Tag: Faith Journey

 It is early in the morning, five AM, at the Bock household, and I am currently the only one up upstairs recording, which is good for no child noise, but the cats are a little bit on the prowl. So we’re gonna see how this goes. Last week, I went through part one of my testimony. So if you didn’t get a chance to listen to that about clinging on to God’s promises during a very difficult time and season in my life, encourage you to go back and listen to that one because everything that I went through in part one of my testimony, I recognize now how God used that to build my faith and used that to build my trust in Him Welcome OCD warriors to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode Even though I was a Christian for a long time before this point that I’m gonna share today, I don’t think I really trusted God very well. I was definitely more on the control freak side, which I know a lot of you can relate to.

It’s like I kinda want things my way, and I think that even bled over into my spiritual life because it’s like, “Hey, God, I have this good idea, and I would like this, and it’s not a bad thing.” I talked about that last week. “Can you just fulfill this prayer request, please?” What I’ve had to learn through spiritual maturity over the years is that God knows way better what I need than I actually do at the time, and ultimately, He’s weaving a story that I can’t see.

I’m in the middle of the story. God knows the beginning, the middle, and the end, and I only know the beginning and the middle of where I am right now. I don’t know how things are going to play out. As you know from any good story, whether it’s a TV show, a movie, or a book that you’ve read, things can get really dicey in the middle.

Because it’s a story, you’re like, “Okay, I’m expecting there to be some happy ending.” Now, they may or may not write the happy ending in there for you. Sometimes your favorite character dies, and that really stinks, and you get annoyed that they got booted off the show. But the point is that we, in our own lives, somehow we don’t hope for that positive ending.

We’re like, “Oh, no, it’s forever gonna be terrible. I’m gonna be miserable.” I would just like to remind you that God is the author of all good things and stories, and He’s the one that gave us creative abilities to even create those types of stories and movies and TV. God is the ultimate author, and if you’re in the middle of your story, just know God’s got a plan here.

I left off last week with marrying my husband, Steve. That was just a beautiful story. We had a COVID love story. We got together and started dating, like, right before the COVID-19 pandemic and just kind of made a decision that we were gonna continue dating through that and decided that that’s what we wanted to do.

If you’re super interested in our love story, you can go back and listen to episode 10 where I talk about anxiety through the dating process. We also have episodes on our first and second year of marriage that might be interesting to you as well. We can link all of that in the show notes. I try to drag Steve on around our anniversary every year, and we do some type of, like, marriage episode together.

Even if you’ve been around and you’ve heard some of those episodes- There’s still gonna be new information in this episode because of the way that I’m laying out the story, and when you’re going through some things, there are specific edits that you make and maybe don’t wanna share right away. Now that we’ve had some distance, it’s a little easier to share the coherent narrative.

Steve and I get married in October of 2020, and we make a decision that we’re not gonna start trying for children right away. We don’t quite want the honeymoon baby, so we’re gonna wait a few months. In June of ’21, he goes to the eye doctor. It’s supposed to be just kind of a routine appointment for him to get an update on glasses prescription The doctor tells him that she wants to see him back because she’s concerned about him running his finger along the wall.

At this point, we know that Steve has some issues with colorblindness and that he doesn’t have great peripheral vision, and that there are some issues with depth perception. The interesting thing about all of this is that my mother said, “This doesn’t quite make sense. Do you have some type of syndrome?”

And my mother was coming from a place of working at an eye clinic for years, like 30 years by the time she retired. Because of the specificity of the types of patients that she saw, I’m not sure that she had seen a case quite like Steve’s before. So Steve always says, “Your mother knew at first. She knew there was something more going on.”

This one eye appointment leads to a cascade of specialist visits over the next year. But we find out approximately a month later, “Hey, I’m pregnant. Here we go.” So I’m newly married, pregnant, and my husband is taking off work to get MRIs on his brain, on his eyes, to go through six hours of testing at Vanderbilt Neuro-Ophthalmology.

For the most part, we’ve had really good providers through Vanderbilt, except for the very first one at Neuro-Ophthalmology. It was an absolutely awful experience, and when you’re in a specialty field, you don’t exactly have a whole lot of options. I do really feel like they dropped the ball as well because the eye symptoms that my husband has, some of them are very classic to his disease.

After the six hours of testing, all they could really tell us was that he had lost vision and that he had optic atrophy on his right eye. I had to essentially Google all the words I didn’t know in the medical record after the fact to really get any information out of this doctor about what he knew that was going on.

