When Everything Falls Apart with Katie Rees and Brooke Warnock
I'm going to introduce you to two of my very best, lifelong friends, my sisters, Katie and Brooke. We still are just the dearest of friends. We have been through a lot, as all families have, but today we're going to be talking about a moment, really a season, of life that changed our lives forever.
My sister Katie had some news one day that caused her to lose her marriage, her community, her world. Everything fell in on this day, and it was a shock.
I first wanted Katie to take us back to the day this devastating news came out and what happened in her heart and mind.
“Thankfully, I was with my two sisters that day. And so the fact that the Lord brought the timing in that moment of us three being able to be in the same place at the same time is completely of Him. I truly believe. And so I just remember a big, huge fog had come over me. When you get news that's not so good - it's question after question after question just starts rolling through your brain. And I would say for a long time there would be moments where I literally would have to remind myself to breathe, like take deep breaths and remind myself just to breathe normally because the questions were just so many to count.
In that moment, I knew that my community would look different from then on. We had just moved into my dream house that I had renovated and put my whole life into. I knew there was a chance we were going to have to move. I knew it meant job changes. I knew possibly a marriage ending, and a family breaking up. And I was so broken-hearted for my kids and what they didn't know at the time and what it was going to mean for them. And just the heaviness of that. I was scared for the future.
I never in a million years saw myself as a single mom or having to wade through life by myself. And so I think in the moment that it happened, I had two sisters that I was able to lean on in the flesh. And then immediately I knew that God had been preparing me at the same time. I was ready to completely surrender and lean into Him. When something bad happens, whether it be death or terrible tragedy in a marriage, which is what mine was, losing someone you love, health problems - all of those things, you have a choice in that moment to either rely and know that God's promises are true and lean into that or to question Him. And in that moment, I chose to totally lean in and trust Him because my whole life I'd been reading His promises and it all comes down to this: Do we believe or not believe? And I think that through the tragedy and through the hardship, He was the only thing that I could lean on.”
I want to talk to Brooke next because we experienced a different side of grief. We experienced the grief of watching somebody we love go through hell. I think there's something very real about watching people you love go through tragedy that we don't often give words to, but the people holding the people up are also in a grief. And I think you don't want to ever take away from the person going through it. But I also think that a lot of you out there are holding people together that you love and there's a real cost to that and a real weight to that.
“My husband and I run this hospitality business, and this hospitality business had turned into a place where, for many years, there was a lot of discouragement that I experienced personally - some expectations that weren't met as a young mom and some loneliness that I was not expecting to experience in that stage of life. I think what I saw in our little sister was a picture of what the brokenness of this world actually looks like and how devastating it can be.
I always told people, yes, it's not me going through it, but it felt like my right arm was in the fire. It felt like a limb of my body was actually experiencing her story. What I saw our little sister do was choose hope on a daily basis. It's not even a day at a time. It's minute by minute. I saw her choose hope and choose light and life on a moment by moment basis. I think what I experienced because I was with her about the first month consistently was an understanding of what restoration actually looks like.
Because the Lord gave us this business to run, I think I have a huge calling of restoration, and it actually came from that time of watching our sister and being there with our sister. Watching a person who is experiencing the brokenness of this world in an excruciating way and knowing that we get to be a part of that restoration process. It was awful, but it was also such an honor and a privilege.”
I want to talk about the choices that Katie made early on because they were deliberate, and they were intentional, and I don't know how she did it.
I want to start with a story that happened in the first week or so. We drove up together to Katie’s house to get some of her things. It was just the two of us, and we weren't speaking, we were just in the car. We were just listening to music and driving. All I remember is Katie was looking out the window most of the trip, and then she turned around one time and said “You know, I'm really blessed.”
This is like a week or so in, and I'm thinking, “what?!”
She said, “Not many people get to lose absolutely everything at the same time and see that God's enough.”
I will never forget it because it was a picture of the way she saw her life of just almost being carried.
Next we talked about what those choices looked like for her in the first few months.
“Jenny, Brooke, and I were in Florida when we got the news, and then I flew back to my house and grabbed my bag. It was literally on the thing that, what is it called that carries your bag off, whatever that thing is like literally on there. And I was like, “I need my Bible and my Bible is in the front pocket.”
I was actually in a two month period where I felt far from God in that moment of hearing that news. I was not in the scriptures every day at that point. Now I had been throughout my life and, but there was this small season that I was feeling hopeless in several things.
So I grabbed my Bible, and I'm on the plane. There were maybe three people on this flight, and the very first verse I opened to was in Isaiah. Have you ever had those moments where you just open your Bible and it's like it’s in bold print? It says,
‘I have made you and I will carry you, I will sustain you and I will rescue you.’ -Isaiah 46:4
It was the banner verse, and it's still my banner verse. I think that when you lose so much all at one time, it does put you in a state of just truly longing for heaven. And I just remember longing for that heaven and for that complete restoration.
