| and she wept |
God redeems all things
“have I not told you that I am faithful?”
what would you do if you heard God speak those words clearly to you—not once, but on two separate occasions?
the seed planted
the story begins with a little (seemingly unrelated but necessary) background on when i first heard God speak those words to me. october 24, 2024, sometime just before dusk. i was driving to the handel’s homemade ice cream parking lot in twinsburg, ohio.
three days earlier, on october 21st, i had taken my best buddy, samson, there for a birthday sundae. we sat in the grass by a tree at the edge of the parking lot while he enjoyed his special treat to celebrate eight years.
what transpired over that three‑day period looked, at the time, like one of life’s simple misfortunes. in the days after samson’s birthday, i noticed i no longer had my oura ring gen 3 on my finger. i didn’t connect the dots back to my buddy’s ice cream celebration. instead, i spent countless hours searching bed sheets, couch cushions, car mats, pockets, washing machines, and every crevice around my home office where the oura charger sits.
it wasn’t until the evening of october 24th, after retracing my steps for days, that it dawned on me: one of the few places i’d been that week was handel’s. and that’s when another detail clicked into place. a few weeks prior, oura announced their gen 4 ring on october 3rd and released an iOS app update on october 15 that enabled a new “find my ring” feature. and wouldn’t you know it—when i tried that new feature for the first time, the last known location showed my ring in the grassy mound at the edge of handel’s parking lot, where my ice cream slobber‑covered hand from “droolius maximus” had made it easy for a ring to slip off unnoticed.
i immediately hopped in the SUV and drove to handel’s. as i pulled into the parking lot i was praying, asking God to help guide me to find my ring. in that moment, i heard his voice so clearly:
“have I not told you that I am faithful?”
it was not the kind of inner voice that rattles on incessantly throughout the day—it was simultaneously the most peaceful and authoritative tone, speaking directly into my being.
i parked, walked to the grass next to the tree where samson had sat, and immediately saw my dark gray ring buried among the blades of grass and fall leaves.
driving away, i was full of relief and gratitude. sure, not having to replace a few hundred dollars’ worth of biohacking tech was a huge blessing. but i couldn’t help but wonder why God offered such a profound and unequivocal reassurance over something that seemed so small and inconsequential—a plastic ring with a few electronic sensors.
as i drove home, that was a conversation i had with God. beyond the words themselves, what did He want me to ‘hear’?
let’s talk about timing. i have owned two oura gen 2 and one oura gen 3 rings since april 2018. and not a single one of those 2,378 days before mid-october of 2024 did the oura app have a location-finding feature. yet a week before the great drool incident, oura pushed an update that added a “find my ring” capability—suddenly the app could show the ring’s last known spot.
you may call it coincidence. i now call it divine timing—the sowing of a seed that i didn’t yet know was being planted. and if you read the rest of this story, you will see that God was only just beginning to help me find what i once thought was lost…
at the time i felt comforted and reassured—if God was faithful in the small things, He most assuredly was faithful in the big things.
i thought the lesson was complete.
and man, did i ever underestimate God…
held in his hands
fast forward to nine months later on july 11, 2025. i stood on a stage in a conference room at the global hotel in the kirkos district of downtown addis ababa, ethiopia, in front of sixty widows who had recently entered a small business empowerment program with life center ethiopia.
while on this mission trip, i had the privilege of sharing my mother’s story marked by loss, hardship, and unwavering trust in God. hearing my own words about her living legacy translated into the amharic heart language of mothers and sisters—who had also endured poverty, vulnerability, and lives shaped by unthinkable hardship—was not only personal, it was a profound privilege.
it was one of those moments in life that you could never plan and will never forget. and watching my mama live out her faith—despite so many seasons of loss and struggle—helped form the heart behind my calling to mission work and ultimately led me to that exact room.
i encourage you to read her entire story i shared that morning: held in his hands: a mama’s story of loss, struggle, and God’s faithfulness.
