July 21, 2024 • 30 mins
In this episode of Bleeding Daylight, Rodney Olsen welcomes Catherine Cowell, a life coach, spiritual director, and host of the Loved, Called, Gifted podcast, to share her incredible journey of faith and resilience. Catherine opens up about the profound challenges she faced, including a brain tumour diagnosis for her husband, infertility struggles, and the complexities of adopting and raising two young boys who had experienced significant trauma. Her story is a powerful testament to finding hope and meaning amidst life's darkest moments, highlighting her unwavering commitment to authenticity and creating spaces for real, vulnerable faith journeys.
Catherine recounts the tumultuous period that began in 2005, when a 24-7 prayer initiative at their home led to unexpected fallout and ultimately her husband's life-threatening health issues. She shares the harrowing experiences of navigating his brain tumour diagnosis, the painful loss of a pregnancy, and the eventual realisation of her own infertility. Despite these trials, Catherine's faith remained a constant source of strength, guiding her and her husband towards adopting two young brothers. Her candid reflections on the adoption process and the ongoing challenges they faced provide valuable insights into the importance of empathy, perseverance, and the enduring presence of God's grace in the midst of hardship.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening.
Links to our social media channels are available right now at bleedingdaylight.net.
Is this your first time listening to Bleeding Daylight?
(00:31):
There are dozens of other amazing guests at bleedingdaylight.net.
Make sure you hear their stories too.
Where is God in the messiness of life?
Where do we find peace when things don't go according to the script and we find ourselves going through difficult circumstances?
My guest today takes us through her own journey and talks about God's closeness through it all.
(01:03):
In today's episode, I'm welcoming Catherine Cowell, a life coach, spiritual director, and host of the Loved, Called, Gifted podcast.
Catherine's journey is a testament to finding hope and meaning amid life's darkest moments.
In navigating profound challenges, Catherine's story is one of resilience, faith, and unexpected love.
(01:24):
Her deep commitment to authenticity and creating spaces for people to be real about their faith journey make her a great guest for Bleeding Daylight.
Catherine, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
We all face the ups and downs of life, but some people do seem to travel a particularly challenging path.
(01:45):
Can you take me back to when life began to take some especially difficult turns for you?
I would say that takes us back to about 2005.
My husband and I had been part of a church for quite a number of years.
You know when you're kind of involved and it's your family and it really feels like your community.
We'd felt very much led by God to do some 24-7 prayer, which we ended up doing in our house.
(02:10):
We tried to do it nicely and respectfully.
We weren't aware that praying in our house was going to cause anybody any trouble.
But the pastor of the church that we were part of at the time took enormous offence at the fact that we had just gone ahead and done this.
And we found ourselves suddenly without a church.
But we had people who were coming to our house to pray.
Two weeks into that, I was down in London and had a phone call from my husband who told me that he'd suddenly got double vision.
(02:37):
I came home and we went to the hospital and it turned out that he had something growing in his brain which shouldn't be there.
So I guess that was the beginning of things feeling a little bit tricky.
This bad diagnosis comes and we'll explore that more in a moment, but it doesn't just come in isolation.
There's already some things that are quite troubling going on.
You're finding yourself without a church, without that group of people around you.
(03:00):
There's this diagnosis.
So as you say, there's something growing there that shouldn't be.
What was the eventual diagnosis of that?
He was diagnosed with a meningioma.
Because of where it was growing, it was pushing onto lots of kind of crucial things.
It was right in the middle of his head.
They couldn't easily get in.
So he needed something called stereotactic radiotherapy.
(03:22):
And there was a long, long wait for that.
He was in a lot of pain.
This is where kind of God's grace in the middle of the darkness comes in, really.
We'd had a couple of friends who had rung us up when he was first in hospital.
He was in hospital for weeks and weeks and weeks while they worked out what was going on.
She rang us up when he was first in hospital and said, listen, we are putting aside some money in case you need it at any point.
(03:45):
And then another friend, knowing what it was that we needed, he'd gone Googling and discovered that we could get this treatment in Sweden for not an outrageous amount of money, actually, and that there wouldn't be a wait for that.
So I rang our friend and said, you know, you said you were putting aside some money.
She rallied around and spoke to other people that we knew.
(04:07):
And within three days, we had got the funds that we needed to take my husband, Andy, to Sweden and to have treatment.
And then coming back from that, we were in a situation where he was kind of in recovery.
He was really, really often he was in pain and struggling with stuff.
And in the middle of all of that, I suddenly found myself to be pregnant, which initially was a bit sort of, oh, my goodness, what on earth is going on here?
(04:33):
This doesn't seem like great timing.
And then I thought about it and I thought, actually, given what we've been through, given the pain that we've been through this year, this really feels like God's redemption.
Here is the beginning of a new life in the middle of what feels like darkness and despair and difficulty.
We decided that it'd be a good idea to go on holiday whilst there was just still the two of us.
(04:54):
We were both delighted once we got over the initial kind of shock of, oh, gosh, we weren't expecting this now.
And in that sort of process of looking forward to the future, we went on holiday to the Dominican Republic.
While we were there, I had a miscarriage and found myself kind of in third world hospital a long way from home being sorted out.
It does seem that there's these struggles that are coming along and there's this glimmer of light in the middle of it.
(05:18):
And as you say, you felt very clearly that this was something from God and yet it's taken away from you.
So where was your faith at this stage when you're going on this roller coaster?
How do you stay close to God when you're not quite sure what direction he's taking you?
That's a really interesting question.
I had a moment in the hospital which felt like slightly harsh mercy, if you like.
(05:41):
I was there saying, well, what on earth?
I thought that this was the plan, that there was redemption in this.
What on earth is going on?
And I felt very clearly God saying, yeah, that wasn't my story.
That was a story that you'd made up.
That wasn't what I was up to.
I don't know quite how the sort of staying close to God works in those moments, except that it was God's presence that was more important to me than what God was actually up to or what life was throwing at us.
(06:10):
You had this calm at this time, which was difficult enough, but then I believe there was further illnesses with your husband over the next couple of years.
Yeah.
So there were quite a lot of consequences of his brain tumour that he'd had.
It left quite a bit of damage.
