When God’s Promises Face The Storms of Life
There’s a saying my parents always shared with my brother and me during my teen and early adult years: “Build your well before you’re thirsty.” Others might know it as “Build your roof before it rains.” It was one of many principles they wanted us to carry into life—the idea of doing the hard, quiet work of strengthening yourself before the storms hit. Life has a way of testing us: jobs disappear, children or parents get sick, tragedy arrives without warning. Now, as I move forward in my adult years, I’m watching that lesson bear fruit. And it turns out this simple truth has everything to do with building a strong home.
When you first get married, it’s easy to live in the glow of idealism. You picture the home you’ll create, the children you’ll have, and which traits they might inherit from each of you. In those early days, it’s hard to imagine preparing for the storms that might come. In our first eighteen months of marriage, my husband and I lost three grandparents between us. For two young twenty-somethings, that was a heavy load. If you were blessed with grandparents like ours, you know they weren’t just family—they were living treasures. They grew up during the Great Depression and lived through world wars. They understood hard work, sacrifice, and the value of simpler times. Losing them felt like losing the pillars we had both been standing on.
The first experiences of grief in a young marriage are uncharted waters. You think you know everything about the person standing beside you at the altar, but loss has a way of surfacing the darkest parts of us. It certainly did for me. I lost two of those three grandparents, including the one everyone always said I was just like. My grandmother was one of my best friends. She was wonderfully eccentric—we’d sit in her living room talking late into the night while she smoked a cigarette, feet propped on the coffee table, with one of her beloved cats in her lap. I share her looks, her personality, and her quick mind. Watching dementia slowly steal her from us was heartbreaking. She grew angry and agitated, and eventually she no longer recognized me. I never got to say goodbye.
That loss brought out the most selfish parts of me. I expected my husband to be my knight in shining armor—perfectly understanding, emotionally available, ready to carry my heartbreak. But empathy doesn’t come naturally to him. He’s intellectual and logic-driven, so grief looks different for him. Instead of clearly communicating my needs, I withdrew. I felt completely alone on a desert island with my thoughts and feelings. In my pain, I distanced myself from him in unhealthy ways and looked for comfort where I shouldn’t have.
Looking back, I see that I hadn’t built my well or checked the integrity of my roof before the first storm arrived. It’s so easy when you’re young to focus only on the optimistic parts of life—the dreams, the excitement—and overlook the preparation needed for the hard seasons. My faith was especially weak then. I had plenty of head knowledge about the Bible and theology, but my actual relationship with God was surface-level at best. I’d pray for friends or sick family members, but my faith wasn’t rooted in daily dependence on my Savior. Good seasons can quietly lull us into forgetting how much we need the Lord.
I’ve been married almost eleven years now. Since those early storms—and through many come-to-Jesus moments—my faith has slowly moved from my head to my heart. Motherhood and the sanctifying fire of life’s trials have taught me that no amount of Bible knowledge can replace a real, living relationship with God. I’ve also learned that a marriage not anchored in Him cannot withstand life’s tests. If we aren’t praying together or seeking to understand each other’s faith journey, how can we reflect Christ’s love for His bride? How can we endure the hard seasons when all we have is our own strength?
Through every major challenge over the past eleven years, my husband and I have found ourselves pressing deeper into each other and deeper into our shared relationship with God. And yet, we know we’re far from having arrived. We still misunderstand each other at times. We have moments when our parenting doesn’t align and we make mistakes. But those eleven years of hard-earned progress have prepared us for what has become our hardest season yet.
In November 2025, we received the kind of earth-shattering news no one wants to hear: my dad had been given a difficult health diagnosis. It rocks you to your core and shakes everything you thought you knew. No amount of prior spiritual growth or “sanctifying” lessons could soften the heartbreak. Watching the strongest person you’ve ever known face the fight of his life is a dark valley—especially when that news came during the darkest, coldest weeks of the year, right as everyone else was gathering to celebrate the holidays.
You find yourself wondering how to carry the weight without traumatizing your own children. Navigating conversations with friends and family becomes incredibly tricky. You’re forced to face a reality you don’t want to accept while also trying to explain it to others. You quickly learn to hold the details close, unsure how people will respond and wary of receiving doom-and-gloom reactions you’re not ready to handle. I realized almost immediately that relying on my own strength and understanding was futile.
Through all the hardness of the past six months, God’s faithfulness has shone in the darkest places in ways that can only be explained by Him. A friend once told me, “We like to think we know Jesus—but in the trenches of our suffering is when we truly call Him friend.” I have found that to be profoundly true. In moments when I felt completely broken, I discovered strength to keep going. In seasons that should have been filled with anxiety, I’ve experienced a peace that surpasses all understanding.
But one of the most profound blessings in all of this is realizing that the faith within our marriage has flourished. It has become bedrock—something both my husband and I can stand firm on.
There have been countless moments of fear and doubt when we’ve paused, held each other tightly, and simply prayed together. When the enemy whispers lies, I’ve found my husband faithfully speaking the truth of God’s Word over me to fight them. When I’m tempted to question God’s goodness, he gently holds me accountable by reminding me of the countless miraculous moments we’ve already seen in these five months. There have been several times we’ve looked back and said, “Wow, God was literally preparing us for this battle years before it even arrived.”
In this season, mornings have been my hardest time. Yet I often wake up with faith-filled songs playing in my head and in my ears. I know the Holy Spirit is there with me, preparing my heart for whatever the day will bring.
When you walk through hard times, you never want them—but I’ve almost been able to thank God for them. Hard times have a way of magnifying our sin and depravity like nothing else. Never in my life have I seen my own idols of comfort and dependence on worldly things more clearly—things that steal God’s glory and distance me from His voice. One of my favorite Chuck Swindoll quotes says, “When I ask people when they really grew spiritually, they never describe an easy time. Never.” It’s so true.
The longer this season stretches on, the more my husband and I have realized that the faith at the center of our marriage and our home has never been more focused.
To bring this all to a close, I would say this: Don’t wait for the trials of life to reveal the true status of your faith. The shaking of your foundation is not the time to discover its integrity. Be grateful for the calm seasons, but don’t let them distract you from the daily necessity of true dependence on the Lord.