January 19, 2025 • 30 mins
In this powerful episode of Bleeding Daylight, author Lori Ann Wood shares her extraordinary journey from being declared exceptionally healthy to fighting for her life with just 6% heart function. Three weeks after praying about an exciting new chapter in her empty-nest life, Wood found herself in cardiac ICU, facing a diagnosis that would transform not just her physical health, but her entire approach to faith and purpose.
Through her book "Divine Detour" and her candid conversation with host Rodney Olsen, Wood reveals how her experience with chronic heart failure led to unexpected ministry opportunities and deeper spiritual insights. Her story challenges conventional views of faith, healing, and God's presence in times of crisis, while offering hope and perspective to anyone facing life's unexpected detours. Wood's journey from college instructor to inspirational author demonstrates how life's greatest challenges can become pathways to profound purpose and meaning. WEBLINKS Lori Ann Wood’s Website Lori Ann Wood on YouTube Lori Ann Wood’s Instagram Divinely Detoured Facebook Lori Ann Wood’s Facebook Lori Ann Wood on Threads Lori Ann Wood on Pinterest
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(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.
I do hope you're able to share Bleeding Daylight with others who really need to hear it.
Please consider who might benefit from this episode as you listen.
(00:31):
There are dozens of other stories of lives transformed waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
When we've decided on a destination and set our direction, facing a detour is often the last thing we want.
But what if it's just what we need?
How can we reframe life's detours?
(00:51):
My guest will share her own detour with us today.
Joining me today is Lori Ann Wood, an inspiring author and heart failure survivor whose life took an unexpected divine detour in 2015.
(01:14):
Despite having no risk factors and being in excellent health, Lori Ann found herself fighting for her life at a Cleveland clinic.
Her remarkable journey from near death to recovery not only transformed her physical health, but deepened her spiritual walk in unexpected ways.
Now through her book, Divine Detour, and her speaking engagements, she helps others navigate their own faith challenges, showing how even life's most difficult questions can lead to profound spiritual growth.
(01:46):
Lori Ann, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you for having me, Rodney.
I mentioned your health event, and we'll explore that more fully, but I understand there was a different kind of event that happened a few weeks before that.
Can you tell me about that night on a stretch of highway far from home?
Yes.
I was in that empty nest phase of life.
(02:10):
I was taking my youngest child to a college visit and I just had this profound sense that something was next, and I didn't know what that was.
I had taught college courses for 25 years and just felt this itch that there was just something more that I was being called to do.
I remember closing my book, it was dark, we were on our way home late at night, and I looked out at the stretch of highway and I saw the stripe going by on the highway, and I just had this sense that whatever was coming was going to be something big, and I was excited about it.
(02:49):
I thought, this is going to be something that is going to be life-changing, and I just prayed right then and there that I was all in on whatever it was, just sure that I was going to have a new career or some new chance of doing something that I had always wanted to do.
I walked away from that thinking that something was going to happen, and what did happen was something so much different than what I ever imagined.
(03:16):
It was quite different, and I guess when we know that something's coming or there's an expectation, we always expect that it's going to be very much in our favor, and this wasn't quite what happened to you.
Tell me about that day three weeks later and what happened.
Well, I will say that in between that highway prayer and the event that you're talking about, I had a medical evaluation for a life insurance policy, and they told me that I had less than three percent chance of ever developing heart disease in my lifetime.
(03:50):
I wasn't really surprised by that because I've always been an extremely healthy person.
I'd never been hospitalized other than for childbirth.
I didn't take any prescription medication.
I exercised.
I thought I ate healthy.
I had no family history.
I had no risk factors, so three weeks later when I was not feeling well, thinking I had pneumonia or maybe the flu or something like that, I went to my family doctor finally that week after having gone to convenient care a couple of times.
(04:27):
Immediately, he took a chest x-ray and found that I had an extremely enlarged heart.
I was immediately put in cardiac ICU with my heart functioning at six percent.
I had no idea because heart disease was never on my list of worries.
You weren't expecting a health issue to crop up, and you're expecting God to do something amazing, maybe a career change or something wonderful happening in your life.
(04:56):
Then this, what did it lead to?
It was kind of one of those times in life where everything was moving really fast and really slow at the same time.
After I was initially diagnosed, they sent me home with a hospice binder because they did not think that I would ever, first of all, leave ICU.
Then once I did, they did not think I would survive the month.
(05:19):
What I thought was a story about God was going to heal me, and I was going to be back.
I was going to tell this beautiful story about miraculous healing.
He did restore my heart function to near normal at one point.
But a couple of years later, after being back to normal, my heart function dropped.
(05:41):
I'm now an active heart failure again.
Through all of that, ups and downs, and all of the medical things that I had endured, a couple of surgeries and other things, I wore a life vest, which is an external defibrillator vest for nine months.
I thought the story was going to be about that medical event and all the things that were happening with me physically, but the real story was what was happening with me spiritually.