A year or so later, he was working in a prison at the time and I got a phone call to say that he'd been taken to hospital in a prison van because he'd had an enormous epileptic fit.
(06:37):
And then the year after that, he'd gone back for a routine scan and they discovered that there were other things growing.
But then it was really difficult to kind of get anybody's take on what that was or what was happening.
And sort of in the midst of all of that, I was beginning to realise that the fact that I hadn't got pregnant again was beginning to really hurt emotionally.
(06:59):
But I'd sort of pushed that to the back of my mind because it just wasn't convenient.
You know, thinking about infertility at a point when my husband was kind of still struggling with stuff, it just didn't feel like this was something that should be on the agenda.
So I'd sort of ignored it.
And I'd had those experiences that I think a lot of women have who are struggling with infertility, where you walk past a toy shop and it really hurts or you see young children.
(07:25):
And whereas before that would have been really great, there was something inside that is finding that really painful.
But I was sort of trying to ignore all of those things.
And the fact that I'd been pregnant once kind of made me think, well, surely, surely at some point this will happen.
But it just wasn't.
So there was quite a lot of stuff going on at once, I would say.
During that desire to become pregnant again, your husband had some tests which came back with something quite surprising.
(07:51):
Yes.
Yeah, so we went and had fertility tests and I was fine.
But he was basically infertile.
His sperm were either not moving at all or malformed or going in the wrong direction, most of them.
I think there was something like a 2% functional sperm count, which meant in fact that the question stopped being, why am I not getting pregnant now?
(08:11):
But rather, how on earth did I get pregnant in the first place?
Life does have its twists and turns, doesn't it?
And I'm interested in the fact that you mention going past the toy stores and going past places that bring joy to so many people was difficult for you.
And I wonder how many times we're in a space where we just don't know what the person next to us is going through and the things that might spark joy in us are very different to the thing that will spark joy in the person next to us.
(08:46):
Yeah, I think that's true.
And it's important to be sensitive.
At the same time, you just don't know.
It would be ridiculous to stop having toy stores and playgrounds where young children play because somebody might find it tricky.
One of the things that was quite interesting to me was that when I'd had my miscarriage, we had told people that I was pregnant.
(09:07):
So, it was a relatively early miscarriage and we told people.
And the reason that I told people was because I thought actually, I think this will all be fine.
But should it not be, I thought it's going to be much harder to talk to people about it and to gain understanding if we'd done that traditional thing of, well, we're not going to tell you for the first three months.
I'd thought, well, actually, if we're open with our friends, then should we need the support because there's been a miscarriage or something, then it would be there.
(09:34):
And what was really interesting was that actually it wasn't.
People did not know how to talk about it.
Two weeks after my miscarriage, I remember being in church and people knew what had gone on and the question was, how's Andy?
And nobody but nobody said, and how are you doing?
The only person who ever inquired was an aunt of mine who'd had a number of miscarriages when she was young.
(09:56):
And we hardly ever spoke, but she rang me up to find out how I was.
And that's the difficulty that we face.
Whenever someone is going through treatment for something or someone has been through an ordeal as you had of that miscarriage, we don't know the words to say.
And unfortunately, so often rather than being clumsy, which I think most people would understand, we say nothing and that can hurt even more.
(10:22):
How important is it that we try and find the right words, even if we don't get it completely right, to actually be there for people in those moments?
I think it's really important for people to know that we're there.
Part of the key, I think, to getting it right or not getting it horrendously wrong is focusing on simply being there and letting people know that you're thinking of them.
(10:43):
To just say, I know that you're going through this thing, which is difficult, and I just want you to know that I'm thinking of you.
Where people do get it wrong, I think, is if they kind of leap in and try and fix it.
There are lots of crass things that you could say to somebody who's just had a miscarriage, like, well, at least you got pregnant.
Or my cousin had eight miscarriages, now she's got two boys and it's all great.
(11:04):
You know what I mean?
There are kind of leaping in and fixing things.
But I think just to say, how are you doing?
And do you want to talk about it?
I think helps, yeah.
After realising that it was going to be very unlikely for another pregnancy, you decided to go down a different path, but that didn't prove to be an easy one either, did it?
No.
(11:24):
I mean, it's been hugely joyful, but it's had lots of challenges.
I spent a couple of weeks thinking, should we do the IVF thing?
And it didn't take me very long at all to think, actually, you know, that just does not sit right.
And then I was sitting in the garden praying one day, the thought came to me very powerfully that if we were going to be a family, why on earth would I go to enormous effort to try and make a pregnancy happen when there are so many children out there who need somewhere and need a family and need to be loved?
(11:58):
That's no judgement at all on anybody else who would take an IVF journey.
I think it's a hugely courageous thing to do.
I know that it's incredibly difficult and I have huge admiration for that, but that just wasn't what felt right for us.
And there were a number of things that came to my mind that I then spoke to my husband about and we were in agreement.
(12:20):
But there were a number of things that came to my mind in that moment that felt important.
One was that I felt that it was right to adopt rather than to foster because I wanted the children who came to us to know that this was unconditional.
We weren't getting paid by anybody, there was no exit route, but this was our choice and they would be our kids.
(12:41):
The next thing that felt important to me was that I knew that there are lots of people who are wanting to adopt babies.
And I thought, actually, I would like to give a home to some children who are a little bit older.
And in adoption terms, a little bit older is not that much older, it's kind of two, three plus.
And then the third thing that I felt quite strongly was that I wanted to adopt siblings.
(13:04):
Part of my thinking was actually, if you're going to move into a new place, but you have a sibling with you, they are probably going to have been the only constant in your life at this point.
And surely it would be easier to do that together with somebody than it would all by yourself.
And the other thing was that I really was thinking about, you know, you see documentaries sometimes about people who've kind of been split from both family and that.
(13:27):
One of the things that I've noticed was the extent to which people would talk about their bonds with brothers and sisters that they'd lost.
And I kind of thought, I would really like to give some kids the opportunity to take their siblings for granted and not have that sense of deep loss about being separated from them.
So those three things were kind of what led us forwards.
(13:48):
And in the end, you managed to adopt.
Tell me about the boys.
Yeah, we had two boys.
They were nearly three and just five when they came home.
We were home number five for them.