Steve is working at this time, but he’s having a lot of troubles. He is dealing with double vision, where he’s trying to read insurance cards at a medical office, and he’s having a hard time. He’s taking a nap every day at lunch. He’s coming home with massive migraines from staring at a screen all day, and I’m just trying to survive pregnancy, which wasn’t that great in my experience After dealing with the morning sickness that really is an all-day sickness that nobody tells you is all-day sickness, and then dealing with back pain after that, I woke up in the middle of the night with my hands and my feet itching really badly, which is a strange symptom.

The only reason I knew to bring that up to my OB was due to a Facebook group I was on for pregnant women over 35. Someone else had the same symptoms, and people were telling them, “You have to tell your OB. That’s a symptom of ICP,” which is intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. We’ll call it cholestasis for short.

Basically, it’s a liver condition that has to be monitored pretty closely because it can cause miscarriage or stillbirth. While Steve and I are elated about having our first child, there’s also an enormous amount of stress at this time. One thing I almost forgot to mention is that we ended up having to leave our church in November before Faith was born, so November of ’21, we end up leaving our church that we had been at because they chose to move couple cities away from where we were at.

We really felt strongly that this wasn’t a good move for us, even if the church felt like it was a good move for them to get a more permanent space. There were a whole lot of pieces that we didn’t share at the time that went into that. However, what I will say is that we lost our small group, our support system, at a really critical time as we were going through these health struggles and as I’m going through these pregnancy struggles.

I really don’t have the level of support that I need. One thing that I really wanted from God, and I was praying strongly about, was wanting to go into labor naturally. I didn’t want to have to be induced. I wanted to have a natural labor. That was a big desire of mine, and I was working with a doula on all the strategies as far as that goes.

I did an episode way back when on my labor, if you wanna go listen to that story. However, that was a very critical point of surrender in terms of learning to trust God with this uncertainty. It was either 35 or 36 weeks that I was diagnosed with preeclampsia on top of the cholestasis. My OB said, “You’ve got these two high-risk pregnancy conditions.”

I’m dealing with high blood pressure, where they had to send me over to the hospital for one of the visits, and then they ended up sending me home. But she said, “You know, I really recommend that we go ahead and induce you because I don’t want anything to happen to you or the baby.” I left that appointment.

I went straight over to a prayer chapel of a church that we had been attending for a little while. We didn’t end up staying there or landing, but it was a bit of a respite while we were trying to figure things out. I got in the prayer chapel and just lost it. I mean, I was crying at God. I was mad at God.

I was like, “This was one thing I wanted, Lord. I really wanted to go into labor naturally. I did not want to have to be induced.” It makes it harder to have a natural labor due to the medications they use. I was so mad at God. Like, “Why can’t you just give me this one thing? Our whole world is a mess right now.

There’s so much going on. Can you just allow my daughter to come into the world on her own terms and not have to be evicted?” Steve and I are faced with this huge decision together of do we go ahead and have the induction for the safety of our child and myself, or do we hold off? What do we do there?

Because certainly, even though the doctors were making recommendations, it was still our choice. I was praying through that process. I’m mad at God, and I’m crying, and I’m just so naughty, and it’s a mess. I’m the only one in there because it’s the middle of the day, and everybody else is working. At some point, I just surrender and say, “Okay, that’s it.

Your will be done.” I don’t know what’s gonna happen here. I really just want to make sure that my baby lives and that everything is okay, and I’m choosing to trust you that if you’ve brought us this far, that we’re gonna come out with things going okay. Now, up to this point, she had always done fine as far as, like, the ultrasounds and things like that.

I wasn’t super worried, but I was a little bit worried taking her out at 37 weeks. I was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to breathe and would have to go in the NICU. To condense a very long story, we end up making the decision to go for the induction at 37 weeks to still go for the natural labor, and I made it.

I survived. Faith survived. She came out really well. She didn’t have to go to the NICU. Everything was great, except for maybe the contractions. Those weren’t so great. But anyway, this whole episode that I was mad at God for allowing me to go through ended up being a huge milestone of faith in my life, and I can look back and see that now to say, “Okay, I surrendered and I trusted God that things were gonna be okay in this situation, that we were gonna make it through, and that Faith was going to come out ultimately okay in the end.”

It was like, if God can get us through that piece, then whatever’s happening with Steve’s health that we still don’t have answers for, He can get us through that piece, too. Due to a variety of factors, we had such a hard time trying to find childcare for Faith as I was getting ready to go back to work, and I had started pretty early on in my pregnancy, was on a bunch of waiting lists, but nothing was coming through.