No, I didn't know what the steps were going to look like for getting through this. Every morning, I asked for my daily bread and deliberately chose to be in the scriptures. I mean, I didn't go into my car without my Bible. I didn't go to bed without it by my side. If a panic attack would come upon me, I would immediately get my Bible out. He would immediately give rest to my soul. The first few days and weeks I definitely was in such thick confusion and grief that I would sometimes yell, sometimes cry through it, repeat over and over and over again. ‘God is good. God is good, God is good.’ And I'd be crying through it. But I kept saying it because I knew that He was good.
It's so cool to look back because you see in the trenches of grief, there are still so many amazing promises and blessings that He is showing us every single day, and I still need to do that in our lives now. Looking back, it would be little things like ‘thank you for this conversation with this person that gave me hope’ or ‘thank you for getting my kids through a day with laughter and joy and no tears’ or ‘thank you for this conversation that I got to have with Sawyer about you, Lord.’ I mean, my kids’ faith group through this experience, and I have those to look at as positive things that happened. So I would say really focusing on the things that were positive around me.
Pulling away for solitude time with God and really resting in prayer and worship and just time in silence. I just found a spot that was comforting to me. It was a trail and you go over this bridge, and then there's this gorgeous forest of these really tall Cypress trees. Finding a spot where you feel like you can pull away from the world and the to-dos, where you are able to do the proper grieving, to cry out if you need to cry out, to be angry if you need to be angry. I think a lot of times people think that grieving just means sadness. It also brings anger - possibly to God - and questioning your faith. I did that, and being angry at those who've hurt you, there's righteous anger in that. I think it’s important having time to go through those feelings and emotions and being able to do it in a safe place.”
I want to speak into this because a lot of people know a dear friend or family member going through hell right now, and I would say to all of you - you get to provide that for them. And I think we've got to take that responsibility on and say, ‘Hey, we're going to participate in this grief process with you’. And if that means helping with kids, if that means bringing meals, whatever, so that people have space and time and margin to grieve. You need to find your people.
And some of you are thinking, “I don't have those people”. We did a whole season of the podcast about this. Go back to Season One and listen to it because it is in the tragedy where you realize that that's where the void is. And don't wait till you're in a tragedy.
Next, I asked Brooke about what she would say to people that have someone they love going through tragedy. What does she think it is to walk beside someone in difficulty?
“You said to pursue those relationships before the tragedy comes. And I want to add to know your theology before the tragedy comes. How many times did we hear our sisters say, ‘thankfully I've been walking with the Lord for awhile’? The people that I see that have gone through severe tragedy and have found the hope that we're describing have been people who have done a lot of that work pre-tragedy. And so not only knowing the people that you'll call, but actually knowing who your God really is to you is something that I continue to think about with Katie’s story. And I mean, she even says it: There wasn't a question of who God was. It was how was He going to show up? How are we going to find hope again? How are we going to put lives back together? But God was still God.
To your question, I think this world we live in, there's a slow decay and whether we're being affected by it through tragedy or whether we're just being affected by it day in, day out, it’s just a picture of brokenness. I think that with tragedy and with someone in grief, there are such broken pieces and there's such destruction, and that is not how it was supposed to be. That is so heartbreaking. I learned more how to sit in that. Because we don't want to sit in it. We try so desperately to distract ourselves from it, to distract the person that's hurting. To reframe it. It's just for comfort, and yes, we need to bring that, but sometimes we have to sit in it with them and sometimes for a very long time.”
I just want to say what an honor it was to walk through that with Katie. I always felt like it was a privilege to carry that season that was so dark and so hard. And God has definitely done a great work in the last year or so. But that season was years long. And now we are in a season of rejoicing. So I asked Katie to share a bit about the season she is in now, years later.
“I have a few scriptures that I still read all the time.
In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
-1 Peter 1:6-9
And I love the line in this verse where it says, ‘refined by fire’ because I do believe in the trenches and in that season of grief and tragedy, when I thought my life was over and I thought everything I knew was gone, I was being refined by fire. I'm able to show you some ways that He has blessed us abundantly, and I feel completely undeserving of it, but I also think through these hardships and through tragedy and through the things that we go through on this earth, it's always for His glory. It's always for His sanctification in us. I have the deepest joy and rest and faith because of the hardships I've gone through because I have seen firsthand, He takes care of me. Do I think it's always in the way the world sees as good? No, but He took care of me every single day. Every single day we'd ask for daily bread and every single night I'd go to sleep, and I felt taken care of.”
That being said, we just celebrated probably one of the happiest years in our family. We got to attend Katie’s wedding to a godly man, and in that same year we have a new little baby Gracie. It was something beyond words. It was more redemptive than any wedding I may have ever been to because of the way that God brought this man into y'alls lives. But I want to point out to everybody that I watched Katie in deep contentment before John Aaron was in the picture. There was a peace with God that she had prior to this. And what she’s preaching is not on the other side. This is how she lived in the darkest dark, not knowing that there would ever be a John Aaron and not knowing that there would ever be that kind of future for her or her kids.
To all of you out there that are walking through this season right now, the three of us just want to say we love you and we're so sorry.
