Miracles Still Happen with Jeff and Gwynette Werth
“If somebody had told me at the beginning of my story, when I started getting sick, ‘It’s going to be 25 years, and this is what’s going to happen and how horrible it is, and you’ll know God really well by the end,’ I probably would have gone, ‘No.’ But I look back, and the way I know Him? Twenty-five years is nothing for it.”
This week on Beyond the Bar, Abby interviews Jeff and Gwynette Werth, a couple with a miraculous testimony. They share about the ups and downs of their journey to where they are now, as well as how they:
Believe for miracles
Walk alongside others in faith
Listen to the Holy Spirit and obey with confidence
“When we’re looking at Jesus and going, ‘I want to become as much like Him as I possibly can,’ we become what we behold.”
About Jeff and Gwynette
Jeff and Gwynette Werth have been married for 36 years. They have 3 children and are Nana and Popop to 7 grandchildren. Jeff works as a Senior Territory Rep for EcoLab and Gwynette recently published her first book, "Grace Found Me: Miracles Still Happen" in 2023, telling her testimony of healing from chronic illness. Jeff and Gwynette are passionate about praise and worship music and can always be found cracking a joke or offering a word of encouragement.
Read the Podcast
Intro: Welcome to Beyond the Bar, the podcast where coffee and conversation are a catalyst for growth. If you’ve been searching for that coffee-with-a-friend experience that leaves you feeling seen, met, and encouraged, you’ve come to the right place. So grab your cup, listen up, and together we’re going Beyond the Bar.
Abby: Hey friends, welcome to Beyond the Bar. I’m your host, Abby. I’m really looking forward to today’s episode. We get to sit down with a couple friends of mine who are from my church, Jeff and Gwynette Werth. We’re going to discuss their book, Grace Found Me, and their testimony and story. So we’re just going to get right into it. Thanks for being here, guys.
Gwynette: Thanks for letting us come.
Abby: Yeah, I’m so looking forward to this. So you just wrote this book, Gwynette, and it came out last year?
Gwynette: Last, just before Thanksgiving last year.
Abby: Oh, okay. So I’ve read it, and it is a story, I’ve known parts and pieces of that journey, a lot of the beginning parts of the book, I didn’t know, was before I met you, but I’m excited to get into this. Will you just briefly give us a synopsis of like, your story, what this book is about?
Gwynette: Wow, yeah. To condense it, um, I started getting sick when our third child was born and it just kept getting worse and getting worse and getting worse. I ended up in Mayo clinic, they couldn’t find anything, and after ten years they found out I had Lyme’s disease. But by the time they found it, it was in my brain, they found it because I had brain swelling and they didn’t think I was going to make it. So it was 25 years of 27 meds. At the very end, strong narcotics, the pain was… just the act of breathing and having air come in my lungs was, there wasn’t a moment when there wasn’t excruciating pain. He would hear me cry in my sleep, just, and when I did sleep, which, there wasn’t really good sleep, and I had just decided nothing was going to get better and, “God just didn’t take me, I don’t want to do this.” I kind of checked out.
Jeff: You were medically hopeless in many, many senses.
Abby: Because you had had a hysterectomy when you were, I think it was said like 26?
Gwynette: Yeah.
Abby: Which is how old I’m about to be. So when I read that, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t imagine at 26 going…” and it was like an emergency hysterectomy, right?
Gwynette: Yeah, it was within a week of finding out. They said, “Well, maybe this is what your pain is,” ‘cause I did have what they call adenomyosis and they took it out and the doctor’s like, “There’s a little bit of endometriosis,” I took care of that, but I didn’t get better. I just didn’t get better.
Abby: So it’s just crazy to me, like, you had a hysterectomy that ended up maybe not even necessarily being super necessary because it didn’t solve anything. You had postpartum depression at one point. You had struggled with anxiety, and then the physical pain, and as you go through in the book, which people can read, it just was like one diagnosis on top of another diagnosis on top of another diagnosis…
Gwynette: And even the fear of diagnosis, because we did see one doctor who’s, who thought I had multiple sclerosis, and he was afraid, we went on Christmas Eve to find out that if it was, and he thought, I’m gonna have to tell her she has MS on Christmas Eve, and he said, “It’s not MS.”
Jeff: We would have welcomed it to be-
Gwynette: -just to have an answer.
Jeff: -we know what it was and we’ve learned since that Lyme’s disease magnifies all other illnesses and diseases and masks itself and so that explains some of that, but it was incredibly intense.
Abby: Yeah.
Jeff: Very very difficult, and with three kids. Yeah, there was a lot.
Abby: You also shared you guys had, you had been homeschooling, Jeff was working, that eventually they put them into public school. Or, Jeff put them into public school.
Gwynette: Yeah…
Jeff: It was a, it was a brutal, ugly time.
