Trust in Jesus's Mercy and Grace

For a long time, my husband and I had felt impressed that our family wasn't complete. The feelings came through dreams and quiet, repeated impressions that we believed were from God. We trusted them and moved toward them with hope.

Last July, at nine weeks along, I had a miscarriage.

My three previous pregnancies had all gone to full term and resulted in healthy, beautiful babies. I didn't know how to hold what had happened, and I didn't know what to do with the impressions I thought had come from God. Had they been real? And if they were — why this?

Then, one month after the miscarriage, my husband lost his job. The month after that, I tore my ACL. The surgery that followed was significant, and five months later I am still recovering.

I felt like I was drowning. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I fully lost my trust in Jesus Christ.

I'm not sure I've ever written or said those words out loud before. But it's true. I questioned my faith. I questioned whether the feelings I thought were coming from God were actually from Him at all. The ground I had always stood on just wasn't there anymore.

In the October 2025 General Conference, Sister J. Anette Dennis spoke words that stopped me in my tracks. Describing a period of deep depression in her late twenties, she said the feeling was as if the reality that God existed had suddenly gone, a complete sense of being lost that she couldn't fully put into words.

I read that and felt, for the first time in months, that I wasn't alone.

There is something quietly powerful about realizing that faithful people, people who have served God their whole lives, have stood in the same dark room you're standing in. It doesn't fix anything. But it reminds you that the room has a door.

Elder Paul B. Pieper's talk, Trust in the Lord, became something I returned to again and again. He counseled those who had lost their trust in God to be patient, to keep learning about Heavenly Father's character and purposes, and to actively look for and record experiences of feeling His love and power.

I tried to do that.

It wasn't dramatic. There were no lightning bolt moments. But I started noticing things.

I noticed my husband. Through a job loss, a miscarriage, and a wife in post-surgery recovery, he showed up every single day with steadiness and love. That is God's power showing up in a person.

And I noticed my daughters.

I have three girls. I never fully understood why until this past year. Their hearts are soft in a way I didn't know I needed. In the middle of my hardest months, their gentleness reached places in me that nothing else could. I think sometimes God knows the shape of the healing before we even know we're going to need it.

I won't pretend I've arrived somewhere tidy. I'm still working through what I experienced. I still have moments where I don't understand why people have to carry such heavy heartache during this life on earth.

But I do know that God lives. I know He loves His children. And I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, to trust that again.

I keep returning to Proverbs 3:5-6: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." I am trying to stop holding so tightly to the specific outcomes I want and trust instead that He has a plan for me that I can't yet see. That is harder than it sounds. But it is the direction I am moving.

I have a testimony of Jesus Christ's mercy and grace. Not because my trials were taken away, but because I have seen His love appear in unexpected places while I was in the middle of them: in my husband's constancy, in my daughters' soft hearts, in the words of a woman at General Conference who once felt exactly what I felt. If your trust in God has wavered, I challenge you to find God’s love and power each day through the small and simple things. As you do this you will be able to rebuild your relationship with Him and trust that He has a plan specifically for you.

He is there. Even when the ground gives way. 

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.