How to Deal with Suffering, Tragedy, and Illness

Dawn Damon: Welcome all you beautiful, bravehearts. So glad to be with you again today. And as always, I'm bringing you the most amazing stories that encourage your heart and help you also draw strength, energy, and encouragement.

Today my guest is a Wyoming native. They also call that the Cowboys state and she's serving as the children's pastor at ignite Wesleyan church in Sheridan, Wyoming. She's been married to her husband for 24 years. His name is Tony and the mom of a beautiful daughter, who is an amazing musician. Her name is Madison. Please welcome me to the program today, Gretchen Danforth.

Hey, Gretchen!

Gretchen Danforth: Hi, thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Dawn Damon: Wonderful to have you!

I've tried to connect a couple of different times and, you know, life has happened and we even recorded once then we had some technical difficulties, but we are together today. You have an incredible story to share. So I'm so glad that you're with us. Just give a quick background of your family and who you are and what you do.

Gretchen Danforth: Yeah. As you said, I live in Wyoming. I was born and raised here in Sheridan. So I've lived in the same town my whole life and absolutely love it. If you've not been to Wyoming, you should.

Dawn Damon: Definitely, I’ll check it out.

Gretchen Danforth: It is amazing. So I've lived here forever. Just celebrated my 24th anniversary this summer with my husband, Tony. We have a daughter who just turned 21 this fall, Madison, who is now attending college in Colorado and studying music education and performance. So that's kind of the nutshell of my family.

I serve as the children's pastor here at Ignite Wesleyan church and the best job in the world. I absolutely love it. What I get to do and who I get to spend my time with each week. So it's kind of a little bit about who I am.

this beautiful family. But in: 2003

Gretchen Danforth: Yeah, so our daughter was born in 2002, and so we were just getting ready to celebrate her first birthday. So she turned one on October 14th, 2003, and we had a birthday party planned for the following weekend. Of course, being the only child and my first birthday, it was going to be a big deal.

phones were not that great in: 2003

So I received that phone call at about 10:30 am. I hurried up and, you know, got things arranged, headed to the hospital, and ended up getting there at least two or three hours before Tony ever arrived. So, it was kind of a brutal couple of hours because we knew nothing. We didn't know if he was alive. We didn't know anything. So we waited, prayed, had family, had church, everybody there surrounding us.

I remember just standing there and the ER had said, okay. They're in town, so they should be here soon and standing kind of out on the balcony with my mom and hearing the sirens and it just sparked panic. It works at the hospital said if they have sirens on that means he's alive. That is a good thing. So you hold on to that. That was kind of a moment to just kind of calm and peace, give a little bit of peace in that moment.

So I never thought that sirens would be something I was excited to hear, but that made sense that he was coming. It was. still alive. So he arrived there. He had fallen anywhere between 20 to 24 feet. They're not exactly sure. Had it snowed the night before he was climbing up scaffolding, slipped and fell, and landed flat on just the hard ground. He had broken his back at T11 and T12, which is right about where your belly button sits.

When he originally fell, so the hours that it took for the EMTs to get there and get him into town, he originally had nothing from about the chin down. He didn't have movement of his arms. He had nothing. He could basically move his mouth and that was the eyes. That was it. By the time he reached the hospital, he didn't have his arms back, not strength, but he had movement. So we felt that was also a huge answer to prayer.

So long story short, he has a spinal cord injury paralyzed from the waist down. He was flown to Montana to a bigger hospital where we spent a couple of weeks pretty touch and go for a while with things. Then he was flown from there to Denver to a rehab hospital where we spent about 18 weeks and we lived down there temporarily while he went through rehab for the spinal cord injury and pretty much learned everything all over again.

ah, we spent the last part of: 2003

Dawn Damon: That's such an incredible story. There's so much there. I mean, that's making a long story short. Your husband suffered a spinal cord injury that to this day, he still has, of course, it's permanent and it upended your life and turned everything upside down, but you stayed in the marriage. You said, Yes, to this trial in this test. You were brave. There had to have been days that you were discouraged, and confused. In fact, didn't one counselor say to you, as you guys went into a room to hear about how to manage a spinal cord injury and said to you, 80 percent won't make it? Your marriage won't make it. Tell me about that.

Gretchen Danforth: Yeah. Thankfully we had a ton of family support and a ton of church support, and my parents were able to be with us for about the first seven weeks in Denver. So they were able to take care of Madison, which. was huge and it allowed me to be able to go through some of the rehab process with Tony, to go through some of the classes, to go through some of the trainings, to just learn kind of what our new life would be.