Gwynette: My goal was to teach these kids and have fun with them and do this and do, I mean, I had all these boxes I wanted to check on, do all this, and we just realized they weren’t getting what they needed. I just didn’t, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to, it was the disease that, yeah, it kind of stripped it from me. So they needed, I was pretty angry with him when I found out what happened. But that’s what they needed. They needed a break from always being with a sick mom.
Abby: And you had, I mean, service animals, you couldn’t walk without assistance, you fully walked up the stairs to the studio today, so people might not be able to tell on camera, but there’s no service puppy sitting here. What happened?
Gwynette: So, our church was having a special speaker, Bruce Van Natta, and he has an amazing story himself of miracle healing, and Jeff was doing the sound for that.
Jeff: And preface this, we came out of a background that was not conductive to miraculous healing and the power of the Holy Spirit. So, quite honestly, I was out of my element, watching things happen, seeing things, watching a guy in front of us, in front of me, going, “This guy was dead.” He had a truck on his chest, and here he’s standing here because of God. So I was very uncomfortable.
Gwynette: It was a two-day thing, and again, I was too sick to go. The second day my head was so horrific. The migraines I had, now they don’t really think they were migraines per se, but because of the brain swelling, and he went off the second day and I was in my chair with my service dog and it had already started and I hear almost audibly, “If you go, I will heal you.” I never heard something that powerful before and I just didn’t move and I heard it again: “If you go, I will heal you.” So I messaged him, got myself dressed, grabbed my service dog, headed to church. I got just in the back door. I didn’t have any, I couldn’t go any farther.
Jeff: She made it to the back of the back auditorium.
Gwynette: And after he- I got there five minutes ‘til the end, and afterwards, Pastor Andrew invited people to come up for prayer. And my name was the first name he mentioned. And I’m like, “God said,” but in my mind, I was still limiting him, because I thought, “Oh, he’s going to get rid of the migraine.” So I handed my service dog off to Jeff in the sound booth, and I went up, but I was walking with forearm crutches. It was either that or electric wheelchair, and it took me a while to get to the front. And by the time I did there was a whole bunch of people up there. And I waited and he came to me and I told him about the migraine because the lights felt like knives in my eyes, and he prayed, and my migraine was gone. And he said, “I’ll come back to you in a minute,” and I’m thinking, “Well, if God can heal the migraine, maybe I should tell him about all the other stuff.” So he came back to me and I told him, and it still chokes me up. He prayed for healing from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, and every bit of pain was gone. And I mean, you don’t really know what to do at that point. So I walked back without any struggle to the back and told him, and he didn’t know what to do.
Jeff: I was growing, being taught how we had been. I did not accept or acknowledge, I’ll understand the complete power of the Holy Spirit and what he can do. I was very skeptical. I was thinking, “Okay, so this is an emotional high. Emotions can cover a lot of things, and so in about three days she’s gonna panic. It’s gonna be bad and we’re going, you know, then it’s gonna get even another step worse than what it was.
Gwynette: But I started walking. I made it to the mailbox. It used to tire me out for a full day. And the next day, if I walked to the mailbox.
Jeff: She started to become exhausting with the walking. Literally, I was like, “Okay…”
Gwynette: He started with me and then he stopped.
Jeff: It was like, “Wow, okay.” And my doubt factor was coming down more and more, going, if something happened, something more happened.
Gwynette: I wanted to make it to the end of our road, which is a mile and a half. I did it in a month. That’s not possible on my own strength. And then one of our kids said, “Well, mom, you should train for the Turkey Trot.” They meant in a couple years, God said, “This year.” So I started walking more and then timing and then doing stretching and really paying attention to training. I wasn’t a runner before this, so April 9th is when God healed me. That Thanksgiving, I ran five miles. That is not possible without God.
Abby: What were you thinking when you saw her run?
Jeff: Um, I was blown away when she crossed the finish line.
Gwynette: I ran into his arms.
Jeff: That was Thanksgiving. She stayed to go Black Friday shopping. I had to come back to take care of the dog and I think I had to work. I’m sitting in the chair that night watching the video and I got ugly, ugly crying.
Gwynette: We’re typing back and forth because I didn’t want to wake the kids at our son’s house and he’s like, “I can’t see the keyboard,” and I’m like, “What do you mean you can’t see the keyboard?”
Jeff: At that point, I realized how incredibly powerful our God is. I mean, it blew me away, and I can’t talk about it without crying.
