56
you. So I just, it was this healing
14:59
journey where God opened my eyes to where he was at, how he used
15:05
those situations to transform my heart and to grow my faith.
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Also to show me where I responded really poorly to the
15:14
things of God and how I can respond to him better.
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He used the experience with the miscarriage and was and and
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showed me see how you responded this time when allowed me to
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heal your heart and you've allowed me to transform you
15:30
through all of these hard things.
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Look at where you're at now. See what I've done in you.
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See how how much your faith has grown and this happened over, I
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don't know, probably January, February, March, April, probably
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like 3 months, three or four months where God just gently
15:48
brought these things back up into my quiet times and brought
15:53
so much healing into my heart during that season.
15:57
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christinasmithofficial.com. It's cool to hear your story and
16:22
how that he worked that in your healing process because he did
16:26
the same thing in mind. It was so gentle the way he did.
16:30
It was like each step, as he would heal one part, the very
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next thing I would need would naturally unfold, whether it was
16:37
through a person or whether it was through maybe a book I
16:40
needed to read that was going to help me with that next, except
16:44
for the healing process, He would show me where he was in
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that moment. When we are in the middle of
16:49
those situations, we just can't see him.
16:53
It's like you can't see the forest for the trees because
16:55
you're in the midst of it. You just see the woods in front
16:58
of you, right, Right. You're just like, right, what's
17:01
in front of you and that's all you can see.
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But he's all around you and His hand is in every piece.
17:07
And part of that situation that we're walking through that we
17:12
are so consumed by the situation that we just can't see clearly.
17:18
Like you said, we've got those like blinders on we're just
17:21
trying to get. Through it.
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That's really what we're focusing on is getting to the
17:25
other side. But he's right there walking
17:28
with us every step of the way up.
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Yeah, you, you talk about, you talked about how he started
17:32
showing you where you've been throughout your life and even in
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the seasons where you didn't recognize it at the time.
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We also shared with me that Scripture began to look
17:41
different to you. You started noticing how often
17:44
God used not just hardships in your life, but that hardships in
17:48
the lives of people throughout the Bible to shape and prepare
17:52
them. What did God begin to show you
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as you looked at those stories, and how did it help you
17:57
understand your own story differently?
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Well, in that healing processes, God would show me different
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pictures and memories of my life and the painful things that I'd
18:05
been through. He took me back to Scripture and
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started walking me through and almost like telling me the
18:12
stories of different people throughout the Bible, several of
18:17
them, mind you, several and the painful things that they went
18:20
through and reminding me when I was reading stories like Job.
18:25
Job was a huge one. Job is the look of the Bible
18:27
that is very easy to avoid because we don't we don't like
18:31
to acknowledge the pain that Job went through.
18:34
But God started walking me through these different people
18:36
in the Bible and showed me look where I was at in their hard
18:41
seasons, look behind the scenes and see how I was working all of
18:46
those things out for good and started showing me this
18:49
framework of how he cultivates deeper faith and transformation
18:56
in the hearts of his people to take them.
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I think it's up in Corinthians, it says take them from 1° of
19:03
glory to another degree of glory, how he transforms us.
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So he showed me the life of Job, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua.
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I mean, there's countless Ruth is another one, Esther, King
19:18
David, there are there's countless people in the Bible
19:24
and several in the New Testament to Jesus himself.
19:27
All of these people in the word of God, how they walked through
19:31
really hard situations, but God was always faithful to transform
19:37
them through the hard situations that God never wasted a single
19:41
hard thing that they went through.
19:43
Like Joseph was one that I went went to a lot.
19:46
When I was walking through this healing journey with the Lord, I
19:50
was like, well, God, why did you let him go through that betrayal
19:53
from his brothers? Why did you let him get sold
19:56
into slavery to be falsely imprisoned?
19:58
Why did you let all these things happen?
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And I relate a lot to Joseph because when we look at him as a
20:05
17 year old kid, he, he was a little prideful.
20:09
How he's like, hey guys, listen to this dream that I had.
20:12
Everybody bows down to me and then, oh, I had another one.
20:16
You all bowed down to me again that we can see some pride in
20:19
him. Like come on Joseph, you got to
20:21
have a little bit of tack to there.
20:22
But he wanted to share. There was some pride there.
20:25
And how the Lord, in order to take him from the immature 17
20:30
year old prideful young man and to transform him into the man
20:33
who would be able to hold the mantle and the weight of
20:38
leadership to be second in command in the one of the most
20:41
powerful countries in existence at the time.
20:44
God had to allow his pride to lead him into these really hard
20:49
situations and to slowly break off that pride, to increase his
20:55
wisdom and to transform his heart to prepare him to hold the
20:59
weight of that mantle of leadership.
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God used that for his good. And even Joseph admits that at
21:05
the end of his story when he's talking to his brothers and he's
21:08
finally reunited with his brothers, he says what you meant
21:11
for evil, God used for good. And that's a testament.
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That story alone would be enough.