(06:09):
As having been a believer all my life, what happened with my faith was the story that came out of those events.
You weren't feeling well.
You went to see your doctor, and we assume, oh, that's great.
The doctor has caught this early and sent you off to hospital, but it was a prolonged time in hospital and a long time of recovery.
(06:31):
As you say, the story's not finished yet, but you talk about that spiritual change, and I guess that's the change that God had tapped you on the shoulder about, something big that was coming.
It wasn't the expected thing, but tell me, how did your faith start to change?
What were the processes that you went through as you started to come to terms with what was going on with your body?
(06:55):
The first thing that happened, of course, because of the shock of the situation, I had a lot of people rally around me, and I was on prayer chains.
People were praying for me around the clock because my Cleveland Clinic doctor told me that my heart was the largest heart she'd ever seen.
When I say that my function was at six percent, five percent is not compatible with life.
(07:18):
So I was right on the edge.
I had so much spiritual support to get me over that hump.
But what started to happen was I started to feel almost guilty or like maybe my faith was the weak link when I wasn't getting any better.
I went a year and a half with just barely hanging on.
(07:41):
I felt like I was getting this very strong silence from God, and that bothered me because I have been a believer all my life, been in church all my life, raised my children in the church, been very active.
When it came to the time when I really felt like I needed my faith, it seemed like He wasn't there.
(08:04):
How did you deal with that silence?
What did you do to connect with God in those times where it felt like He wasn't answering?
It was very hard.
One of the things I mentioned is I felt like I was letting people down because people would come to me and say, We've been praying for you.
How are you feeling?
And I didn't want to tell them that I wasn't getting any better and that I wasn't feeling that well.
(08:27):
What I learned to process through that very silent period, and I still go through those silent periods where it seems like God's not listening, is that when we're in a silent period with God, the power of our prayer at that time is not necessarily in being able to move God's hand.
(08:48):
The power of prayer is in forming this relationship with Him that will get you through anything.
I learned that the power of prayer and other people's prayer on my behalf was not in this immediate resolution that I wanted so much, but it was rather in building this enduring relationship.
(09:12):
My husband used to tell me that we were trading something we can't keep for something we can never lose.
That's what I felt like the trade-off was then.
Part of what got me through that time was that I learned that it was okay to borrow words.
When I say borrow words, my first reaction when I had this terrible news in my lap was to go to Scripture.
(09:38):
To be quite honest with you, when I opened Scripture, it felt like it was too rich for me.
It felt like I was not at a place where I could go back to that and find any comfort.
I had to dial it back a step.
I had to listen to podcasts.
I had to read blogs.
(10:00):
I had to read books from trusted voices that could help me dive back into the richness of Scripture.
I even borrowed words from songs.
That may have been the most surprising thing to me.
Even when I was at a point spiritually where I wasn't reading anything, if I was listening to the music, those words could sink into my heart when nothing else could get anywhere close to it.
(10:29):
By borrowing the words of songs and blogs and podcasts and even the prayers of other people, I was able to hold on enough and hang with God long enough to see that when He was pausing in my life, He was helping me gain perspective.
(10:51):
That perspective gave me time to start writing.
I had been a college instructor for 25 years prior to my diagnosis.
Once I got my heart failure diagnosis, I couldn't stand up and lecture anymore.
But I found that I could sit down and type all day long.
I had energy for that.
(11:12):
I started to write this book that never would have happened in a safer, healthier life.
That was a big realization in that silent period that I never wanted.
It helped me find that purpose that I think was coming to me from that highway prayer that I prayed the weeks before my diagnosis.
(11:35):
It helped soften something that a friend of ours, who is also a doctor, visited me in the hospital.
He was not hopeful for me at the time.
He told me, the heart is the only muscle that can't heal itself.
It felt so final when he said that, but I've since learned that that's just true of human nature.
(12:01):
That's true of humanity and world that we live in.
There are some things on this side of eternity that aren't going to fix.
I've always been that fix-it person.
When God was silent to me and He wasn't going to fix it because the world doesn't fix everything, I felt like He was absent.
But He was using that time to change me and instill in me a different purpose and a different direction.
(12:29):
You've mentioned that you've always been that fix-it person.
You mentioned earlier that when you weren't getting well, you felt that this was on you, that it's somehow your fault that you weren't getting better.
It occurs to me that although we know that we are saved through grace alone, it's completely up to God, we often feel that our walk with God is all on us, that it's still down to us when it's actually on God.
(12:57):
Is that something that you had to come to terms with, that no, no, this is all God?
Certainly.
Like you say, you know that if you were taking a written test on that, you would get that question right every time.
But when you're living it in real time and your tendency is to try to fix it, it makes it so hard.
(13:18):
I told you that I grew up as a believer.
My mother was a strong believer, and I felt like I had this family heirloom that someone had passed down to me.