But I remember, yeah, we sat in a class with quite a few other married couples. A few, a few singles, but mostly were married couples who had had accidents, very similar time frame as ours, and were told that in five years, 89 percent of us would be divorced. I just remember walking out of that class and walking down the hallway and I mean, I was just being silent, not even knowing what to say. I just remember thinking, Wow. Like there's no hope there. There's no, you know, 89%. That's why you might as well say all of you are going to be divorced.

Then, so it was a gut punch for sure. We battled that we faced that sadly in the group that we were sitting in. There's one other couple that is still married out of probably 12 of those couples. Yeah, she was right. We fought against that. You know, there were days in rehab where it was difficult. I distinctly remember sitting in the gym one day and had Madison in the stroller and they said, okay, this is going to be tough. You also have to know, that my husband is six foot eight. So he's not a little guy, even in a wheelchair, he's a big man. So you're going to fall out of your wheelchair. You're going to have times where you fall and you have to figure out how to get yourself back up. So they very nicely dumped him out of his wheelchair and then put the wheelchair clear across the room. Then, of course, my first instinct was to jump in and help and they said, no, you two need to go sit in the other corner. You can't talk. You can't help. You just watch. I remember sitting there thinking, Oh my goodness, again, such a helpless feeling. There was nothing I could do. I watched my husband who, you know, a few weeks before was, you know, he could carry concrete blocks and bricks with, you know, just strong physically and watched him crawl his way across this mat in the gym. Try and pull himself up into a wheelchair and just watch the defeat in his eyes knowing, okay, this is going to be a battle. This is going to be difficult, but difficult isn't impossible.

So we definitely had our moments where we struggled. We had times when it was tough and would have been easier to walk away. It would have been easier to just end, but that's not what God calls us to do in marriage. That's not what we are called to do as a wife. We pushed through. We went through the difficult, the tough, the messy, and through those amazing moments also, and a marriage that has really stood through those trials.

Dawn Damon: Well, you have, you've stood through the trials, you've made it through the ups and the downs. 24 years now, congratulations, but you paint such a beautiful picture of a faithful wife, and yet such an agonizing, heart-wrenching picture of seeing your husband, six foot eight. This is a large man, an independent man, a strong man now crawling across the floor.

You had to have felt helpless, not just in that moment, but in so many others. Were there times when you were really angry at God or confused? What were your feelings and emotions?

Gretchen Danforth: I think for me there was anger. I don't know if it was ever pointed directly to God. Like, I felt like I was angry at the situation. I was angry at why we were given this. You know, we had been married four years when this happened, barely four years, you know, so we had plans, we had things that we were going to do. And so why were we given that? And that, I think is more where my anger settled, not necessarily at God, but just the questioning and the wondering what, and I'm a planner.

So I like to know, I like to know what's happening. I like to know, you know, what the next day is going to bring. And, you know, We were living just flying by the seat of our pants on everything. We moved out of our house. We didn't, our church and our family moved us out because we had a two-story apartment, you know? Instantly we had lost her home, both of our jobs. You know, any kind of financial security we had, everything was pretty much upside down and gone. I think Tony definitely went through way more of the anger as far as just the anger is what had happened and what was he supposed to do and why he'd worked so hard for his career and for what he had built and then it was taken away is what he felt like for a long time. But yeah, I think definitely angry at the situation. But also just wondering what the purpose was.

I think we've seen some of that in the last 20 years, you know, we've seen people who have come to know Jesus because of it, and that's where you sit back and say, okay, I see it, you know, doesn't make it easy. Doesn't make it fun, not necessarily the path we would choose, but when you see what God does with it, It just makes it a little bit easier to swallow. I think right.

Dawn Damon: Tell us a time. How is God brought some glory out of this for him? Is there an example or an illustration of a good time because you are in the midst of something? If you didn't have the right heart, the right mindset, and attitude. This is a lifetime struggle that would absolutely defeat you.

Gretchen Danforth: Yeah, it's got to be God that keeps you going day after day. How has God received the glory from this? I mean, there are a million ways, but I think one of the ways that even as a mom, one of the things I struggled with so much in the beginning was, how do we keep Madison?