Abby: I remember this stage of life for you guys and so I wasn’t obviously at the beginning of your story or your journey, but I got to witness you guys starting to come to church, and I didn’t really know you because you were not at church much, and so Jeff would be around, and you would see him, and every once in a while you would see his wife, but you know, you would come in and clearly there was lots of pain going on. You could read that in your face, in your body. So if you were around you would maybe be there for a little bit, and then, you know, so there wasn’t much there. But I remember that day. I remember that prayer service. I got prayer at that prayer service and so then watching you guys since then and what God has done, but what He did went far beyond a physical healing, and you guys talk about some of this in your book, and the book’s called When Grace Found Me, and in that you talk about, and there’s multiple times in the book where you’ll go through the whole chapter and you’ll talk about, “This was hard and this was hard and this was going on and this is what happened,” and then at the end you’d say, “And God was chasing after me in grace,” or, “God was gracious to me and we just didn’t see it.” Could you talk about some of those other things that were going on relationally? Because the couple of you guys are now and, and the, in tears running into his arms after victoriously running, that wasn’t who you guys always were.
Jeff: No, no. I had become pretty much non-emotional except for some anger and frustration, but had just quenched all emotion, and between us, it was like, “Yeah, I take care of her. I’m her caregiver.” There’s nothing, there’s no spark, nothing, because she was physically just there.
Gwynette: I slept 22 probably hours a day, not good sleep, not restorative, but I was out of it. If he was home, he couldn’t make noise because it was too painful for me. So he went to work.
Jeff: I escaped with work. I escaped and looked for other things, but still always had to be taking care of her. But after the healing and things were progressing, then we were able to start having conversations about all sorts of different things. And our love life came back. We, everything, it was like, instead of doing things separately or, “You stay home, I’m gonna go to church, do this, that…” whatever, it was like, “No, you see one, you get both of us.” It really, we did, have done multiple projects at home.
Gwynette: Major ones.
Jeff: Major ones, and we’re, you’re absolutely loving time together, not looking for time to be apart.
Abby: In one chapter, you said that you didn’t realize this until later, but Jeff had a stash of money in the car in case he decided one day that he was just ready and he wasn’t gonna come back home.
Gwynette: He was ready so many times. It was, there’s nothing he could do. I mean, he was, I was taking 124 pills a day, so he made sure I got the meds I needed, but it was, and our kids suffered and struggled majorly in multiple areas, so as teenagers, there are struggles anyway as they’re learning who they are and how to deal with this and to have a mom, and I also had ehrlichiosis, which, which, my main emotion was anger, and it didn’t take much to set me off. There’s so much, even in the book that we talk about, that I don’t remember. They said it’s a combination of the brain swelling and the medications. There’s so much I don’t remember. But when we talk about it, and I talked to my kids, it didn’t take much to set me off. And now it’s…
Jeff: Yeah, it’s a whole different, whole different atmosphere, vibe, everything. God is, God is there. It’s not…
Gwynette: It was easier for him to just check out and that didn’t help me, but my issues weren’t helping him. It was just, just constant, and I, I always wanted to be cherished and I wasn’t being cherished, and I didn’t know if he really even loved me, and then afterwards I went to visit my parents in Texas, and one of my kids said, “Mom, Dad misses you.” He used to send me to see one of them for a break, and they’re like, “Mom, Dad misses you,” and I’m like, “Awww, he misses me.”
Jeff: It’s just a revolutionary change. I mean, it’s hard to even describe all the different aspects of our life that have changed revolving around also learning to listen for the Holy Spirit, because He’s working on other things all the time and you go…
Gwynette: Yeah, I think He’s, He’d been working, and just that we moved up to come to church here. We were living in the cities because of my medical bills. We lost everything and had to move in with my parents. That wasn’t a wonderful ordeal. And then he lost his job down there and we had to move to Rice Lake and then worked for a while there. Then he lost his job again and we came up to Hayward. And then…
Jeff: Things we couldn’t control.
Gwynette: We couldn’t see.
Jeff: Restructuring that I was the low guy on the totem pole. So I was like, “Well, when’s my last day?”
Gwynette: But we can see God’s hand bringing us to Wisconsin. Yeah, it took losing everything, ‘cause we would have stayed. And we came to Wisconsin and then God’s like, “Nope, I need to get you up to Spooner because Bruce Van Natta is gonna be speaking and I’m gonna heal you through him.” So we just look back and we see His hand and His hand and His hand through all of it. It is…
Jeff: He’s been orchestrating.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Jeff: We didn’t know a soul before we moved up here. Literally did not know anybody. And God put us at Cornerstone.
Gwynette: We tried other churches- he tried. And I came with him to Spooner, to Cornerstone, and it felt like home.