I remember sitting in the bed one evening, and I was holding Faith. Steve was next to me. And I just looked at him and I said, “Will you stay home with her?” I don’t know that he agreed to it that night. I think he said that would be hard, but he would think about it. I was essentially fully telehealth at this time, so I was still gonna be at home in another room seeing clients.

I will tell you that Steve was a five-star stay-at-home dad. It was also a blessing for him because he wasn’t having those massive migraines from staring at a computer screen all day. We knew that this would buy us a little bit of time to make a determination about whether or not Steve would be able to go back to work, or if he would need to go on disability.

But we also didn’t feel like we had a strong disability claim at this time. Meanwhile, we have our follow-up with the awful neuro-ophthalmologist, and I noted, “Hey, Steve is having some balance challenges, like when lights get turned off in a room, that’s really disorienting to him. If we go into a place where there’s really low light, that causes problems and makes it a lot harder for him to be steady, and he’s holding onto my shoulder.”

The doctor looks at me in his crude way of communicating and says, “Well, even blind people can balance.” Because before this point, we’re both really concerned that Steve is going blind. He’s lost vision. They can’t tell us why. They can’t tell us the process, the when. Did it happen gradually? Did he have some kind of eye stroke, but because it was peripheral, he didn’t notice?

We still to this day don’t know the answer to that. However, the original ophthalmologist said, “You need to go see a specialist because I think you have Leber’s disease.” It was super scary because people with Leber’s disease do go blind, most of them by the time they’re fifty, and my husband is in his late forties at the time.

At this juncture, we realize that Steve really needs to be in regular neurology, not just neuro-ophthalmology. Regular neurology led to specialty neurology, and by the time he got to specialty neurology, they knew exactly what he was dealing with. Fortunately, Dr. G at Vanderbilt is an incredibly compassionate human, so the delivery of Steve’s diagnosis, I think, was much different.

It was really scary. I remember being in the room, and they’re performing all of these tests on him, and one of the things they asked him to do was to walk heel to toe. And this is not something that you see anybody do in a normal day-to-day activity. Unless they’re getting pulled over for drunk driving or something like that, which had not occurred.

I’m watching my husband really struggle to put his heel to his toe, and then his other heel to his other toe, and I’m going, “Oh, no.” I don’t know what this means, but I just know it’s not good. There were other things they had him do that he was struggling with, like touch his nose and then touch their finger.

They watched him walk down the hallway. So Dr. G says, “Well, you have something called spinocerebellar ataxia, or SCA for short.” And I think we were both like, “What?” Like, what even is that? Like, we’ve literally never heard those words in our entire life. Like, what are you talking about? And I think this is one of the hardest things about having a rare condition, is that nobody knows when you say, “I have SCA.”

It’s actually very rare when you tell a medical professional that they know what that is. Now, occasionally, they will have run into it before. So it’s not like someone saying, “Oh, I have Parkinson’s,” or I have MS. People know what those things are. There’s a context in their brain for those conditions, and maybe I’ve known someone with this condition, or at least I know what the symptoms are.

I’ve seen a documentary about it on TV, et cetera. I know a famous person with it. I mean, I think that’s a huge one. This actually happened the day that Faith turned six months old. We have a six-month-old, and we’re being told, “Hey, you have this really rare diagnosis. Oh, and by the way, there’s no treatment and there’s no cure.

We just kind of like manage the symptoms.” What in the world? When you get a diagnosis like this, it sends you into all of the grief and loss feelings. Like there’s the initial shock, the denial, the anger, the sadness, the loss. What does this mean for us? We had landed in a church where people were incredibly gracious to us as we walked through this because shortly after Steve got his diagnosis, my mother passed away from pancreatic cancer.

All the grief in my experience internally got super confused. It’s like I didn’t have time to process the grief of the diagnosis because I had to process the grief of my mother. So I processed that grief and then like had to move backwards and process the grief of the diagnosis and what that meant for our marriage and family moving forward.

The loss of my mother was pretty sudden and very huge. She had gotten sick around the time that Faith was born, and when Faith was about four months old, she went into the hospital. We had gone down to Florida to see her. Unfortunately, she was mostly in the hospital for the three weeks that we were there staying with my parents.

And I told my mom I wanted to come down before things got really bad. I, I didn’t want to wait until you were dying to tell you how much I loved you and to really be here for you. And I’m glad that I had that time with her. The timing was really important for me, but it was just such a crazy time of having a four-month-old who’s being cared for by my husband while I’m trying to go in a room in my parents’ house, lock the door and see clients via telehealth and really be there for other people with stuff that they had going on, while at the same time I have all this craziness that I’m going on in my own life.