Okay. I remember calling the pediatrician that first week and saying, okay, her life's upside down. How do we make sure she's okay? You know, she was one, but I was still worried about what this was going to do to her life. And I remember her saying, just keep loving her. You just keep doing the same thing. We had been back at the hospital in Denver for a checkup. At this point, I think Madison was about four and it was Halloween time. They were carving pumpkins and a woman comes in who's in a, you know, she's steering her chair with her mouth, had no movement at all. I watched my four-year-old go over and push a chair up to her and she said, would you like to carve pumpkins? Blink your eyes once if you want to, you know, she had picked this all up at the hospital.

Then I just sat back amazed, like, what is she doing? This woman pulled up there who was by herself, sat next to Madison. She said, okay, I'm going to ask you questions about your pumpkin. Do you want circle eyes? Blink once, you know, all these questions. She knew the woman could not talk back to her. She had no ability to carve this pumpkin, and then here's my four-year-old communicating and loving her in a way that I don't know she would have been able to had she not witnessed what she had witnessed as a, you know, a toddler, and a preschooler.

So I know that even now that has changed her heart. She has a heart for the people who are hurting, she has a heart for people who are, are lonely, are, you know. Just alone. So God's used it in amazing ways, but that's one that just stands out so much to me is how it has shaped her.

Dawn Damon: Yes. You know, for me, and I think I've shared this with you before Gretchen too, but my daughter, when she was 10 years old, was struck as a pedestrian by a truck, and we almost lost her. But after that, God was so faithful. And I know there are those listening where they didn't get that ending to the story that there was a death or there was a loss. But after that time, fear just grabbed me for such a long time. How did you do? Did you battle the fear of something happening to Tony, to your daughter? How did you overcome that?

Gretchen Danforth: Fear has been something, I still battle it. If I'm being honest, it's definitely been, now it's a million times better than it was, but the story I told about Hearing the sirens and they gave me peace, knowing that Tony was okay. Well, that didn't last long because, you know, after that, he goes back to work and then, and I would be sitting at my office or whatever, and I would hear those sirens and instantly I would think, Oh my goodness, what if that was my husband, you know, I've been told since I was a kid, every time you hear sirens, you pray for the person in trouble.

So that day when he got hurt. I heard the sirens leave town and I prayed not knowing I was praying for my husband and for the people going to rescue him, you know, so that took a long time for me to get past that, like that anxiety of, Oh, I hear that. And I know somebody else, what they're going to feel. What if it's my husband, what if it's my daughter, what if it's my parent, you know, like all of these things? So yeah, a lot of fear and that Tony went through some very, very dark depression, you know, as anyone would with this.

There were moments where it was okay, this, you know, I may lose my husband to depression. The fear of how do I battle that? How do I stand against that? How do I keep him? Okay. Myself. Okay. How, how do we do that? So yeah, lots of fear about the unknown. I think just the fear that I had to overcome also was that this was something I never expected. I mean, you never expect a tragedy to hit or a trial and you never expected, but I felt like I was waiting for the next thing. And, you know, probably 10 years after my husband's accident, he was in another accident where he broke his back and was hit by a car. And, Extricated out of it. And, and so then that felt like, okay, here we go again. So now we're waiting for the next thing. And so that had to be, that's something I've had to really work on is letting go of that fear of what's next instead of the what's next, knowing whatever it is. God's going to get us through it.

Dawn Damon: Yeah. You know, as I listened to you, of course, the title of the podcast is the bravehearted woman, and then we do these brave stories. And I'm just so struck with the thought that you were brave. It's not something that you chose. You are also fearful. You also had anxiety. you were also overwhelmed. You didn't have any choice. It's not like you chose this brave pathway. It came to you. So how did you find a way to come into peace? Was it prayer? Was it reading the word? Did you get a counselor? What would you say to somebody who's listening to this that might be in a trial too? How did you make it through, Gretchen?

Gretchen Danforth: I think it's all of those things. I think for a long time, I felt like I had to be okay. I had to, you know, physically, emotionally, mentally, all of those things. Like I, I had to, I had to take care of my husband and my baby. And so there wasn't time to really even process it.

It wasn't until years later, I think that I finally realized, wow, I don't know that I have overcome some of this stuff because you know, I was living on adrenaline. I was living on just. Survival. And so, yeah, I think it is all of those things. It is, it's prayer. It is a community. We have had the most amazing group of family and church family, and I just cannot stress enough how important it is to surround yourself with that community of believers and people.

By the time I got to the ER that day, there were 20 to 25 people waiting to pray and be there. And when someone tells you, Oh, I'm going to pray for you, or I'll be praying for you. You just kind of smile and nod and think, thanks. But when you know that they are, and that's what sustains you. There were days that I think that's truly what we survived on because we didn't necessarily have it in us.