i still believe her story needs to be shared on repeat as a reminder that even in the darkest seasons, God’s grace is near.
the cliff notes version: i walked the room of beautifully broken women through the seasons of pain, grief, and burdens, of a woman in the US.
and near the end of the story, i revealed that woman was my own mama:
“…this woman i’ve spoken about is not just some distant woman i know by chance meeting. mary is my mother!
this isn’t just a testimony about her hardship, it is also my lived experience as her son. yes, i am the one who she raised through my father’s illness, drove hours to care for through vision and hearing loss. the one who she prayed for while she lay on the floor next to me through my deepest suffering.
i got to grow up under the covering of my mother’s faith and God’s provision through her prayers. i stand here today as witness to the impact of faith across generations. i am living proof that strong mamas, strong faith, and strong community leave a legacy.”
when i shared this story in ethiopia, the room was quietly attentive—leaning in, connecting, maybe seeing pieces of themselves in it. and when i revealed the mama in the story was my own, i wish you could have heard the collective gasp—the surprise, the sacred pause. not because the story changed, but because it suddenly became personal. and somehow, that made it theirs too.]
prophecy playing out in real life
there was something so special about standing behind that podium and connecting with the smiles and tears across those beautiful faces. that image is forever imprinted on my heart. i think these widows—despite the uniqueness of their own pain and loss—saw themselves in my mama’s story.
after speaking, i sat down full of emotion, yet clear in the truth i had just shared. i was seeing isaiah’s prophecy of Jesus making ‘beauty from ashes’ play out in full color in a room of women who had also lived lives of great suffering:
1The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
3 to grant to those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;
that they may be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.
before the next speaker from our team shared her story with the widows, i snuck out for a quick bio break. and of all places, at the urinal (yep!), i heard God speak those exact words from nine months ago:
“have I not told you that I am faithful?”
the strangest of places to hear God speak: a hotel bathroom. but the profound and unequivocal reassurance of His voice was no stranger in that moment—it was the same as i had heard driving into an ohio ice cream shop parking lot 7,310 miles away. yet this time, it was not about something small and inconsequential—it was about something beyond words, across generations and continents, and profoundly personal.
God reminded me in that moment that He is faithful in the big things. and that seed i didn’t even know He planted had steadily and silently grown into a ‘beautiful oak of righteousness’ whose branches carried my mom’s story, our families’ story—my story—of brokenheartedness and mourning—to glorify Him.
God planted something in me in october that i didn’t understand until july. i wonder how often God is doing the same thing in the background while i’m too distracted to notice. how often do we step over the small, inconvenient moments of daily life without realizing they might be part of something He’s sowing? maybe we miss the planting, the growing, or the harvest—or all of it? this time, God didn’t leave it for me to discern—it was laid out in full Glory.
what a blessing to witness the beauty of what God did in that hotel in ethiopia—for me and those widows. how He echoed the promises of isaiah to remain faithful across generations, comfort the brokenhearted, and free us from the captivity of the pain from our past.
maybe that’s exactly how the prophets intended this scripture to work? that we would get to see God’s truth made visible in real lives. and i got a front row seat to watch God do what He promised!
amen.
but God wasn’t done speaking to me yet that day…
and she wept
after opening the session with my mama’s story, two other amazing women on our mission team shared their own deeply personal journeys of hardship and grief—brave stories of trauma, pain, and the emotional burden of losing someone close to them.
when aime (co-trip leader and my friend) closed the morning session with interactive questions, the connection the widows found in all three stories reminded us that pain is not confined to borders, race, language, or circumstance.
aime asked the widows, “can any of you relate to their stories? can any of you relate to matt’s mom’s story?” hands went up all around the room…
she asked the women if they would be willing to share a struggle they were enduring. through a translator, the third widow who stood explained that she felt connected to my mom’s story. holding back tears, she courageously shared that her husband was an alcoholic, had a stroke, she had HIV/AIDS, and had struggled with mental illness. and in that moment, she revealed she wanted to share 1 kilogram of spices to take back to my mother.