I was also trying to pick up extra work because my private practice hadn’t fully rebuilt after maternity leave. So we had some financial challenges, of course, because I’m trying to build back up. My husband’s not working. I look back and I don’t even know like how I got through that time. I mean, just the grace of God sustained us.

That’s the only thing that I can say because with all the stress that was happening, all of the unknowns One thing that stands out to me, though, and this might choke me up a little bit, is that I went to go visit my mom in the hospital, and she was like: “Will you get me my phone?” That she had plugged in.

And so I picked it up, and I noticed that she had been listening to a Mother’s Day episode that I did. This was before I had faith. I did a episode on hope for the not yet mothers, I think was what we called it, and it was just different people’s stories of infertility or adoption and just really beautiful stories that different people had shared.

Back when we were Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I would ask people to share stories of hope, and my mom was listening to this episode and I thought, “Well, that’s kinda weird.” But then I realized that in that episode I had given, like, this tribute to my mom in the beginning about how she was essentially the biggest fan of this podcast, and I don’t say that lightly.

We have little podcast cards and things, and Mom was always talking to people and saying, “Hey, do you listen to podcasts? My daughter has this podcast.” And she would hand out those little cards, like on the plane and other places. I can honestly say that my mom would be so happy at where things have gone with this podcast and the people that have been reached.

And Hebrews talks about how we have this great cloud of witnesses that has gone before us that’s passed through the heavens. And when I read that, I just think about my mom, because Mom just loved the Lord, and she was not shy about telling people about it, either. When she was in the hospital, I mean, she was talking to the nurses about Jesus.

And I thought this hospital was in God’s sovereign plan. That was my mom’s final mission field. My mom had gone to seminary in hopes of being an overseas missionary, and she didn’t ever do that. She married a pastor, stayed in the US, but my mom was very much a missionary in two ways, because she raised a daughter that started a podcast that reaches people in seventy-plus countries.

I haven’t looked at that stat recently. So if you’re a mom, just know that’s the highest calling that you could ever have. I really believe that, just raising disciples for the next generation for the Lord. And my mom was very much a missionary while she was here on Earth and in her final days in the hospital.

And talk about things that you don’t understand. Why? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. I just know that God has given me peace and that my mom is no longer in pain. Pancreatic cancer is a horrible thing to watch somebody go through. And if you know, you know, they basically just waste away, and it’s very hard to see.

And my mom, of course, went through a lot of emotional struggles regarding, like, “Do I have enough faith for God to heal me?” There were very much things that she wanted to do and wanted to see still. I know that there were dreams that were unfulfilled for her. My daughter was actually, because of the induction, she was actually born on my mom’s birthday.

We did not plan it that way. That’s just kinda the way the calendar fell on her coming out at thirty-seven weeks. And so we had really just hoped and looked forward when that happened that, hey, you’re gonna be able to celebrate your birthday with Faith, and that’s so awesome. But unfortunately, that wasn’t in God’s plan.

She ended up passing away when Faith was about six months old. After Steve had gotten that diagnosis of SCA, around the same time, his balance really started to fail. He went from walking with a cane to then us having to get this stand-up walker contraption. He went for weeks of vestibular therapy, essentially to relearn how to walk, for his brain and his foot to connect together.

What he has is a nervous system condition. He had to stop driving. Once we got the diagnosis, we applied for disability. It was just such a hard road not knowing what was gonna happen. The therapist had told us at that time, “It’s not an if your husband ends up in a wheelchair, it’s a when he ends up in a wheelchair.”

Which was super scary. We did not live in a house that we could even remotely make accessible. And I remember just getting up at that time in the morning and walking the house before anybody was up and just saying like, “I trust you, God. I trust you. If I could trust you with bringing my daughter into the world, if I could trust you with the financial provision, with us being able to get disability incredibly fast,” which rarely ever happens if you know anything about applying for disability.

If I can trust God with bringing me a husband when things look very hopeless as a single person, then I can trust God with this. And that’s the point that I want to make with you is oftentimes we forget there’s so much in scripture that tells us, “Just remember what the Lord has done for you.” When the River Jordan stopped and the people walked across the river, Joshua told them, “Pick up a stone, and we’re gonna tell our children, we’re gonna remember that the Lord stopped the Jordan so that we could walk across and get into this land that God gave us.”

And I think that this is so crucial for us to be telling stories to our children, not just that, but to remember for ourselves, like how far has God brought you from where you started? If you’re in the middle of a storm, can you look back and see what God has done in your life and how He sustained you through some hard times?

That really helps us in the next hard season and is incredible in helping you deal with uncertainty and knowing that you can trust God. And I’m not here saying that I understand everything that’s happened to me. I don’t, especially with the mom stuff. We did not see that one coming. My mom had been incredibly healthy person.