I had taken very good care of it all my life, and then I hit this rough, bumpy, very bumpy path, and I was afraid it might break.
Instead of actually using it, I put it on a shelf, and I wanted to protect it because I did not want to break that family heirloom that handed down faith.
(13:50):
So I put it on the shelf, and I wanted to protect it.
I thought, I'll come back to God when my life comes back together.
But what I didn't realize then is that I ran the risk, a very big risk, of never coming back to it at all.
Thankfully, all of that learning and all of that faith that had been planted in me from an early age came out because I just couldn't walk away.
(14:18):
I put it up there, and I tried to walk away, but every day I would get up and I would talk to God and say, I don't understand this.
I don't get it.
I don't know where you are.
I don't know why you would not answer all these prayers.
Why can we not see your hand move?
That kept me tethered to Him when otherwise I could have just walked away and never come back.
(14:44):
Peter I know that you can't speak on behalf of others, but I am wondering what were at least your perceptions of what was going on for those around you?
You've mentioned that there are a lot of people praying for you, but even those closer to you right there in your family, how were they dealing with this?
You had your own issues that you had to face in this health crisis, but how were they operating in this time?
(15:09):
I think most clearly about my youngest daughter was still at home.
She was a senior in high school.
She saw everything up close.
She got to live it in real time.
I hated that for her.
I hated that she went with us to the doctor appointments and she heard people say, there's nothing we can do.
(15:32):
She saw nurses crying for me.
She saw all of the raw emotion and information.
But I look back on that now and I realized that because she was there with me when it was happening, she understands now that this is serious.
(15:52):
She understands that I have limitations.
Whereas my older kids that weren't here, they still think I'm the mom that I was before.
They still think that I can do everything that I did before.
And so while I wouldn't wish that on her to have to go through that, that is something that we share that couldn't be replicated in any other way.
(16:19):
And then my husband has been, you just don't know how it's going to be.
You hope that your children will marry somebody that comes alongside you and supports you no matter what.
But he has been the best caregiver, the best advocate, the best encourager.
It's been amazing to see what it did in our marriage and our relationship, which was already very good.
(16:47):
But to see it taken to that other level was something that was a blessing to me that some of us don't ever get to see that part.
None of us want to walk down that hard road.
And yet so often when we do, whatever that road might be, we do find that there's a deepness and a richness that we did not expect.
And I know that you were very keen to put that down in words in your book.
(17:11):
Tell me about the process for writing.
When did you decide this should be a book?
That's a great question because this started way before I knew what was even happening.
And so that's how I know that it wasn't me.
Because to be honest with you, I started writing, and at some point I thought, this is going to be a book about my medical events, or it's just a story about me.
(17:38):
It turned out to be something very different.
It turned out to be a book of essays about life questions and being on a detour in life.
It all started because a friend of mine dropped off this little spiral notebook in my ICU room.
She didn't say anything about it.
It was just in there with some other things.
And I think she probably meant for me to write down medications or what the doctors were saying or thank yous I needed to write or instructions for my child at home or something like that.
(18:10):
But what it became was when I would wake up in the middle of the night and they're taking my vitals and doing all the things that they do in the hospital to you while you're a patient there in the middle of the night, I had trouble going back to sleep.
And so I would start writing down just things I was thinking about, questions for God, angsty statements, complaints even.
(18:36):
I was hoping that I would be able to burn that one day.
In fact, when I left the hospital and things sort of leveled out after a few months, I quit writing in it.
And my husband said one day, are you still keeping your journal?
And I said, no, I'm done with that.
I don't want to ever look at it again.
I don't want to bring it up again.
(18:58):
I don't want to relive it.
And he said, you should be writing all of this down.
And this is when we were still in a very uncertain time about whether I would survive.
I resisted even then, but finally started writing again in my journal.
And those journal entries became these little snippets and they're very short and just little insights into what was actually happening with my faith at that moment.
(19:25):
And I'm so glad that I was able to do that because I can think back on it now and I don't have the depth of emotion now that I did when it was happening in real time.
So when I can incorporate those into the book, it brought this realness to the book.
I also didn't want to just publish it as this raw emotion.
(19:50):
It took several years after the journal entries that I used to actually have perspective enough to write about them and say, this is what I was feeling, but this is what is true.
That I think the combination of the real raw emotion and the perspective of time was something that made that relatable to people on all kinds of detours in life.
(20:17):
As you mentioned, there are these almost bite-sized pieces because when someone is going through a really difficult time in life, the last thing they need is a hefty volume about how to deal with it.
That can be helpful at times, but sometimes what we need is just, okay, how have others gone through this?
We see it in the Psalms.
(20:38):
We see people bringing their angst and their complaints to God and seeing that resolution coming to the point of, but I know that this is true, which is really what you're here.
How has the book been received by people who are going through their own difficulties of various kinds?
I think I started out thinking, like I said before, that it was just going to be this medical account of what happened.
(21:03):
I was hoping to end it with, and I have this miraculous healing.