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But God uses that same cycle, that same pattern through about
21:23
scripture and even since scripture was born, if you look
21:25
at the lives of several different Saints throughout
21:27
history, it's the same pattern that God takes us from where
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we're at in our normal world, allows those hard things to come
21:36
into. Sometimes it's from our own
21:38
doing, like in my own situation, he allows us to walk into those
21:42
hard things in those trials, in those ordeal, but always is
21:45
faithful to use them and transform them so that we emerge
21:50
from that season a better vessel for his glory, a transformed
21:55
vessel for his glory. And that's what he really
21:59
started to reveal to me through throughout Scripture of what how
22:03
he uses those hard things in people's lives.
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You know what's cool about it though, is it never makes sense.
22:09
Like the way God works things out.
22:11
I think there's nothing logical about it.
22:13
Like we can't wrap our human brain around how he's going to
22:17
do what he does to turn it around for our good.
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Tell me how he applied that to your life, like what he did when
22:25
Joseph's life, how he did it to your life.
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Yeah, through all of that. So that was, like I said, about
22:30
four months of me learning and walking through this healing
22:33
journey with God. And then come June, the Lord put
22:37
it on my heart to write it down and to start taking the message
22:41
that he had been given me and putting it into a book.
22:43
I always loved writing. And so that I'm a avid
22:46
journaler. And so that was very easy for me
22:48
to put it in book format until this fall when God put it on my
22:52
heart and said, OK, now you need to share it.
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I've given you the message, I've given you the words and now you
22:59
need to share it. You need to Share your story.
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And so over this year was started, 2025 started as me
23:05
almost dying, turned into this journey by the end of the year,
23:10
I now have a book that has been written, has been formatted and
23:14
edited and is ready to be published.
23:16
And it will be published on January 9th.
23:18
That's amazing. Congratulations.
23:20
I love it. He takes, He's taking you
23:22
through that season and you're turning it around and you're
23:25
using it for His glory, but He's going to turn around and He's
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going to use it to help other people.
23:29
He wants to take our life and the things that we go through
23:32
and use it to help others as well.
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How is walking through all of this really shaped who you are
23:38
today? How do you see God using your
23:41
story now to encourage other people?
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Well, I mean, with the book alone, I've given it already to
23:47
about 20 different people as kind of early readers, editors
23:51
thing. And I've had several of those
23:54
people tell me that they thought that they were going to be able
23:57
to just buzz through the book because they like to read.
24:00
And it has stopped them in their tracks where they have had to
24:03
stop and look at their own stories and reflect on what God
24:07
has done in their own lives. And people have told me that the
24:10
message that God gave me is so speaking to their hearts and
24:14
their lives in the season that they're in and that it's
24:16
transforming that, that the way that they view the Lord and
24:19
they're, it's transforming their relationship, which is a
24:22
tremendous blessing to my heart to be able to see, wow, this
24:27
isn't just a message that you gave me, God.
24:29
There's a reason you wanted me to write it down.
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There's a reason you wanted me to share this because this isn't
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just a healing journey for my heart.
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This is something that you just wanted me to put together in an
24:41
order of what you've taught me, but you really want this to get
24:46
to other people too. And so I'm really excited to, to
24:49
share it with the world. I'm super intimidated to share
24:52
it with the world. Let me be honest, because it, it
24:55
is raw, is vulnerable and it does not paint me in the best
25:00
light because like I said, it's very vulnerable and it I share
25:04
about all of the ugly responses I had to the Lord's working in
25:08
my life. And so it's, it's nerve racking.
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But based on just the feedback that I've gotten already, and
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some of it's from friends and family and some of it's just
25:17
random people that I've met off of the Internet, off of
25:20
Instagram and Facebook that wanted to be a part of it.
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We're like, Hey, this sounds like a book I might like.
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Can I read it? And the feedback that they're
25:27
giving me, people that I don't even know, just it's, it's
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firing me up. It's making me excited like,
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wow, God is going to use this message to change more than just
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my life. That's.
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Amazing. I love it.
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I love it when he does that. It's so good.
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He's so good. I know he's always at work in
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our story, isn't he? For those joining us today,
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we'll make sure that you can get the link to buy Chelsea's book
25:53
in the show notes below. One final question for those
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joining us today, Chelsea, who are trusting God with what's
26:00
ahead even when the path doesn't make sense.
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What would you want to say to them to encourage them to get
26:07
them through? The one message that I have
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taken most from this whole journey is this simple little
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thing that the Lord taught me is that God is good and He is
26:19
faithful even when our circumstances are hard and that
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our circumstances do not impact or change the character of God.
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So if I could leave you listener with one thing is just to
26:33
remember that that even though you make me going through hard
26:36
and difficult circumstances, that does not change the
26:39
goodness and the faithfulness of our God, that He is good and
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faithful no matter our circumstances.
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Right the Bible says he's the same yesterday, today and
26:48
forever. He does not change.
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Thank you so much, Chelsea for sharing your stories and for
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those of you joining us today and trusting God with what's
26:57
ahead even when you don't understand the path.
27:00
Be courage, keep holding on. Keep trusting God because He
27:05
does not fail and He is always at work in your story.
27:10
To learn more about today's guest or explore the resources
27:13
mentioned, visit christinasmithofficial.com where
27:16
I've made it easy to find everything connected to each
27:20
episode. And if you're enjoying Witness
27:22
the Wonder, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss
27:25
future episodes, leaving a review or sharing the show with
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someone you know. Really, it does help these
27:31
stories reach more people. And remember, God is always at
27:35
work in your story.