She was the walker. She didn’t drink. She didn’t even drink soda. I mean, she was the vegetable eater of the family. We have no idea how she got pancreatic cancer and why she had to go so soon. So there are some things that we just have to surrender and say, “Okay, I don’t understand it. I’m not gonna understand it.”

But that doesn’t mean that God’s not good, and it doesn’t mean that He’s not sovereign. He is still in control, and He has a plan. Remember, He’s the author of the story. So we’re now almost four years past my husband’s initial diagnosis of SCA. All I can tell you is that prayer works, and we just believe that God has been incredibly good and gracious to us through the midst of this diagnosis.

Because there are so many different forms of SCA, it’s really hard for them to predict how things are going to go. We tried to get some genetic testing earlier this year to figure out if they could type what type he has, and nothing came back conclusive. There’s some more invasive, more expensive genetic testing that we just kinda opted to not follow through with right now.

What I can tell you is that Steve is walking better today than he was two years ago, definitely better than he was four years ago. He was wearing ankle braces, and he’s no longer having to wear those. He was using this huge standup walker because he didn’t have, like, the grip strength to use a regular walker and also was– really couldn’t quite use a cane all the time.

It was making him very fatigued. He’s now at a place where he’s been able to just walk on a regular basis, which is the best thing that you can do for SCA. And due to his walking and how he’s, like, slowly pushed himself over time, he now is just using the cane. We give all credit and praise and honor to glory to God for that, that he has what is considered a degenerative condition, but he’s doing really well and has actually somehow improved.

I can’t explain that to you other than the Lord is good. He still definitely has the vision loss and vision challenges for sure and deals with fatigue And other things as a result of his diagnosis, he’s started to deal with some memory issues as well that have become a little bit more prominent in the last year or so.

We just take things one day at a time. That’s just how we’ve had to live around here. We don’t catastrophize about the future. Steve actually has just an incredible outlook. I interviewed him about uncertainty on a past podcast episode. He just has to focus on what he’s able to do today. At the time of this recording, he came back from a trip to Germany with our church.

I was really nervous about him going on the trip to Germany only because our pastor hadn’t been before. This was a little bit of a scouting trip for them to figure out what would it be like to take a mission team back the next year, what kind of ministries could they help support the church in Germany with.

So I’m asking questions like, “How many stairs are there around? Do they have elevators? How much walking is going to be involved,” et cetera. They did end up walking more than they had anticipated, but it wasn’t actually the walking that Steve had the most problems with, it was the escalators. Apparently, Germany, where he went, they have a lot of escalators, and they don’t always paint the lines on them like they do in the US so that you can know kinda where to step on and step off if you have some vision mobility challenges.

There were a couple times pastor or someone else on the team had to grab a hold of him on the escalator, but overall, we’re just very thankful that he’s still able to go on mission trips, which he’s very passionate about. And I just believe that God will sustain him to do whatever work he has called Steve to do.

I can honestly say that the whole experience has helped me in terms of working with the clients that I work with that are dealing with OCD or dealing with trauma, dealing with other uncertainties, health challenges, relationship issues, to really teach people what I’ve had to learn of how to live in the present day by day, trusting in God that He’s gonna see us through whatever we go through in life.

I know that this isn’t gonna be the last hard season that we go through. Thankfully, we’ve been in a really good season for a while in our life. God has really richly blessed us.

With a beautiful church community that we’ve been at about a year. Our daughter is doing really well and just thriving in a small preschool environment. God is opening up doors for me to write a book for all of you about discerning between OCD and the voice of God. I am so excited about this. I can barely contain it.

I just see such a huge need for this book to be out in the world, and it’s coming from a place of love and burden that God has given me for the Christian OCD community. I think that you guys are just tough stuff, um, and that’s why I call you the OCD warriors, ’cause you’re fighting battles internally every day, and you deserve more resources for going through these times.

I hope and pray that this future book is another resource for all of you out there struggling. Please pray for me, as this project is nothing like anything else that I’ve ever done. But I did start a podcast, and I had no idea what I was doing there either, so it’s all okay. God bless you all. Thank you so much for being here.

We’ve got a couple exciting episodes coming up that I want to tell you about. This is the official end of our personal story summer series, but we are gonna be hearing next week about when autism and OCD overlap from Nicole Kruger. She’s been on the show before, so she is coming back to talk about autism and OCD, so that should be a great episode.

Then we’re also gonna talk about supporting your hormones naturally. This is for all the ladies. Ended up being a super interesting interview, so I’m excited to bring that one to you as well. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.