Abby: See, and one of the things I think people could misunderstand in here is, ‘cause I think it’s a catch up for a lot of people, is, they’ll hear the end of the story and so they’ll go, “Oh, so you got set free and that’s why you praise the Lord now, because you got the healing, you got the thing you prayed for,” and then in the midst of a hard circumstance they’ll go, “What if I don’t get the thing I’m praying for? Is God still good? Does He still love me? How do I have hope and faith?” So it could be easy for someone listening to go, like, “Ah, you worship Him now because you got the thing you were praying for.” What people wouldn’t know unless they were doing life with you then and walking with you guys, which I’ve gotten the privilege of being able to do, because there are a variety of other things in your life that you guys are still praying for, that you haven’t seen redemption in yet, but what’s incredible is that God was doing a work of grace throughout all of the job losses, medical visits, all of the years that you weren’t healed, He was doing other things in your hearts, and so like, we were, I don’t know if it was in the episode or before we started recording that you were talking about pride and anger and just different things and it’s like God going after your guys’ hearts and in chipping away at things that needed to be gone, because now I watch you two and I’ve experienced the benefit of it in my own life. of being massive prayer warriors for redemption, and again, I’ve been chief benefactor probably of that, of believing for people when they can’t and to see that in your guys’ life and in marriage together, of being a couple who worship the King and who believe for other people, and it’s so, it’s just so encouraging to me and again, if people haven’t done life with you they might not get that, but I just wanted to be said here of like, what God has done through your story hasn’t just been because you got the answer to every prayer you ever prayed.
Gwynette: There is still a whole list that we’re still- but the thing is, when He answered in one, we can trust Him to answer in others.
Jeff: You start realizing how in control He is, He’s going, and if your goal is that He is glorified and we love to worship Him, we love to praise Him, and when life is tough, that’s one of the best times to start praising. Start praising Him, worshipping, praying, and I can’t tell how many times we have different things have happened, different, all sorts of different things. Fortunately, we live out in the country and we can crank the music up and absolutely drown out Satan. Because our home’s a Kingdom home and we want nothing that isn’t in God’s kingdom to be in our home.
Abby: It’s just such an encouraging thing to me, and I just get to witness it on Sundays. Just the fact that you guys can look forward down to other situations in your life where you’re still praying for God to redeem the thing and it hasn’t happened yet.
Jeff: Exactly.
Abby: And the hope that you guys have and the faith that you guys have now, it’s an inspiration to me, the way that you’re able to have faith for things and even from your testimony and reading your, reading your book, it was just a reminder to me that it wasn’t always that way. That you guys weren’t always that way, and so it’s been a work of grace in your life that God has produced faith in that way. But it doesn’t mean your lives have all the things answered now.
Gwynette: No, we have a whole list of prayer requests that He hasn’t answered yet. But the ones that He has answered were blown away. He doesn’t just, He cares, He cares deeply, but we don’t see the fingers behind the scene. That He’s preparing hearts for first. And He has to do that, and He knows what each of these people we’re praying for needs, and we just have to, we can, we can trust Him, that His timing is always perfect, because I would love it if I go, “God, can you do this?” He’s like, “Got it.” But He sees a big picture and He knows how He’s preparing the heart. How He’s growing them, and when, when they’re ready, but we can trust Him to do it.
Jeff: We have to listen for His leading.
Gwynette: And learning to, like the picture in the Bible of the man who couldn’t walk. And he didn’t have faith, but his friends did, and they lowered him through the roof. So that has been a big thing for me, is, I need to keep lowering my friends and family through the roof.
Abby: I love that.
Gwynette: So it’s, and it’s not my faith that answers the prayer, but I have faith in the One who does. So if your faith isn’t enough, I’m gonna bolster your faith up and go, “But I believe for this.”
Abby: That, I’ve experienced that in my, just recently, it might’ve been like a couple weeks ago, you gave me a journal and you had a prayer written in it for me and a couple of bookmarks and different things, and it was you doing that and you guys as a unit have done that for me specifically over the last couple of years, walking through even I think when my marriage was just hard, you guys would circle around and be intentional on Sunday to come up and say, “Hey, how are you doing? How can we be praying for you?”
Gwynette: I remember coming to Redemption and knowing and seeing you and knowing it wasn’t a good day and just praying over you.
Jeff: And we’ve realized that, yeah, when God speaks to go and confront somebody, they’re not confronting the bad way, but going, “Is something right? Are you okay?”
Gwynette: Don’t just say, “I’m praying for you,” do it!
Jeff: Many times in our early years, we never had some of that. It was sort of go by rote, go by this and that. You do this, that’d be fine. Instead of going, “No, if the Holy Spirit is speaking,” and we’ve experienced, you know, other people at times where you’d have thought we’ve gotten at that point, but didn’t get it, you know. Growing up in certain circles, the Holy Spirit was stifled.
Gwynette: He’s uncomfortable. A lot of the time, the Holy Spirit moving is uncomfortable.
Jeff: He does things in ways that we’re not, we’re not really normally running that, right? I mean, He’s going, “Oh no no no, I’ve got this. You do this. I’m directing.” “It doesn’t make sense!” “No, it doesn’t make sense on paper or anything, but I’m the Holy Spirit, I’m God, I’m doing it.”