When that didn't happen, I knew the story was something much different than that.
So it's interesting that you say that they need to be in small pieces because I didn't know that at the time I was writing it, that when you're in a trauma environment, you can only process in short bites.
(21:26):
But I was processing in short bites because I was in trauma.
So I was spitting it out in these little chunks, not knowing what in the world am I going to do with that and how's that ever going to go together.
Through lots of sticky notes and all kinds of praying and help and mentoring, it became this book that people have said, I don't have heart failure.
(21:52):
I don't have any kind of health issue.
I'm not on any kind of medical detour, but I'm dealing with bankruptcy or loss of a spouse or a child issue or something that was much different than what I've ever experienced.
They related to the same things that I was going through on the detour that I was on.
(22:17):
Just recently, someone had used my book in a women's correctional facility for the inmates there.
It was used to teach a class on processing childhood trauma.
That's not my story.
That's not detour I had, but it is a detour.
It was very well received and helpful because Jesus was on a detour to the desert.
(22:43):
I think we all get detoured at some point in our life and we end up in this dry, desolate place and go, how do I make it through here?
What's the keys to surviving this place that I'm in?
That's what I hope and I've found that people use the book for.
(23:04):
Whilst your medical issues are a little bit more stable, you're still going through this journey.
I'm wondering if when people have read your book and they've received that encouragement and they've fed that back to you, has that been an encouragement to you in your own journey?
Certainly.
I think that has been one of the biggest blessings of this entire ordeal.
(23:28):
I have been able to reach people and connect with people that I would have never connected with.
As much as what happened to me has strengthened my faith, that maybe has even strengthened my faith more to hear from other people who I feel like have been on much harder roads than I've been on, who have endured so much suffering and so much hardship, that can reach out to me and say something that we have in common.
(23:57):
That shows me the strength of faith across countries, across generations, across multiple lifetimes, and gives me so much hope and so much depth to a faith that before was just really very linear and very me-focused.
(24:17):
I know that the book is a complete volume in itself, but that doesn't mean that you've stopped writing.
You continue to write your blog posts.
What is the inspiration for that?
Is that just your ongoing journey, the things that you encounter day by day?
It is.
I've learned since I've been diagnosed that heart failure is a chronic progressive disease.
(24:40):
It's chronic because it never goes away.
Like my friend said, once the heart muscle is damaged, it doesn't repair itself.
It's progressive because it only goes in one direction.
While you can have some blips up, like I did originally in my journey, overall, that trajectory is downward.
(25:01):
That whole situation with my heart failure has made me realize that's kind of life itself.
We're all on this chronic progressive journey.
As I'm still processing what's going on in my life with loss of my parents since the book's been out, or things with my grown-up children, other issues that have come up, loss of friends, that comes into the same framework because we're all on this journey and we all know how it ends.
(25:33):
That is the framework for life, really.
I continue to just write as topics or ideas or issues come to my mind.
I just trust that God's Spirit will take that and use that and reach the people that it needs to go to.
People go through various trials and detours in life.
(25:58):
It's not just a medical issue.
For some, it is.
For others, it's various different things that they're encountering in life at the moment.
What would be your words of encouragement to someone who is going through a difficult time right now?
I think one of the main things I've learned, I mentioned earlier that we're all on some sort of detour, but one of the most beautiful things is I thought originally a detour is this inconvenience.
(26:23):
It's this unwanted path that I don't want to be on because when you think about really what a detour is, we set our minds or our GPS on this destination, and we choose the smoothest, safest, most scenic, most efficient route, and we set out and go that way.
(26:46):
Sometimes we get thrown off that route because the road's closed, or for some other reason that we may never know, we cannot go forward on the road that we'd chosen.
Our first reaction is to say, well, that really makes me angry because I had planned on something else, or that makes me disappointed, or it makes me question God because that's not what I expected.
(27:13):
But really, a detour is a way that makes a way when there is no way.
When you get thrown off of your main highway onto a little dirt road, little rural windy path, that's making a way for you because the way you were going, you weren't going to get there.
(27:37):
When you can reframe your detour into God's making a way for you when there is no way, and it is a little bumpier, it is a little less comfortable, it is a little bit more scary and uncertain, but God's still in control of that.
Even though it's a path we didn't choose and really a path we'd never choose if we were choosing it, a detour for me has been this unplanned route to a deeper faith, and that's the thing you can never lose.
(28:12):
So that's the encouragement that I have for anyone who feels like they're on this road they didn't want, they didn't choose, and maybe it's not even their fault that they're on that road, but that can be the route to a deeper faith, which is something so much more precious than probably your own plans.
If people want to get hold of the book Divine Detour, or to read your other blog posts, where's the easiest place for people to find you?
(28:39):
They can find me at loriannwood.com.
I have a books page.
There's a tab at the top for my books page.
They can look at a trailer about the book.
They can even read the first chapter free.