They'd bounced from birth parents to family carers, two or three sets of foster carers, and then to us.
(14:09):
When we were having our 24-7 prayer at our house all those years before, one morning Andy had come downstairs and said to me, God's given me two names.
And there were two boys' names.
And we thought that this was relating to friends of ours who were wanting to have twins.
And so we kept these names aside because they were praying to have twins in our house and this kind of felt coincidental.
(14:30):
And then they had a little girl, but we'd remembered them.
We had a handful of profiles of children to look at.
And there were these two little boys and something in my heart warmed to them.
And I said to Andy, I think we should find out more about these two.
At the point when we had decided, yes, we will look into this further, we suddenly realised that their names were the names that God had given us back in 2005 before they were even born.
(14:55):
So those were our two boys.
Matthew That's absolutely remarkable when you see God's hand at work right throughout that process.
And yet we know that even when God is involved, it doesn't mean that the road will be easy.
And I imagine for these boys, if they've been bounced around from a home to home, it's going to be very difficult for them to internalise the truth of what you were talking about in that, guys, this is your forever home.
(15:24):
Because I imagine that they'd be always thinking, but for how long?
So how difficult was it for them to become part of your family?
Alison I think becoming part of our family was not necessarily that difficult.
But what happens to young people who have had a traumatic early start and all of those, that kind of separation, they develop brain patterns and ways of thinking and ways of being in the world, which were designed to keep them safe in those dangerous situations.
(15:55):
And those kind of non-functional survival patterns affect absolutely everything.
There has not been an element of their interacting with life that has not been impacted by that early trauma.
If you imagine you're in a sort of a survival situation, there is a bear in the woods and I must run away.
In that moment, you need the brain pattern which says, this is an emergency, I must run and I must be alert for danger.
(16:20):
You don't need the brain pattern which says, hmm, I wonder what kind of bear that is.
I wonder what sort of plan we might make in order to escape from the bears.
I wonder who I could talk to about that.
We have a sort of a calm, logical way of thinking about things.
And then we have a different sort of way of interacting with the world, which is all about what do we do when there's an emergency.
(16:41):
And if you've had early trauma, the emergency part of your brain ends up being very, very active, whereas the, it's all calm and I can work this out carefully, that bit of your brain doesn't develop nearly as well.
We ended up with these kids in our house and there were a number of things going on for them.
Their emergency brain is always on red alert.
(17:02):
There is a deep inner sense of shame from the fact that they have not stayed with their birth parents, completely unspoken, but it's absolutely there.
There is also the sense that grown-ups are not safe.
So they really felt the need to be in control all of the time.
And if you think about what parenting normally looks like, parenting normally looks like adults doing their best to help their kids to understand that they are in charge and that adults being in charge is a good thing.
(17:32):
Whereas our kids absolutely were not believing of that.
And to be honest, that was back in 2011.
And I would say that they still have that sense that life is best and life is safest if they are in charge.
You can imagine that that kind of made life something of a challenge.
They didn't know how to play because that had never happened.
(17:55):
We'd got toys and we'd got stuff for them and they just used to, when they first came home, they would just empty the shelves in our living room with everything.
That was a daily thing.
If they got stressed, they would empty their bedrooms down the stairs.
Mattresses, toys, duvets, blankets, everything.
Both of them had a tendency to sort of escape from the house and run off.
(18:16):
So it was pretty chaotic and pretty difficult.
And for my husband, the real challenge was that we just had not recognised he had a really difficult childhood and we just had not recognised that he had got within him a lot of unresolved trauma.
And I don't think this is uncommon for adoptive families that you suddenly invite into your home children who've been through a lot of trauma and their trauma triggers your unresolved trauma.
(18:46):
I ended up in the situation where I had three people in my home who were deeply traumatised and really struggling.
That must have been incredibly difficult for you and for the others in your home.
Sadly, that didn't go down a particularly good path.
What happened at that stage for your husband?
He did his best in many ways, did lots of bits and pieces of kind of going for counselling and then finding that really difficult.
(19:13):
And life at home was just really, really hard.
I think for both of us, we had that Christian idea of marriage is for always.
Our initial response was just to try and make it work and to persist and to keep going.
And we did that for a number of years, but actually it was not healthy for any of us.
I had gone to a Christian conference called New Wine and they had a lovely, lovely sort of area for parents of children with additional needs.
(19:41):
And I just went and sat there and wept.
And I knew at that point that I needed to make a decision.
I could see that my oldest was kind of heading towards teenage years really quite quickly.
And I was sort of thinking, if we don't do something to make home life properly stable quickly, then we're going to hit teenage years and this is just going to be dreadful and a nightmare.
(20:01):
He needs some stability.
But obviously that's a really difficult decision to make.
But God's grace was absolutely all over it.
So I am sitting in this place where they do free tea and coffee and cake and sobbing.
Busy body Christian person comes over.
I just wanted people to leave me to cry, to be quite frank.
But anyway, he comes over and says, why are you crying?
So I kind of told him a bit.
He says, oh, we need to find a woman to pray for you.
(20:22):
I thought, oh, please.
But you can't really refuse, can you?
Anyway, he found somebody and it turned out that out of this conference of like 15,000, 20,000 people, I ended up sitting with a woman who was a divorcee who had needed to divorce her husband after 20 years because they got two children with additional needs and he couldn't cope.
(20:43):
And she was also a social worker and understood that some of what I was telling her, I gave her a very lacking in detail picture of what was going on at home.
And she made it clear that she felt that there was emotional harm going on.
And that really gave me the answer that I needed.
And so I said to my husband, I think you need to go or we need to go.
And very graciously, he moved out.
(21:03):
I'd said to him, we need to split up, but please don't deprive the boys of their home.
He moved.
And I know that for so many couples, that's not what happens, that the husband kind of sticks around and says, if you're then go, but I ain't moving anywhere.
But what that meant was that the kids kind of, they were not uprooted from their home, although they found that difficult.
I had been in this really difficult situation of thinking, what is the worst thing that I can do here?
(21:28):
Is it to maintain the situation or is it to inflict upon them yet another loss of another significant person in their lives?
But I really felt God's accompanying presence with us through that process.
And there was a point at which a friend had emailed me just after I'd made this decision and we'd had this conversation.