Abby: Well it takes faith. Even something as simple, and it might sound silly, but even something as simple as purchasing a journal for somebody, writing a note and prayer for them, “Hey, I’m hoping this for you. I’ve noticed this. I’m praying this for you, with you,” and giving it to them. Like I know that you did that with complete confidence and like, I know it wasn’t hard for you because God has built faith in you to do that. But when you first try to do something like that it can feel miserably awkward.
Gwynette: And hearing the Holy Spirit’s voice, because I limited the Holy Spirit, I mean, we learned about God and Jesus, but the Holy Spirit was kind of, we didn’t really learn about that, and Jesus wasn’t the center of everything but that’s where our hope is ‘cause if Jesus hadn’t come we have no hope for the future. And learning to hear the Holy Spirit’s voice because sometimes you’re like, I was told growing up it was my imagination. So then you’re like, but what if I go up and I say, “I’m praying over this for you,” and it doesn’t mean anything to them, well, maybe it doesn’t, but I followed the Holy Spirit’s prompting. And the more you do that, the more you hear His voice clearly. And it’s not always right away. There’s so many things we’ve like, “Well, you know, what about this?” and He’s like, “Just keep trusting I’m working.”
Abby: Yeah, yeah. You guys in your book said, “We really needed some of the calm alongside of us, but that didn’t happen.”
Gwynette: Yeah.
Jeff: We’ve had that many times. I was working full-time Christian ministry and I looked back and I go, I missed the Holy Spirit’s leading when some salary things changed. I was sinning by working, not just the ministry, but I had to work two other jobs so we could exist, so we could do the ministry. I was sinning by not taking care of my family, and it was all for a righteous purpose.
Abby: So you thought.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Jeff: So I thought, right. But I was really, literally, I was going against God’s word and what He was teaching and saying. And I, we needed mentors to come alongside and go, “Jeff, Gwynette, you’re not where you should be.”
Gwynette: To come and tell him, “It’s okay to quit here at the ministry and get a job so you can support your family, and be involved in a ministry, but not have that your full-time.”
Abby: At the sacrifice of your family.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Jeff: I was… and I believe I missed the Holy Spirit.
Gwynette: But what if somebody had come alongside him and said, “And I’m gonna be here with you and I’m gonna walk through this, so let’s meet next week, and I, why don’t you apply for some jobs, I’ll look at your resume, and, you know, let’s just get together for lunch and let’s pray about things.” There wasn’t that. Sometimes you have to say uncomfortable things.
Jeff: But if the Holy Spirit’s directing, then that’s the Holy Spirit directing, and they need to hear that. Or, I need to hear that. It goes both ways.
Abby: Well one of the things I’m awkwardly passionate about is this concept of people walking with you and coming alongside of you. Because I think in your guys’ case, like, in your real testimony, the process to the miracle was a process. It was a process of God doing sanctification. And so I know you guys fully believe in miracles. You’re a living walking proof miracle.
Jeff: Oh at this point, yeah, oh yeah.
Abby: So like I know you believe that God can instantaneously set you free because that’s what He did. He instantaneously, in a moment, but it was 25 years before that-
Gwynette: Yeah.
Abby: -the process and actually the process looked like it just went from bad to worse to even, like, worse.
Jeff: Exactly.
Abby: In a process. and having people to be able to come alongside of you and link arms with you and go after some of that stuff-
Gwynette: Yeah.
Abby: -in grace and in love, which, Jeff, in your case, you’re saying, like, I needed a Godly man to come alongside of me and say, “Hey, Jeff, I know you think you’re serving the Lord here, but your wife and your kids are suffering and they’re your first job.”
Gwynette: Yeah.
Jeff: And hold you accountable and really stick with it.
Abby: Right.
Jeff: And we had some friends that were very dear to us that were there for some very tough times, but that was usually when we were physically, things were falling and the wheels were coming off and it was very bad.
Gwynette: I got into what I call the victim mentality. Here it goes again, happening to me, feeling sorry for myself. Yeah, here we go again, it was another this, another that, another surgery, another diagnosis, and just got into that. And if I would have had somebody come alongside me and help me to live knowing I could trust Him. Even simple things like sitting and talking to me or just sitting there, you don’t have to say anything. Why don’t they come make a meal for you? I know Jeff’s at work and the kids come home and there’s nothing made. Just these simple things, and they come alongside and go, “I’m noticing you’re in a kind of… I feel bad for you because of everything you’re going through, but kind of feeling sorry for yourself…” and that’s a hard conversation to have. But how many times do we go, “Here we go again,” and yeah, to have somebody that would have walked me through that, was it going to stop what was going on, happening? No, but if they could have guided me to Christ, and He cares, He loves you, He counts your tears, but let’s not feel sorry for ourselves.