There's also a tab at the top for blogs and my other publications as well.
There's also a contact form, and I love to hear from people whether they are subscribers or not.
(29:04):
If they just feel a need to reach out to someone else who have been on a detour, I would love to respond to them, and I personally respond to all of the emails and all of the comments on my website.
I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily.
I just want to say thank you so much for sharing your ongoing story.
(29:29):
Thank you for what you've written.
Thank you for the encouragement that you're giving to so many, and thank you for spending some time with me today on Bleeding Daylight.
It's been my pleasure, Rodney.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(29:50):
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.
I do hope you're able to share Bleeding Daylight with others who really need to hear it.
Please consider who might benefit from this episode as you listen.
(00:31):
There are dozens of other stories of lives transformed waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
When we've decided on a destination and set our direction, facing a detour is often the last thing we want.
But what if it's just what we need?
How can we reframe life's detours?
(00:51):
My guest will share her own detour with us today.
Joining me today is Lori Ann Wood, an inspiring author and heart failure survivor whose life took an unexpected divine detour in 2015.
(01:14):
Despite having no risk factors and being in excellent health, Lori Ann found herself fighting for her life at a Cleveland clinic.
Her remarkable journey from near death to recovery not only transformed her physical health, but deepened her spiritual walk in unexpected ways.
Now through her book, Divine Detour, and her speaking engagements, she helps others navigate their own faith challenges, showing how even life's most difficult questions can lead to profound spiritual growth.
(01:46):
Lori Ann, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you for having me, Rodney.
I mentioned your health event, and we'll explore that more fully, but I understand there was a different kind of event that happened a few weeks before that.
Can you tell me about that night on a stretch of highway far from home?
Yes.
I was in that empty nest phase of life.
(02:10):
I was taking my youngest child to a college visit and I just had this profound sense that something was next, and I didn't know what that was.
I had taught college courses for 25 years and just felt this itch that there was just something more that I was being called to do.
I remember closing my book, it was dark, we were on our way home late at night, and I looked out at the stretch of highway and I saw the stripe going by on the highway, and I just had this sense that whatever was coming was going to be something big, and I was excited about it.
(02:49):
I thought, this is going to be something that is going to be life-changing, and I just prayed right then and there that I was all in on whatever it was, just sure that I was going to have a new career or some new chance of doing something that I had always wanted to do.
I walked away from that thinking that something was going to happen, and what did happen was something so much different than what I ever imagined.
(03:16):
It was quite different, and I guess when we know that something's coming or there's an expectation, we always expect that it's going to be very much in our favor, and this wasn't quite what happened to you.
Tell me about that day three weeks later and what happened.
Well, I will say that in between that highway prayer and the event that you're talking about, I had a medical evaluation for a life insurance policy, and they told me that I had less than three percent chance of ever developing heart disease in my lifetime.
(03:50):
I wasn't really surprised by that because I've always been an extremely healthy person.
I'd never been hospitalized other than for childbirth.
I didn't take any prescription medication.
I exercised.
I thought I ate healthy.
I had no family history.
I had no risk factors, so three weeks later when I was not feeling well, thinking I had pneumonia or maybe the flu or something like that, I went to my family doctor finally that week after having gone to convenient care a couple of times.
(04:27):
Immediately, he took a chest x-ray and found that I had an extremely enlarged heart.
I was immediately put in cardiac ICU with my heart functioning at six percent.
I had no idea because heart disease was never on my list of worries.
You weren't expecting a health issue to crop up, and you're expecting God to do something amazing, maybe a career change or something wonderful happening in your life.
(04:56):
Then this, what did it lead to?
It was kind of one of those times in life where everything was moving really fast and really slow at the same time.
After I was initially diagnosed, they sent me home with a hospice binder because they did not think that I would ever, first of all, leave ICU.
Then once I did, they did not think I would survive the month.
(05:19):
What I thought was a story about God was going to heal me, and I was going to be back.
I was going to tell this beautiful story about miraculous healing.
He did restore my heart function to near normal at one point.
But a couple of years later, after being back to normal, my heart function dropped.
(05:41):
I'm now an active heart failure again.
Through all of that, ups and downs, and all of the medical things that I had endured, a couple of surgeries and other things, I wore a life vest, which is an external defibrillator vest for nine months.
I thought the story was going to be about that medical event and all the things that were happening with me physically, but the real story was what was happening with me spiritually.
(06:09):
As having been a believer all my life, what happened with my faith was the story that came out of those events.
You weren't feeling well.
You went to see your doctor, and we assume, oh, that's great.
The doctor has caught this early and sent you off to hospital, but it was a prolonged time in hospital and a long time of recovery.
(06:31):
As you say, the story's not finished yet, but you talk about that spiritual change, and I guess that's the change that God had tapped you on the shoulder about, something big that was coming.
It wasn't the expected thing, but tell me, how did your faith start to change?
What were the processes that you went through as you started to come to terms with what was going on with your body?