(21:49):
A friend had emailed me an article.
It just had one line in it that was absolutely what I wanted to hear.
It said, God loves marriage, but he loves people more.
And I thought, yes, absolutely.
Absolutely, of course.
And that proved to be another difficult path.
I know that taking on the additional load of caring for those boys on your own, whilst it may have been more stable, would obviously have a toll on your life and on your mental well-being.
(22:21):
Where did it go from there?
Well, we went through a period that was just incredibly, incredibly difficult.
So both the boys were struggling with school, and I know lots of people go through this.
So I had two different, lots of school refusal going on and trying to sort all that out.
And that is really hard because what happens then is that you wake up every morning not knowing what's going to happen next.
(22:42):
So you don't know whether one or both of them is going to get to school or not.
At one point, I was taking my eldest to school.
We would get him to school and he would walk off the school grounds.
I would get phone calls about my youngest, or he wouldn't go in.
So I was trying to do all of that.
At one point, I was homeschooling my eldest and trying to get my youngest to a special school.
And it would take several hours to persuade him to get there.
(23:05):
And then I would race the school transport home in order to spend a bit of time doing some schooling with my eldest.
For much of the time, there was just no break.
It was utterly relentless.
And then finally found a school, which for a short time they were both settled in.
And then things began to go wrong there.
I had a nervous breakdown, basically.
I remember ringing a friend and saying, I think I'm having a nervous breakdown.
(23:26):
He said, right, I'll be there in 10 minutes.
And he came and chatted and helped me to find the number of counsellor.
And then later on that night came round with instant meals, but healthy ones, a bottle of red wine, a bar of chocolate and some vitamin tablets.
Bless his heart.
All the essentials.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's getting it right, I think, big style.
(23:49):
I know that sometimes we like to hear the stories where things go bad, then things get better.
We tie it all up with a neat bow.
And yet if we do that, if we're waiting for that wonderful outcome, we miss seeing what God is doing in the midst of the difficulty.
How did you see God during that time of difficulty in your life?
(24:11):
A deep sense of God's presence with me.
And I think for me, that has always been the key.
If you look around the world, it is not the case that God frequently rescues people from circumstances.
I know that quite often we have a narrative around prayer, which says that if you pray hard enough and with enough faith, then God will do the things that you're asking for.
(24:32):
But I think actually sometimes that leaves us in a very difficult place faith-wise, because then what do you do when that doesn't happen?
And what I really had faith for was that there was meaning in the middle of it all.
It was really important to me not to be looking for all this to be sorted out before I found God's grace and God's meaning in it.
(24:52):
For me, it was really important to find ways of connecting with God in the middle of it all.
And that has been a huge source of solace and inner peace.
In the midst of this time, of course, there have been glimmers of hope and there has been some happiness in there.
Tell me about what has happened since those dark days as you continued to journey, knowing that God was there, knowing God's presence in the midst of the darkness.
(25:20):
How did he begin to show you some glimmers of hope?
I think there were always glimmers of hope, glimmers of lovely people.
I think there was always quite a lot of knowledge of God's intimate provision.
Financially, I knew God's provision really quite miraculously.
And then friends, you turn up at just the right moment.
Having been very social, I'd had a long time of being quite socially isolated.
(25:42):
But I got a small group of friends who I was inviting around once a month.
And I said, who would like to come here for Christmas day?
Would anybody like to come?
You'd be very, very welcome.
And out of this small group of friends, one of them, a guy called Stephen said, yes, he would find it very convenient to be at my house for Christmas for various reasons.
(26:03):
He wanted to stay in the city rather than go back to his folks.
And then I started saying to God, well, who else would you like to invite around?
Who else?
I was genuinely saying, I'm sure there are other people who will be lonely at Christmas.
I would love to bless them.
But it ended up being just me and Stephen.
And we'd been friends for a number of years.
His story is that he was married to a wonderful woman called Marnie, who I'd known too.
(26:26):
And they were married for 17 years.
And 16 and a half of those years were a cancer journey for Marnie.
And there were times when she was well and times when she wasn't.
So he'd been through quite a difficult time.
And she died six months before COVID.
And in the course of our day together, it became evident to me, shall we say, that I quite liked him, which was absolutely unexpected.
(26:49):
He sort of made a compliment and then was apologising because he didn't want me to get the wrong idea.
He thought that he might have said something which suggested that he liked me romantically and was trying to apologise for potentially saying the wrong thing.
And sort of fed up with the apologising really, and trying to kind of just move us to a less awkward piece of conversation, I said, shall we not just both agree here and now that neither of us is interested in a relationship with the other?
(27:15):
Honestly, Rodney, when I started that sentence, I absolutely believed it.
And by the end of it, I didn't at all.
So there was a question of what do you do about that, having declared that I wasn't interested.
So it took us a little while, like about six days, I think, to go from that point to going out with one another.
So once we decided we would give this a go, we fell in love quite quickly really.
(27:39):
And it's been an absolute delight.
It really, really has.
We got married last September.
Our reflection really is that for both of us, we have seen God's redemption of difficult things and turning the difficult into something beautiful.
And none of that denies the authenticity of what has gone before.
(28:02):
Wisdom involves understanding that there is good and there is light and there is darkness.
And the good does not deny the difficulty of the things which are difficult.
You know, the good things are good and the difficult things are hard.
I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your podcast, Loved, Called, Gifted.
(28:22):
What caused you to begin that journey?
I began my podcasting journey through an awareness that I'd spend a lot of time creating space for other people to tell their stories and to speak.
I realised that part of that was because it was easier to give other people space to have a voice than it was to raise my voice in the world.
(28:43):
And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
I perhaps ought to do something about that.
And I did a couple of things.
I thought, well, I would do some writing.
So I've done a bit of blogging and I would also start a podcast.
And there are a number of things that are really close to my heart.
The first is that we are all loved, that who we are, as we are, is important and valid and we are accepted and loved as we are.
(29:04):
That's part of the identity piece, really.
So quite a lot of what I talk about is stuff around identity in various ways, all with the aim of helping people to understand themselves better and possibly understand those around them better.
And I think that we are all called to do something.
I love conversations with people who are passionate about something.