Abby: Well, I think this was a previous episode we did, but we were talking about the importance, I think it was, because I think it was Jeremey King who was talking about the importance of love and truth and like grace and truth going together. If you used grace and truth. And so you need to be grace-filled in your interactions with people and obviously you were going through major things, so to people to extend grace to that and to be able to hold space for that, but then also to provide enough truth and love that it brings transformation.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Abby: And people getting set free. And that line in your book just really hit me and maybe just because it’s something that I’ve been super passionate about, but we, I need, and we need, people need, humans need, those who can walk with us in that journey of sanctification and that journey of something getting better. Because more often than not, I don’t think it is an instantaneous miracle. And it can be. But even after the miracle, there was training required.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Jeff: Relearning.
Abby: Yeah.
Jeff: Re-listening… it’s easy to be negative. Negativity is super easy to do, but it’s learning to be positive in Jesus. And just keep that going, because knowing that He is so much, He’s already conquered everything.
Gwynette: And it’s Satan that goes, “Oh look, something more is happening to you.” He wants to point out the negative, because if we feel sorry for ourselves and we take our eyes off of Christ, he’s won and he hasn’t won, we know Christ has won, but we’ve taken our eyes off too many times instead of going, “This is really hard.” We’ve walked through some really hard stuff just in the last couple years. That’s one reason, if I’m awake, praise and worship music is on, because I can take my- if I don’t, I found for myself, I take my eyes off of Christ and I put them on thing that’s going wrong, the situation that’s not good, and we have found, we had something a couple years ago really bad, and we went home and we just sat together and we cranked praise and worship music. So just learned, keep your focus on Him. Too many times, as soon as we start to take our focus off.
Jeff: A pastor that we’ve, we love and respect has said, “You become what you behold.” And that is such a powerful statement, because if we’re watching Hollywood, we’re watching some YouTuber TikTok-y thing that, but that’s what we’re putting everything into, we’re becoming what we behold. But when we’re looking at Jesus and going, “I want to become as much like Him as I possibly can,” we become what we behold.
Gwynette: We don’t want people to look at our story and go, “Oh, look what they did,” because there’s no hope in that, because then we start comparing ourselves to each other. We want people to see what God did, what He’s still doing, that He never steps back and just takes His hands off and go, “Well, you’re all on your own.” You have to keep trusting. He keeps moving.
Jeff: And we’re humans, we’re working every day on different aspects of our relationship with each other, with God, and going, “Whoa, that was a better day. That was… wow.” And then being, learning to be honest. We’ve been honest with your dad who’s our pastor many times, going, “Okay, it was a rough week. It was. And there’s things I’ve been having to work on and go, ‘Okay, I can do so well this week.’”
Abby: One of the things that you guys have done, I think now, is pour into other people the way that you would have wanted to be poured into.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Abby: And I’ve probably never told you this so this will be an awkward confession, but when you guys first started kind of doing that with me, I think I was married at the time, and you guys would, you gathered, I don’t know even exactly how it was going, maybe I had shared it, I don’t know, that life wasn’t going fantastic and marriage was super hard. And when you guys would start to ask me on Sundays or on Wednesdays at Bible Study or something and come along, “Okay, hi,” you know, “How’s it going? Oh, you’re alone,” or, and ask me about it. I remember being so prickly and, and so just irritated of like, “Can I just like put my head down,” like, “Life already sucks, I don’t need to have to tell somebody every time I see them, ‘Yep, it still sucks,’ like, ‘Thanks for checking in, everything’s still horrible,’ I’m like, ‘Nothing is better.’” And so I remember just kind of- I wasn’t mad at you guys particularly, it was just this idea of like, “Nothing’s better, what do you want me to do about it? What do you want me to do about it?” What is beautiful is that you guys continued to be persistent through what was actually just my version of trying to protect myself. My, my initial reaction was like, “I’m just gonna fight people around me because I’m dying inside. I’m dying inside.” And so it came across like a self-protection thing.
Gwynette: We put up a wall because we can’t handle any more and what if they, they say they’re interested and they don’t and then I get hurt again, and I can’t handle any more hurt. I think that’s normal.
Abby: Yes. Yes.
Jeff: Unfortunately, in our, in our, all of our circles, even outside of the church and Christianity, people, they’d like all the juicy stuff, but they don’t want to get in where this is gonna get really ugly.
Abby: Yes.
Jeff: We’re digging into the drain and into the sewer here and we have to help pull them out, and going, “Yeah, it’s gross. It’s ugly, but I’m here for you.” But you’re gonna tell me, “Okay, so that happens, that’s whatever it is,” but God’s bigger than that.