(06:55):
The first thing that happened, of course, because of the shock of the situation, I had a lot of people rally around me, and I was on prayer chains.
People were praying for me around the clock because my Cleveland Clinic doctor told me that my heart was the largest heart she'd ever seen.
When I say that my function was at six percent, five percent is not compatible with life.
(07:18):
So I was right on the edge.
I had so much spiritual support to get me over that hump.
But what started to happen was I started to feel almost guilty or like maybe my faith was the weak link when I wasn't getting any better.
I went a year and a half with just barely hanging on.
(07:41):
I felt like I was getting this very strong silence from God, and that bothered me because I have been a believer all my life, been in church all my life, raised my children in the church, been very active.
When it came to the time when I really felt like I needed my faith, it seemed like He wasn't there.
(08:04):
How did you deal with that silence?
What did you do to connect with God in those times where it felt like He wasn't answering?
It was very hard.
One of the things I mentioned is I felt like I was letting people down because people would come to me and say, We've been praying for you.
How are you feeling?
And I didn't want to tell them that I wasn't getting any better and that I wasn't feeling that well.
(08:27):
What I learned to process through that very silent period, and I still go through those silent periods where it seems like God's not listening, is that when we're in a silent period with God, the power of our prayer at that time is not necessarily in being able to move God's hand.
(08:48):
The power of prayer is in forming this relationship with Him that will get you through anything.
I learned that the power of prayer and other people's prayer on my behalf was not in this immediate resolution that I wanted so much, but it was rather in building this enduring relationship.
(09:12):
My husband used to tell me that we were trading something we can't keep for something we can never lose.
That's what I felt like the trade-off was then.
Part of what got me through that time was that I learned that it was okay to borrow words.
When I say borrow words, my first reaction when I had this terrible news in my lap was to go to Scripture.
(09:38):
To be quite honest with you, when I opened Scripture, it felt like it was too rich for me.
It felt like I was not at a place where I could go back to that and find any comfort.
I had to dial it back a step.
I had to listen to podcasts.
I had to read blogs.
(10:00):
I had to read books from trusted voices that could help me dive back into the richness of Scripture.
I even borrowed words from songs.
That may have been the most surprising thing to me.
Even when I was at a point spiritually where I wasn't reading anything, if I was listening to the music, those words could sink into my heart when nothing else could get anywhere close to it.
(10:29):
By borrowing the words of songs and blogs and podcasts and even the prayers of other people, I was able to hold on enough and hang with God long enough to see that when He was pausing in my life, He was helping me gain perspective.
(10:51):
That perspective gave me time to start writing.
I had been a college instructor for 25 years prior to my diagnosis.
Once I got my heart failure diagnosis, I couldn't stand up and lecture anymore.
But I found that I could sit down and type all day long.
I had energy for that.
(11:12):
I started to write this book that never would have happened in a safer, healthier life.
That was a big realization in that silent period that I never wanted.
It helped me find that purpose that I think was coming to me from that highway prayer that I prayed the weeks before my diagnosis.
(11:35):
It helped soften something that a friend of ours, who is also a doctor, visited me in the hospital.
He was not hopeful for me at the time.
He told me, the heart is the only muscle that can't heal itself.
It felt so final when he said that, but I've since learned that that's just true of human nature.
(12:01):
That's true of humanity and world that we live in.
There are some things on this side of eternity that aren't going to fix.
I've always been that fix-it person.
When God was silent to me and He wasn't going to fix it because the world doesn't fix everything, I felt like He was absent.
But He was using that time to change me and instill in me a different purpose and a different direction.
(12:29):
You've mentioned that you've always been that fix-it person.
You mentioned earlier that when you weren't getting well, you felt that this was on you, that it's somehow your fault that you weren't getting better.
It occurs to me that although we know that we are saved through grace alone, it's completely up to God, we often feel that our walk with God is all on us, that it's still down to us when it's actually on God.
(12:57):
Is that something that you had to come to terms with, that no, no, this is all God?
Certainly.
Like you say, you know that if you were taking a written test on that, you would get that question right every time.
But when you're living it in real time and your tendency is to try to fix it, it makes it so hard.
(13:18):
I told you that I grew up as a believer.
My mother was a strong believer, and I felt like I had this family heirloom that someone had passed down to me.
I had taken very good care of it all my life, and then I hit this rough, bumpy, very bumpy path, and I was afraid it might break.
Instead of actually using it, I put it on a shelf, and I wanted to protect it because I did not want to break that family heirloom that handed down faith.
(13:50):
So I put it on the shelf, and I wanted to protect it.
I thought, I'll come back to God when my life comes back together.
But what I didn't realize then is that I ran the risk, a very big risk, of never coming back to it at all.
Thankfully, all of that learning and all of that faith that had been planted in me from an early age came out because I just couldn't walk away.