To be praying all the time there was nothing left and so for others to be walking us through that way and holding us up in prayer was huge. Yeah, we survived on other people's prayers for a long time. And that was beautiful to look back on and realize how much. That community of believers had really embraced us and walked us through it and then to be able to get on the other side of it and be able to then say, okay, some of these things I'm still not okay with, and it's okay to talk to somebody to have a counselor.

It's okay to have moments where you fall apart, and to allow yourself those moments, but not to allow yourself to stay there. Long when we were all in the midst of it. I remember my dad saying, okay, we can all have bad days, but we can't have them on the same day. So we got, we have a space these days out.

So, you know, you take your moment when you need it and you cry out to God. And sometimes that's all you do have is the cries, the groans of your heart, and then He hears those as well.

Dawn Damon: So much for being willing to share your story. You know, there is an upside to this because God called you to the ministry. And so even though you were walking through a difficult challenge and still are today, I imagine it became your new normal at some point, this is your life, but you said, I'm not going to just sit here and do nothing. God has called you into the ministry and you became a pastor. So tell us a little bit about today and what you're doing in, how did you feel God's call to become a pastor?

Gretchen Danforth: Yeah. If you had asked me 20 years ago, in the midst of all this, this would have been the farthest thing from where I thought I would be, but God has used it. Yeah. Just in the midst of the, You know, not having a job and then being able to stay home and take care of my husband and my daughter for a while and then just kind of seeking like where am I supposed to be and what am I supposed to do and position came open here at the church that I've attended since I was like a child and my husband has actually attended it since he was a child as well.

So it just started in the office and pretty soon it just was like, this is where God has placed me. This is what God has called me to do. And that led to, you know, some more volunteer positions, which then led to God saying, no, this is what I'm calling you to do. This is not just you volunteering a few days a week or once a month. This is what I've called you to do. And this is what I've equipped you to do. I fought it for a long time because, for one, that's scary and for another, I didn't know if I was ready for that. God continued to tell me, you're never going to be ready, but I will prepare you and I will equip you. And so, yeah, I've stepped into the role as a pastor here at Ignite Westland. Just recently got licensed a few weeks ago. I'm in the process of ordination, so it's still a little ways away, but we're definitely on the road to that. Yeah, I've never felt more at peace with where God has called me to be.

Dawn Damon: That's awesome. Congratulations on all of that. You're a very brave woman. You're a strong woman. I know you're a woman that has a depth of wisdom that some people don't have because of the things that you've walked through and our time is just about up, but I want to circle back just for a moment, because. You shared a story about how you met your husband. If you ever were tempted to doubt that Tony was the one for you, didn't you have a miraculous meeting with this man that you have now been married to for 24 years?

Gretchen Danforth: Yeah, so I had been actually praying for him though he was not in a good situation and had been praying for him and that for quite a while before we met and then continued to pray with him for a year.

So when we finally did start dating I was able to pull out my prayer journal and say, so I've been praying for you by name. And for these things for a year and a half, two years, and that just God used that to solidify his plan for us that he had prepared my heart for him and his for mine way before we ever even could have imagined that. So yeah,

Dawn Damon: You were praying for him because a prayer request had come through and you didn't know who he was. So you just said, yes, I'll pray for this prayer request. Little did you know that you were praying for your future husband all that time.

Gretchen Danforth: For a long time and very specifically and yeah, have had it all written down in a prayer journal and So it was definitely another piece of what God had prepared for us for sure.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Well, thank you for being here. And for all of those of you who are listening, I hope you can hear the miracle thread that is woven throughout this story. The power of prayer, the power of destiny, the power of God's ability to sustain and give us what we need, the ability for God to give us the strength to walk things that we don't think we could ever do. Amen.

And if you're going through a difficult situation, I want you to know that the same God who brought Gretchen, Tony, and Madison through their trial and continues to prove himself faithful to them is going to be faithful to you too. We're here for you!

By the way, I always like to give an offer to anyone listening to the podcast. This week I really want to give you the Brave Affirmations for an Abundant Life. So make sure you take a moment, and download the free gift. It will teach you the power of speaking God's word over your life.

Gretchen, thank you for being with us. for sharing your story. And hey, everybody, I'm going to leave you like I always do. This is Dawn Damon, your brave heart mentor reminding you that it's time for you to find your brave and live your dreams!