Abby: And people can say that supper flippant and they can say, “Hey, I’m praying for you, let me know if you need anything,” they can say that because it’s the thing to say-
Jeff: It’s cliché.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Abby: -but then it doesn’t come with backed-up action, and so yeah, what I, like, that was my protection mechanism was like, “Don’t, don’t even ask if you don’t care. Don’t, don’t make me spill my messy guts that are already embarrassing. That already, that already keep me from not even wanting to show up in this building. Don’t ask about them and then make me go through like, telling you that to not do anything about it. Like, I’m dying, don’t ask if you don’t actually want to help,” and I didn’t say any of that, but that was the emotions going on, and I would put on the, you know, “I’m fine,” or “It’s fine,” or “Thanks,” or, and brush stuff off. Your guys’ persistence though, to continue to show up- and maybe sometimes I was hurtful, I don’t know, because we’ve never actually had this conversation- but your persistence to continue to show grace to me, to continue to ask how things were going, and as, and it wasn’t even like you guys, it wasn’t like that was something radical. If you just saw me at Wednesday night, or you saw me at church, you would fairly consistently and regularly make sure you asked how I was, say you were praying for me, and show care and love, and that was pretty much it. And you continue to do that, and when life circumstance changed when I started walking through divorce, when I had to move back with my parents, you guys continued to do the same thing, and I’m not sure when along the way my heart started to change to actually be able to receive it from you guys as, “Man, they’ve actually not stopped,” and it took the consistency of you guys continuing to reach out, continuing to just ask how I was doing, to love on me, say, “Hey, we love you. We’re glad you’re here. Let us know if you need something. We’re praying for you.” The consistency of being for me, eventually it became a, it softened my heart, actually, and it became a joy to be able to go, “Man, I would love to share what’s going on, and actually, I’d love to say, ‘Hey, could you pray for this, too? Would you partner with me in this, too?’” And you guys still do that for me.
Gwynette: God created us to be family. He made that. We need family. I mean, how many times in the Bible does it talk about being a family and the family of God? And family comes beside family. We divide the sorrow, we double the joy. So we have to walk beside each other in the good and the bad times, and if we give up, we’re really letting God down because we are His hands and feet. And sometimes me learning the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit will say, “Say this,” but He also says, “Don’t say that,” There’s many times that God will say, “Well, say this,” and He’ll go, “Oh, God, that’s kind of harsh,” and the Holy Spirit will go, “No, say it that way.” “Well, you know, if I said it this, way, they might-” “No, say it this way.” And you say it and then you’re like, “I hope I didn’t hurt them,” and God’s like, speaking to them through that. And He knew how they needed it. So learning to trust what He’s telling me to say and not to say, that’s been a process. And it’s also me going, “I don’t want them to be mad at me,” you know, “I want them to like me,” and learning to take my focus off of me and putting it on the Holy Spirit, because He uses us, and if we don’t, oh, He’ll find somebody else to do it. I mean, it’s not like with Esther, it wasn’t, “Well, if you don’t do it, everybody’s dead,” it was, “Well, I will find someone else if you don’t, but I will bless you through this,” and He does.
Abby: I just love your guys’ story and your testimony that you walked so many years alone- and I’m not saying you never had people who prayed for you and prayed for me, but a lot of years of feeling the heartache, of feeling like you actually were battling your entire lives falling apart, your marriage, your kids, your health, your home, finances, everything you could lose or be broken felt like it was. And so to know the depth of that kind of sorrow and pain and baggage for years and feel you walked it alone. Now I get to witness you guys do the exact opposite, which is say, “We know what it feels like to walk alone through the muddiest of circumstances. We will take up the posture of saying, ‘We won’t let people around us walk alone,’” and it is such a challenge and encouragement to me, and hope-filled of because you know what it feels like. Because you know what the lonely road feels like. If you, if you so be it if you can help it, you will not let someone that you witness walk that.
Jeff: Exactly. And we had friends used to call us jokingly, “Oh, you’re Job and Mrs. Job,” because it was like, continue the wheels were falling off, but look what happened to Job.
Gwynette: And Job knew God, but through what he went through, he truly came into a deeper relationship with God. That’s what happened with us. Did we know God? Yeah, I don’t doubt my salvation whatsoever, but there are times we just now go, not, not just the healing, but us, I used to look for my value to come from other people and going, “I never measured up.” And now I can go, “I am a daughter of the King. That’s where I get my value.” I was valuable enough to Him for Him to die on the cross. I don’t have to measure up. I don’t have to do all this. I want to because He’s my everything. I can’t imagine walking through life, I mean, I used to think Jesus would say to His disciples, “I’m going and somebody better is going to come,” going, “How can it be better than Jesus right next to you?” but when you have the Holy Spirit living inside of you, you can’t imagine not having that. That alone would be hell. Going from hearing His voice and Him speaking to you and being able to have that trust to that gone, yeah, I couldn’t do that.
Abby: So knowing what you guys know now, and you’ll hopefully have many more years of learning lessons and looking more like Christ, if you could go back and tell your younger selves one thing, what would it be?