And I really enjoy telling stories and giving space to people who wouldn't normally do that.
(29:30):
And the great thing about a podcast is that you can give somebody space to tell their story.
So that's the Loved Called Gifted podcast.
Catherine, you've been able to tell your story here today on Bleeding Daylight.
And I know that some people are going to want to connect with you.
And so I will put a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily, find your website, find your podcast.
(29:55):
But I just want to say thank you for sharing your story with me.
Thank you for what you're doing for others in helping them to share their stories.
It's been a delight to have you as part of Bleeding Daylight today.
Thank you so much.
It's been great.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(30:18):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening.
Links to our social media channels are available right now at bleedingdaylight.net.
Is this your first time listening to Bleeding Daylight?
(00:31):
There are dozens of other amazing guests at bleedingdaylight.net.
Make sure you hear their stories too.
Where is God in the messiness of life?
Where do we find peace when things don't go according to the script and we find ourselves going through difficult circumstances?
My guest today takes us through her own journey and talks about God's closeness through it all.
(01:03):
In today's episode, I'm welcoming Catherine Cowell, a life coach, spiritual director, and host of the Loved, Called, Gifted podcast.
Catherine's journey is a testament to finding hope and meaning amid life's darkest moments.
In navigating profound challenges, Catherine's story is one of resilience, faith, and unexpected love.
(01:24):
Her deep commitment to authenticity and creating spaces for people to be real about their faith journey make her a great guest for Bleeding Daylight.
Catherine, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
We all face the ups and downs of life, but some people do seem to travel a particularly challenging path.
(01:45):
Can you take me back to when life began to take some especially difficult turns for you?
I would say that takes us back to about 2005.
My husband and I had been part of a church for quite a number of years.
You know when you're kind of involved and it's your family and it really feels like your community.
We'd felt very much led by God to do some 24-7 prayer, which we ended up doing in our house.
(02:10):
We tried to do it nicely and respectfully.
We weren't aware that praying in our house was going to cause anybody any trouble.
But the pastor of the church that we were part of at the time took enormous offence at the fact that we had just gone ahead and done this.
And we found ourselves suddenly without a church.
But we had people who were coming to our house to pray.
Two weeks into that, I was down in London and had a phone call from my husband who told me that he'd suddenly got double vision.
(02:37):
I came home and we went to the hospital and it turned out that he had something growing in his brain which shouldn't be there.
So I guess that was the beginning of things feeling a little bit tricky.
This bad diagnosis comes and we'll explore that more in a moment, but it doesn't just come in isolation.
There's already some things that are quite troubling going on.
You're finding yourself without a church, without that group of people around you.
(03:00):
There's this diagnosis.
So as you say, there's something growing there that shouldn't be.
What was the eventual diagnosis of that?
He was diagnosed with a meningioma.
Because of where it was growing, it was pushing onto lots of kind of crucial things.
It was right in the middle of his head.
They couldn't easily get in.
So he needed something called stereotactic radiotherapy.
(03:22):
And there was a long, long wait for that.
He was in a lot of pain.
This is where kind of God's grace in the middle of the darkness comes in, really.
We'd had a couple of friends who had rung us up when he was first in hospital.
He was in hospital for weeks and weeks and weeks while they worked out what was going on.
She rang us up when he was first in hospital and said, listen, we are putting aside some money in case you need it at any point.
(03:45):
And then another friend, knowing what it was that we needed, he'd gone Googling and discovered that we could get this treatment in Sweden for not an outrageous amount of money, actually, and that there wouldn't be a wait for that.
So I rang our friend and said, you know, you said you were putting aside some money.
She rallied around and spoke to other people that we knew.
(04:07):
And within three days, we had got the funds that we needed to take my husband, Andy, to Sweden and to have treatment.
And then coming back from that, we were in a situation where he was kind of in recovery.
He was really, really often he was in pain and struggling with stuff.
And in the middle of all of that, I suddenly found myself to be pregnant, which initially was a bit sort of, oh, my goodness, what on earth is going on here?
(04:33):
This doesn't seem like great timing.
And then I thought about it and I thought, actually, given what we've been through, given the pain that we've been through this year, this really feels like God's redemption.
Here is the beginning of a new life in the middle of what feels like darkness and despair and difficulty.
We decided that it'd be a good idea to go on holiday whilst there was just still the two of us.
(04:54):
We were both delighted once we got over the initial kind of shock of, oh, gosh, we weren't expecting this now.
And in that sort of process of looking forward to the future, we went on holiday to the Dominican Republic.
While we were there, I had a miscarriage and found myself kind of in third world hospital a long way from home being sorted out.
It does seem that there's these struggles that are coming along and there's this glimmer of light in the middle of it.
(05:18):
And as you say, you felt very clearly that this was something from God and yet it's taken away from you.
So where was your faith at this stage when you're going on this roller coaster?
How do you stay close to God when you're not quite sure what direction he's taking you?
That's a really interesting question.
I had a moment in the hospital which felt like slightly harsh mercy, if you like.
(05:41):
I was there saying, well, what on earth?
I thought that this was the plan, that there was redemption in this.
What on earth is going on?
And I felt very clearly God saying, yeah, that wasn't my story.
That was a story that you'd made up.
That wasn't what I was up to.
I don't know quite how the sort of staying close to God works in those moments, except that it was God's presence that was more important to me than what God was actually up to or what life was throwing at us.
(06:10):
You had this calm at this time, which was difficult enough, but then I believe there was further illnesses with your husband over the next couple of years.
Yeah.
So there were quite a lot of consequences of his brain tumour that he'd had.
It left quite a bit of damage.
A year or so later, he was working in a prison at the time and I got a phone call to say that he'd been taken to hospital in a prison van because he'd had an enormous epileptic fit.
(06:37):
And then the year after that, he'd gone back for a routine scan and they discovered that there were other things growing.
But then it was really difficult to kind of get anybody's take on what that was or what was happening.
And sort of in the midst of all of that, I was beginning to realise that the fact that I hadn't got pregnant again was beginning to really hurt emotionally.
(06:59):
But I'd sort of pushed that to the back of my mind because it just wasn't convenient.
You know, thinking about infertility at a point when my husband was kind of still struggling with stuff, it just didn't feel like this was something that should be on the agenda.