here’s a woman in one of the poorest countries in the world who had lost so much, feeling so connected to another woman whom she’d never met. and yet, she was willing to give of her treasures so that the other woman (my mom) would know she was seen.
only God can do that…
as she sat down and aime continued to speak life into these women, this widow broke down.
she began to shake. and she wept…
in that moment, i couldn’t stay seated—it felt like the Holy Spirit was pulling me toward her pain. i got up, walked a few rows over, kneeled next to her, and put my arms around her. she was shaking and crying (me too). and yet, she was focused on comforting me—she kissed my head twice and wiped my tears with her scarf.
suffering is not wasted.
our grief does something in us that comfort never could.
and what an honor to experience God’s glory revealed so purely in that shared moment. it defies any words.
“In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” —1 Peter 1:6-7 (NIV)
stories connected across language, geography, and generations—only God can do that.
he redeems all things
after the widow wept in my arms and we began to conclude that moving morning session, i sat back down in my chair completely undone.
i had come to ethiopia thinking i was bringing a story of God’s faithfulness to these women. but in that moment, i began to realize God was also bringing their stories to me.
we had a short break before a catered buffet lunch of local cuisine. and of all places—again—i found myself standing at a urinal in an ethiopian hotel bathroom when God spoke to me a second time in that unmistakable peaceful and authoritative tone:
“you think this was by accident? this was always the plan.”
for the first time, God’s voice carried a vision with it. i won’t be able to fully articulate what i saw: women in a room—somehow outside space and time—working a large loom, weaving fabric together.
thread by thread, each strand representing a story of loss, resilience, and redemption. and somehow, my mama’s story… and my story… were woven into theirs.
God wasn’t just comforting those widows. He wasn’t just reminding me of His faithfulness.
He was redeeming my story. my mama’s story. our family’s story.
and somehow, through His mercy, using it to comfort women 7,000+ miles away.
this is the promise of Joel 2:25 (ESV):
“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten…”
maybe for the first1 time i not only felt—but heard and saw—the peace and hope of something divinely redeemed from a life lived full of loss.
the seed planted in october had grown into something i never could have imagined. and God made sure i didn’t miss it. decades of grief and loss and pain and isolation somehow found their way into a room across the globe, being used for God’s glory.
amen.
what you have lost will be found. suffering is not wasted. Jesus never leaves things broken.
God redeems all things.
author’s note
i didn’t write this story because it’s tidy or inspiring. i wrote it because it’s true. for most of my life, i carried my grief and loss quietly, convinced it was mine alone to hold. but God has a way of taking the parts of our story we’d rather hide and using them to heal people and places we didn’t know were connected.
what happened in ethiopia wasn’t a moment i created or curated. it was something God revealed. something He had been weaving long before i ever stepped on a plane. i’m still learning how to tell it without feeling exposed, but i’m also learning that silence can keep us from seeing the redemption right in front of us.
i think maybe satan wants us to keep our pain private, to keep us alone. but these stories matter—they connect us and show us how God meets us in the places we’d rather disappear. i don’t know why i’ve hesitated to share the words and vision God placed on me that day. but it’s not meant for silence. this story is meant to be shared.
if anything in my words meets you in your own loss or reminds you that God hasn’t forgotten your years that felt wasted, then i’m grateful. that’s the whole point. not to make a story out of suffering. but to bear witness to the God who redeems all things—even the parts of our lives we thought were too lost, too wasted, too broken, too painful, or too far gone.
so this is my small attempt to name both the details and the greatness of what He did. and to say out loud what i spent years keeping quiet and holding in uncertainty because i didn’t yet understand (or maybe didn’t yet believe)—nothing is wasted.
God redeems all things.
after writing this reflection, i remembered that this was actually the second time God spoke hope into me in a season of loss. there were no visions in that encounter, but i can’t wait to share how God affirmed His truth that day!