Jeff: That was a good question. That has been running through my brain, but I would have to say, “Learn to love and listen to the Holy Spirit,” and to listen to Jesus and go only towards that, and, and that would probably be one of the biggest things I would tell my young, my younger self.
Gwynette: Mine would probably be what we just talked about. “Don’t look at everybody else for your worth.” Because it didn’t matter what I did, I never felt worthy. In fact, I was told I wasn’t good enough so many times. But if I could tell my younger self, “Your value is through Christ. Look to that.” How many things would I have not gotten myself into or thought processes that weren’t healthy because I wasn’t looking in the right direction. That would have been life changing.
Abby: So many of those lessons are, aren’t they? You don’t always love the circumstances in which we go through for the Lord to reveal them to us. But at least in my experience, I can look at things and go, “God, I wouldn’t rewrite it any other way,” not because it wasn’t painful, because it was, and sometimes I still have to deal with those scars, but because I love what you were doing in me.
Gwynette: If somebody had told me at the beginning of my story, when I started getting sick, “It’s going to be 25 years, and this is what’s going to happen and how horrible it is, and you’ll know God really well by the end,” I probably would have gone, “No.” But I look back, and the way I know Him? Twenty-five years is nothing for it. Yeah, I still wouldn’t want to go through it again, but-
Abby: Isn’t it beautiful grace sometimes when we just don’t know?
Jeff: Oh, wow.
Gwynette: Yeah, yes.
Abby: ‘Cause there’s certain chapters where you’d go, “I wouldn’t have wanted to read that one.”
Jeff: And in the book we don’t even, that’s just a small smidgen of some of the stuff.
Gwynette: I’d be writing, “You got to go, no, don’t put that in, but, but, no.” And then he’d say, “Put this,” and I’d go, “But, God, that’s really ugly.” He’s like, “No, put it in.”
Jeff: But it’s all Jesus and God who totally did the changing. It isn’t our power. It wasn’t something that we magically did. “We followed this formula and we did this.”
Gwynette: Our magic faith.
Jeff: You know, we had some oil on us and then we were all better.
Gwynette: It was truthfully, like I say, lowering friends down through the roof. Bruce Van Natta had the faith when he prayed for me. I didn’t. I mean, I knew God said, “I’ll heal you,” but I didn’t think He was going to… I mean, I had no clue.
Abby: Well, you had a little bit of faith. You thought maybe He could heal the headache.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Abby: And when He healed the headache, you thought, “Well, maybe He could heal this. Maybe if You could do that little thing, You could do this.”
Jeff: His power is greater than our imagination can ever be.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Jeff: We love it. That’s why we love to praise and worship, you know, and for somebody who grew up not raising their hands, I’ve come a long way.
Abby: So unlike most people, you do have a book that will outlive you and you will be remembered by, but for those who don’t, or maybe this is how you want to be remembered, the other question we always ask our guests is, “What is one thing you want to be remembered for?”
Gwynette: I don’t want them to remember me. I want them to remember my God and how they saw Him work through me. So I just want to be His hands and feet. “I saw God and I got to know Jesus. He spoke through her,” or “He did this,” but I don’t want the focus on me. I’m just kind of, you know, there’s so many people he uses, but I want, “Man, I knew Gwynette’s God. I got to know Him.”
Jeff: I don’t want to be remembered. I’ve got a warped sense of humor, but I don’t want to be remembered for that, but I want to be remembered that somebody that learned to listen to Jesus, and learned to be, accept His redemption of ugly things and turn them into something that brings total glory to Him. Because it isn’t about me. It isn’t about Gwynette or Abby or anybody. It’s about, just continually about Him, and that’s, I don’t care, I just want them. That’s what I would rather my legacy be. That they see somebody who loved God and did everything they can to learn to follow and chase after Him.
Abby: I think you guys have been doing it. I’ve experienced the benefit in my own life, so I guess I just get to speak to that more than maybe some people could, or hopefully the people listening can understand it, but I just know so much your guys’ heart, got to witness a lot of these last couple of years, specifically since when you got healed, just watching what the Lord has done and how you guys have been a springboard for His testimony and glory, but the better factor of that will leave multiple times, so thank you.
Jeff: it’s God, it’s God.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Jeff: And people that don’t know Him, they’re missing out, and when they think they know Him, they need to know Him better, because the well is so deep. It is so deep.
Gwynette: Yeah.
Abby: Well thank you guys for being here today, for taking time, for sharing your story, um, I super value it and I think it’s gonna bless a lot of people.
Gwynette: I hope so.
Jeff: We’ll be praying over it.
Abby: Thank you guys for being here, I hope the story did bless you and encourage you. You guys want to read more and hear more, you can get Gwynette’s book, Grace Found Me: Miracles Still Happen, but honestly, truly, hopefully if you got anything out of this story, it is that miracles still do happen and they’re offered for you as well in your story, in your circumstances, in your life. So thank you so much, we will see you next time!