(14:18):
I put it up there, and I tried to walk away, but every day I would get up and I would talk to God and say, I don't understand this.
I don't get it.
I don't know where you are.
I don't know why you would not answer all these prayers.
Why can we not see your hand move?
That kept me tethered to Him when otherwise I could have just walked away and never come back.
(14:44):
Peter I know that you can't speak on behalf of others, but I am wondering what were at least your perceptions of what was going on for those around you?
You've mentioned that there are a lot of people praying for you, but even those closer to you right there in your family, how were they dealing with this?
You had your own issues that you had to face in this health crisis, but how were they operating in this time?
(15:09):
I think most clearly about my youngest daughter was still at home.
She was a senior in high school.
She saw everything up close.
She got to live it in real time.
I hated that for her.
I hated that she went with us to the doctor appointments and she heard people say, there's nothing we can do.
(15:32):
She saw nurses crying for me.
She saw all of the raw emotion and information.
But I look back on that now and I realized that because she was there with me when it was happening, she understands now that this is serious.
(15:52):
She understands that I have limitations.
Whereas my older kids that weren't here, they still think I'm the mom that I was before.
They still think that I can do everything that I did before.
And so while I wouldn't wish that on her to have to go through that, that is something that we share that couldn't be replicated in any other way.
(16:19):
And then my husband has been, you just don't know how it's going to be.
You hope that your children will marry somebody that comes alongside you and supports you no matter what.
But he has been the best caregiver, the best advocate, the best encourager.
It's been amazing to see what it did in our marriage and our relationship, which was already very good.
(16:47):
But to see it taken to that other level was something that was a blessing to me that some of us don't ever get to see that part.
None of us want to walk down that hard road.
And yet so often when we do, whatever that road might be, we do find that there's a deepness and a richness that we did not expect.
And I know that you were very keen to put that down in words in your book.
(17:11):
Tell me about the process for writing.
When did you decide this should be a book?
That's a great question because this started way before I knew what was even happening.
And so that's how I know that it wasn't me.
Because to be honest with you, I started writing, and at some point I thought, this is going to be a book about my medical events, or it's just a story about me.
(17:38):
It turned out to be something very different.
It turned out to be a book of essays about life questions and being on a detour in life.
It all started because a friend of mine dropped off this little spiral notebook in my ICU room.
She didn't say anything about it.
It was just in there with some other things.
And I think she probably meant for me to write down medications or what the doctors were saying or thank yous I needed to write or instructions for my child at home or something like that.
(18:10):
But what it became was when I would wake up in the middle of the night and they're taking my vitals and doing all the things that they do in the hospital to you while you're a patient there in the middle of the night, I had trouble going back to sleep.
And so I would start writing down just things I was thinking about, questions for God, angsty statements, complaints even.
(18:36):
I was hoping that I would be able to burn that one day.
In fact, when I left the hospital and things sort of leveled out after a few months, I quit writing in it.
And my husband said one day, are you still keeping your journal?
And I said, no, I'm done with that.
I don't want to ever look at it again.
I don't want to bring it up again.
(18:58):
I don't want to relive it.
And he said, you should be writing all of this down.
And this is when we were still in a very uncertain time about whether I would survive.
I resisted even then, but finally started writing again in my journal.
And those journal entries became these little snippets and they're very short and just little insights into what was actually happening with my faith at that moment.
(19:25):
And I'm so glad that I was able to do that because I can think back on it now and I don't have the depth of emotion now that I did when it was happening in real time.
So when I can incorporate those into the book, it brought this realness to the book.
I also didn't want to just publish it as this raw emotion.
(19:50):
It took several years after the journal entries that I used to actually have perspective enough to write about them and say, this is what I was feeling, but this is what is true.
That I think the combination of the real raw emotion and the perspective of time was something that made that relatable to people on all kinds of detours in life.
(20:17):
As you mentioned, there are these almost bite-sized pieces because when someone is going through a really difficult time in life, the last thing they need is a hefty volume about how to deal with it.
That can be helpful at times, but sometimes what we need is just, okay, how have others gone through this?
We see it in the Psalms.
(20:38):
We see people bringing their angst and their complaints to God and seeing that resolution coming to the point of, but I know that this is true, which is really what you're here.
How has the book been received by people who are going through their own difficulties of various kinds?
I think I started out thinking, like I said before, that it was just going to be this medical account of what happened.
(21:03):
I was hoping to end it with, and I have this miraculous healing.
When that didn't happen, I knew the story was something much different than that.
So it's interesting that you say that they need to be in small pieces because I didn't know that at the time I was writing it, that when you're in a trauma environment, you can only process in short bites.
(21:26):
But I was processing in short bites because I was in trauma.
So I was spitting it out in these little chunks, not knowing what in the world am I going to do with that and how's that ever going to go together.
Through lots of sticky notes and all kinds of praying and help and mentoring, it became this book that people have said, I don't have heart failure.
(21:52):
I don't have any kind of health issue.