So I'd sort of ignored it.
And I'd had those experiences that I think a lot of women have who are struggling with infertility, where you walk past a toy shop and it really hurts or you see young children.
(07:25):
And whereas before that would have been really great, there was something inside that is finding that really painful.
But I was sort of trying to ignore all of those things.
And the fact that I'd been pregnant once kind of made me think, well, surely, surely at some point this will happen.
But it just wasn't.
So there was quite a lot of stuff going on at once, I would say.
During that desire to become pregnant again, your husband had some tests which came back with something quite surprising.
(07:51):
Yes.
Yeah, so we went and had fertility tests and I was fine.
But he was basically infertile.
His sperm were either not moving at all or malformed or going in the wrong direction, most of them.
I think there was something like a 2% functional sperm count, which meant in fact that the question stopped being, why am I not getting pregnant now?
(08:11):
But rather, how on earth did I get pregnant in the first place?
Life does have its twists and turns, doesn't it?
And I'm interested in the fact that you mention going past the toy stores and going past places that bring joy to so many people was difficult for you.
And I wonder how many times we're in a space where we just don't know what the person next to us is going through and the things that might spark joy in us are very different to the thing that will spark joy in the person next to us.
(08:46):
Yeah, I think that's true.
And it's important to be sensitive.
At the same time, you just don't know.
It would be ridiculous to stop having toy stores and playgrounds where young children play because somebody might find it tricky.
One of the things that was quite interesting to me was that when I'd had my miscarriage, we had told people that I was pregnant.
(09:07):
So, it was a relatively early miscarriage and we told people.
And the reason that I told people was because I thought actually, I think this will all be fine.
But should it not be, I thought it's going to be much harder to talk to people about it and to gain understanding if we'd done that traditional thing of, well, we're not going to tell you for the first three months.
I'd thought, well, actually, if we're open with our friends, then should we need the support because there's been a miscarriage or something, then it would be there.
(09:34):
And what was really interesting was that actually it wasn't.
People did not know how to talk about it.
Two weeks after my miscarriage, I remember being in church and people knew what had gone on and the question was, how's Andy?
And nobody but nobody said, and how are you doing?
The only person who ever inquired was an aunt of mine who'd had a number of miscarriages when she was young.
(09:56):
And we hardly ever spoke, but she rang me up to find out how I was.
And that's the difficulty that we face.
Whenever someone is going through treatment for something or someone has been through an ordeal as you had of that miscarriage, we don't know the words to say.
And unfortunately, so often rather than being clumsy, which I think most people would understand, we say nothing and that can hurt even more.
(10:22):
How important is it that we try and find the right words, even if we don't get it completely right, to actually be there for people in those moments?
I think it's really important for people to know that we're there.
Part of the key, I think, to getting it right or not getting it horrendously wrong is focusing on simply being there and letting people know that you're thinking of them.
(10:43):
To just say, I know that you're going through this thing, which is difficult, and I just want you to know that I'm thinking of you.
Where people do get it wrong, I think, is if they kind of leap in and try and fix it.
There are lots of crass things that you could say to somebody who's just had a miscarriage, like, well, at least you got pregnant.
Or my cousin had eight miscarriages, now she's got two boys and it's all great.
(11:04):
You know what I mean?
There are kind of leaping in and fixing things.
But I think just to say, how are you doing?
And do you want to talk about it?
I think helps, yeah.
After realising that it was going to be very unlikely for another pregnancy, you decided to go down a different path, but that didn't prove to be an easy one either, did it?
No.
(11:24):
I mean, it's been hugely joyful, but it's had lots of challenges.
I spent a couple of weeks thinking, should we do the IVF thing?
And it didn't take me very long at all to think, actually, you know, that just does not sit right.
And then I was sitting in the garden praying one day, the thought came to me very powerfully that if we were going to be a family, why on earth would I go to enormous effort to try and make a pregnancy happen when there are so many children out there who need somewhere and need a family and need to be loved?
(11:58):
That's no judgement at all on anybody else who would take an IVF journey.
I think it's a hugely courageous thing to do.
I know that it's incredibly difficult and I have huge admiration for that, but that just wasn't what felt right for us.
And there were a number of things that came to my mind that I then spoke to my husband about and we were in agreement.
(12:20):
But there were a number of things that came to my mind in that moment that felt important.
One was that I felt that it was right to adopt rather than to foster because I wanted the children who came to us to know that this was unconditional.
We weren't getting paid by anybody, there was no exit route, but this was our choice and they would be our kids.
(12:41):
The next thing that felt important to me was that I knew that there are lots of people who are wanting to adopt babies.
And I thought, actually, I would like to give a home to some children who are a little bit older.
And in adoption terms, a little bit older is not that much older, it's kind of two, three plus.
And then the third thing that I felt quite strongly was that I wanted to adopt siblings.
(13:04):
Part of my thinking was actually, if you're going to move into a new place, but you have a sibling with you, they are probably going to have been the only constant in your life at this point.
And surely it would be easier to do that together with somebody than it would all by yourself.
And the other thing was that I really was thinking about, you know, you see documentaries sometimes about people who've kind of been split from both family and that.
(13:27):
One of the things that I've noticed was the extent to which people would talk about their bonds with brothers and sisters that they'd lost.
And I kind of thought, I would really like to give some kids the opportunity to take their siblings for granted and not have that sense of deep loss about being separated from them.
So those three things were kind of what led us forwards.
(13:48):
And in the end, you managed to adopt.
Tell me about the boys.
Yeah, we had two boys.
They were nearly three and just five when they came home.
We were home number five for them.
They'd bounced from birth parents to family carers, two or three sets of foster carers, and then to us.
(14:09):
When we were having our 24-7 prayer at our house all those years before, one morning Andy had come downstairs and said to me, God's given me two names.
And there were two boys' names.
And we thought that this was relating to friends of ours who were wanting to have twins.
And so we kept these names aside because they were praying to have twins in our house and this kind of felt coincidental.
(14:30):
And then they had a little girl, but we'd remembered them.
We had a handful of profiles of children to look at.
And there were these two little boys and something in my heart warmed to them.
And I said to Andy, I think we should find out more about these two.