I'm not on any kind of medical detour, but I'm dealing with bankruptcy or loss of a spouse or a child issue or something that was much different than what I've ever experienced.
They related to the same things that I was going through on the detour that I was on.
(22:17):
Just recently, someone had used my book in a women's correctional facility for the inmates there.
It was used to teach a class on processing childhood trauma.
That's not my story.
That's not detour I had, but it is a detour.
It was very well received and helpful because Jesus was on a detour to the desert.
(22:43):
I think we all get detoured at some point in our life and we end up in this dry, desolate place and go, how do I make it through here?
What's the keys to surviving this place that I'm in?
That's what I hope and I've found that people use the book for.
(23:04):
Whilst your medical issues are a little bit more stable, you're still going through this journey.
I'm wondering if when people have read your book and they've received that encouragement and they've fed that back to you, has that been an encouragement to you in your own journey?
Certainly.
I think that has been one of the biggest blessings of this entire ordeal.
(23:28):
I have been able to reach people and connect with people that I would have never connected with.
As much as what happened to me has strengthened my faith, that maybe has even strengthened my faith more to hear from other people who I feel like have been on much harder roads than I've been on, who have endured so much suffering and so much hardship, that can reach out to me and say something that we have in common.
(23:57):
That shows me the strength of faith across countries, across generations, across multiple lifetimes, and gives me so much hope and so much depth to a faith that before was just really very linear and very me-focused.
(24:17):
I know that the book is a complete volume in itself, but that doesn't mean that you've stopped writing.
You continue to write your blog posts.
What is the inspiration for that?
Is that just your ongoing journey, the things that you encounter day by day?
It is.
I've learned since I've been diagnosed that heart failure is a chronic progressive disease.
(24:40):
It's chronic because it never goes away.
Like my friend said, once the heart muscle is damaged, it doesn't repair itself.
It's progressive because it only goes in one direction.
While you can have some blips up, like I did originally in my journey, overall, that trajectory is downward.
(25:01):
That whole situation with my heart failure has made me realize that's kind of life itself.
We're all on this chronic progressive journey.
As I'm still processing what's going on in my life with loss of my parents since the book's been out, or things with my grown-up children, other issues that have come up, loss of friends, that comes into the same framework because we're all on this journey and we all know how it ends.
(25:33):
That is the framework for life, really.
I continue to just write as topics or ideas or issues come to my mind.
I just trust that God's Spirit will take that and use that and reach the people that it needs to go to.
People go through various trials and detours in life.
(25:58):
It's not just a medical issue.
For some, it is.
For others, it's various different things that they're encountering in life at the moment.
What would be your words of encouragement to someone who is going through a difficult time right now?
I think one of the main things I've learned, I mentioned earlier that we're all on some sort of detour, but one of the most beautiful things is I thought originally a detour is this inconvenience.
(26:23):
It's this unwanted path that I don't want to be on because when you think about really what a detour is, we set our minds or our GPS on this destination, and we choose the smoothest, safest, most scenic, most efficient route, and we set out and go that way.
(26:46):
Sometimes we get thrown off that route because the road's closed, or for some other reason that we may never know, we cannot go forward on the road that we'd chosen.
Our first reaction is to say, well, that really makes me angry because I had planned on something else, or that makes me disappointed, or it makes me question God because that's not what I expected.
(27:13):
But really, a detour is a way that makes a way when there is no way.
When you get thrown off of your main highway onto a little dirt road, little rural windy path, that's making a way for you because the way you were going, you weren't going to get there.
(27:37):
When you can reframe your detour into God's making a way for you when there is no way, and it is a little bumpier, it is a little less comfortable, it is a little bit more scary and uncertain, but God's still in control of that.
Even though it's a path we didn't choose and really a path we'd never choose if we were choosing it, a detour for me has been this unplanned route to a deeper faith, and that's the thing you can never lose.
(28:12):
So that's the encouragement that I have for anyone who feels like they're on this road they didn't want, they didn't choose, and maybe it's not even their fault that they're on that road, but that can be the route to a deeper faith, which is something so much more precious than probably your own plans.
If people want to get hold of the book Divine Detour, or to read your other blog posts, where's the easiest place for people to find you?
(28:39):
They can find me at loriannwood.com.
I have a books page.
There's a tab at the top for my books page.
They can look at a trailer about the book.
They can even read the first chapter free.
There's also a tab at the top for blogs and my other publications as well.
There's also a contact form, and I love to hear from people whether they are subscribers or not.
(29:04):
If they just feel a need to reach out to someone else who have been on a detour, I would love to respond to them, and I personally respond to all of the emails and all of the comments on my website.
I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily.
I just want to say thank you so much for sharing your ongoing story.
(29:29):
Thank you for what you've written.
Thank you for the encouragement that you're giving to so many, and thank you for spending some time with me today on Bleeding Daylight.
It's been my pleasure, Rodney.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(29:50):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
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