At the point when we had decided, yes, we will look into this further, we suddenly realised that their names were the names that God had given us back in 2005 before they were even born.
(14:55):
So those were our two boys.
Matthew That's absolutely remarkable when you see God's hand at work right throughout that process.
And yet we know that even when God is involved, it doesn't mean that the road will be easy.
And I imagine for these boys, if they've been bounced around from a home to home, it's going to be very difficult for them to internalise the truth of what you were talking about in that, guys, this is your forever home.
(15:24):
Because I imagine that they'd be always thinking, but for how long?
So how difficult was it for them to become part of your family?
Alison I think becoming part of our family was not necessarily that difficult.
But what happens to young people who have had a traumatic early start and all of those, that kind of separation, they develop brain patterns and ways of thinking and ways of being in the world, which were designed to keep them safe in those dangerous situations.
(15:55):
And those kind of non-functional survival patterns affect absolutely everything.
There has not been an element of their interacting with life that has not been impacted by that early trauma.
If you imagine you're in a sort of a survival situation, there is a bear in the woods and I must run away.
In that moment, you need the brain pattern which says, this is an emergency, I must run and I must be alert for danger.
(16:20):
You don't need the brain pattern which says, hmm, I wonder what kind of bear that is.
I wonder what sort of plan we might make in order to escape from the bears.
I wonder who I could talk to about that.
We have a sort of a calm, logical way of thinking about things.
And then we have a different sort of way of interacting with the world, which is all about what do we do when there's an emergency.
(16:41):
And if you've had early trauma, the emergency part of your brain ends up being very, very active, whereas the, it's all calm and I can work this out carefully, that bit of your brain doesn't develop nearly as well.
We ended up with these kids in our house and there were a number of things going on for them.
Their emergency brain is always on red alert.
(17:02):
There is a deep inner sense of shame from the fact that they have not stayed with their birth parents, completely unspoken, but it's absolutely there.
There is also the sense that grown-ups are not safe.
So they really felt the need to be in control all of the time.
And if you think about what parenting normally looks like, parenting normally looks like adults doing their best to help their kids to understand that they are in charge and that adults being in charge is a good thing.
(17:32):
Whereas our kids absolutely were not believing of that.
And to be honest, that was back in 2011.
And I would say that they still have that sense that life is best and life is safest if they are in charge.
You can imagine that that kind of made life something of a challenge.
They didn't know how to play because that had never happened.
(17:55):
We'd got toys and we'd got stuff for them and they just used to, when they first came home, they would just empty the shelves in our living room with everything.
That was a daily thing.
If they got stressed, they would empty their bedrooms down the stairs.
Mattresses, toys, duvets, blankets, everything.
Both of them had a tendency to sort of escape from the house and run off.
(18:16):
So it was pretty chaotic and pretty difficult.
And for my husband, the real challenge was that we just had not recognised he had a really difficult childhood and we just had not recognised that he had got within him a lot of unresolved trauma.
And I don't think this is uncommon for adoptive families that you suddenly invite into your home children who've been through a lot of trauma and their trauma triggers your unresolved trauma.
(18:46):
I ended up in the situation where I had three people in my home who were deeply traumatised and really struggling.
That must have been incredibly difficult for you and for the others in your home.
Sadly, that didn't go down a particularly good path.
What happened at that stage for your husband?
He did his best in many ways, did lots of bits and pieces of kind of going for counselling and then finding that really difficult.
(19:13):
And life at home was just really, really hard.
I think for both of us, we had that Christian idea of marriage is for always.
Our initial response was just to try and make it work and to persist and to keep going.
And we did that for a number of years, but actually it was not healthy for any of us.
I had gone to a Christian conference called New Wine and they had a lovely, lovely sort of area for parents of children with additional needs.
(19:41):
And I just went and sat there and wept.
And I knew at that point that I needed to make a decision.
I could see that my oldest was kind of heading towards teenage years really quite quickly.
And I was sort of thinking, if we don't do something to make home life properly stable quickly, then we're going to hit teenage years and this is just going to be dreadful and a nightmare.
(20:01):
He needs some stability.
But obviously that's a really difficult decision to make.
But God's grace was absolutely all over it.
So I am sitting in this place where they do free tea and coffee and cake and sobbing.
Busy body Christian person comes over.
I just wanted people to leave me to cry, to be quite frank.
But anyway, he comes over and says, why are you crying?
So I kind of told him a bit.
He says, oh, we need to find a woman to pray for you.
(20:22):
I thought, oh, please.
But you can't really refuse, can you?
Anyway, he found somebody and it turned out that out of this conference of like 15,000, 20,000 people, I ended up sitting with a woman who was a divorcee who had needed to divorce her husband after 20 years because they got two children with additional needs and he couldn't cope.
(20:43):
And she was also a social worker and understood that some of what I was telling her, I gave her a very lacking in detail picture of what was going on at home.
And she made it clear that she felt that there was emotional harm going on.
And that really gave me the answer that I needed.
And so I said to my husband, I think you need to go or we need to go.
And very graciously, he moved out.
(21:03):
I'd said to him, we need to split up, but please don't deprive the boys of their home.
He moved.
And I know that for so many couples, that's not what happens, that the husband kind of sticks around and says, if you're then go, but I ain't moving anywhere.
But what that meant was that the kids kind of, they were not uprooted from their home, although they found that difficult.
I had been in this really difficult situation of thinking, what is the worst thing that I can do here?
(21:28):
Is it to maintain the situation or is it to inflict upon them yet another loss of another significant person in their lives?
But I really felt God's accompanying presence with us through that process.
And there was a point at which a friend had emailed me just after I'd made this decision and we'd had this conversation.
(21:49):
A friend had emailed me an article.
It just had one line in it that was absolutely what I wanted to hear.
It said, God loves marriage, but he loves people more.
And I thought, yes, absolutely.
Absolutely, of course.
And that proved to be another difficult path.
I know that taking on the additional load of caring for those boys on your own, whilst it may have been more stable, would obviously have a toll on your life and on your mental well-being.
(22:21):
Where did it go from there?
Well, we went through a period that was just incredibly, incredibly difficult.
So both the boys were struggling with school, and I know lots of people go through this.
So I had two different, lots of school refusal going on and trying to sort all that out.
And that is really hard because what happens then is that you wake up every morning not knowing what's going to happen next.
(22:42):
So you don't know whether one or both of them is going to get to school or not.
At one point, I was taking my eldest to school.
We would get him to school and he would walk off the school grounds.
I would get phone calls about my youngest, or he wouldn't go in.
So I was trying to do all of that.
At one point, I was homeschooling my eldest and trying to get my youngest to a special school.
And it would take several hours to persuade him to get there.
(23:05):
And then I would race the school transport home in order to spend a bit of time doing some schooling with my eldest.
For much of the time, there was just no break.
It was utterly relentless.
And then finally found a school, which for a short time they were both settled in.
And then things began to go wrong there.
I had a nervous breakdown, basically.
I remember ringing a friend and saying, I think I'm having a nervous breakdown.
(23:26):
He said, right, I'll be there in 10 minutes.
And he came and chatted and helped me to find the number of counsellor.
And then later on that night came round with instant meals, but healthy ones, a bottle of red wine, a bar of chocolate and some vitamin tablets.
Bless his heart.
All the essentials.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's getting it right, I think, big style.
(23:49):
I know that sometimes we like to hear the stories where things go bad, then things get better.
We tie it all up with a neat bow.
And yet if we do that, if we're waiting for that wonderful outcome, we miss seeing what God is doing in the midst of the difficulty.
How did you see God during that time of difficulty in your life?
(24:11):
A deep sense of God's presence with me.
And I think for me, that has always been the key.
If you look around the world, it is not the case that God frequently rescues people from circumstances.
I know that quite often we have a narrative around prayer, which says that if you pray hard enough and with enough faith, then God will do the things that you're asking for.
(24:32):
But I think actually sometimes that leaves us in a very difficult place faith-wise, because then what do you do when that doesn't happen?
And what I really had faith for was that there was meaning in the middle of it all.
It was really important to me not to be looking for all this to be sorted out before I found God's grace and God's meaning in it.
(24:52):
For me, it was really important to find ways of connecting with God in the middle of it all.
And that has been a huge source of solace and inner peace.
In the midst of this time, of course, there have been glimmers of hope and there has been some happiness in there.
Tell me about what has happened since those dark days as you continued to journey, knowing that God was there, knowing God's presence in the midst of the darkness.
(25:20):
How did he begin to show you some glimmers of hope?
I think there were always glimmers of hope, glimmers of lovely people.
I think there was always quite a lot of knowledge of God's intimate provision.
Financially, I knew God's provision really quite miraculously.
And then friends, you turn up at just the right moment.
Having been very social, I'd had a long time of being quite socially isolated.
(25:42):
But I got a small group of friends who I was inviting around once a month.
And I said, who would like to come here for Christmas day?
Would anybody like to come?
You'd be very, very welcome.
And out of this small group of friends, one of them, a guy called Stephen said, yes, he would find it very convenient to be at my house for Christmas for various reasons.
(26:03):
He wanted to stay in the city rather than go back to his folks.
And then I started saying to God, well, who else would you like to invite around?
Who else?
I was genuinely saying, I'm sure there are other people who will be lonely at Christmas.
I would love to bless them.
But it ended up being just me and Stephen.
And we'd been friends for a number of years.
His story is that he was married to a wonderful woman called Marnie, who I'd known too.
(26:26):
And they were married for 17 years.
And 16 and a half of those years were a cancer journey for Marnie.
And there were times when she was well and times when she wasn't.
So he'd been through quite a difficult time.
And she died six months before COVID.
And in the course of our day together, it became evident to me, shall we say, that I quite liked him, which was absolutely unexpected.
(26:49):
He sort of made a compliment and then was apologising because he didn't want me to get the wrong idea.
He thought that he might have said something which suggested that he liked me romantically and was trying to apologise for potentially saying the wrong thing.
And sort of fed up with the apologising really, and trying to kind of just move us to a less awkward piece of conversation, I said, shall we not just both agree here and now that neither of us is interested in a relationship with the other?
(27:15):
Honestly, Rodney, when I started that sentence, I absolutely believed it.
And by the end of it, I didn't at all.
So there was a question of what do you do about that, having declared that I wasn't interested.
So it took us a little while, like about six days, I think, to go from that point to going out with one another.
So once we decided we would give this a go, we fell in love quite quickly really.
(27:39):
And it's been an absolute delight.
It really, really has.
We got married last September.
Our reflection really is that for both of us, we have seen God's redemption of difficult things and turning the difficult into something beautiful.
And none of that denies the authenticity of what has gone before.
(28:02):
Wisdom involves understanding that there is good and there is light and there is darkness.
And the good does not deny the difficulty of the things which are difficult.
You know, the good things are good and the difficult things are hard.
I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your podcast, Loved, Called, Gifted.
(28:22):
What caused you to begin that journey?
I began my podcasting journey through an awareness that I'd spend a lot of time creating space for other people to tell their stories and to speak.
I realised that part of that was because it was easier to give other people space to have a voice than it was to raise my voice in the world.
(28:43):
And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
I perhaps ought to do something about that.
And I did a couple of things.
I thought, well, I would do some writing.
So I've done a bit of blogging and I would also start a podcast.
And there are a number of things that are really close to my heart.
The first is that we are all loved, that who we are, as we are, is important and valid and we are accepted and loved as we are.
(29:04):
That's part of the identity piece, really.
So quite a lot of what I talk about is stuff around identity in various ways, all with the aim of helping people to understand themselves better and possibly understand those around them better.
And I think that we are all called to do something.
I love conversations with people who are passionate about something.
And I really enjoy telling stories and giving space to people who wouldn't normally do that.
(29:30):
And the great thing about a podcast is that you can give somebody space to tell their story.
So that's the Loved Called Gifted podcast.
Catherine, you've been able to tell your story here today on Bleeding Daylight.
And I know that some people are going to want to connect with you.
And so I will put a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily, find your website, find your podcast.
(29:55):
But I just want to say thank you for sharing your story with me.
Thank you for what you're doing for others in helping them to share their stories.
It's been a delight to have you as part of Bleeding Daylight today.
Thank you so much.
It's been great.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(30:18):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
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