Ep 32 Hope in the Valley of Estrangement: God’s Promises for Weary Moms

In this episode, Nicole opens up about the deep valleys so many estranged moms find themselves in—those seasons where heartbreak, confusion, and grief collide. Using Billy Graham’s powerful reminder that “mountaintops are for views and inspiration, but fruit is grown in the valleys,” she shares how God uses the lowest places to grow resilience, faith, and hope.

Nicole also shares practical steps for staying rooted in faith during hard seasons and highlights resources in her community, including devotionals and an online support group for moms facing estrangement. This episode is an invitation to slow down, breathe, and trust that God meets you in the valley, not just on the mountaintop.

God is with you: “For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” —Joshua 1:9

God will give you rest: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” —Matthew 11:28

God will give you peace: “Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand.” —Philippians 4:7

God will work all things for good: “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God…” —Romans 8:28

God will renew your strength: “But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength…” —Isaiah 40:31

God gives wisdom when you ask: “If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you.” —James 1:5

God will comfort you in your pain: “He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others.” —2 Corinthians 1:4

God’s love will never leave you: “Nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God…” —Romans 8:39

God will finish what He started in you: “God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work…” —Philippians 1:6

00:00 Introduction and Inspirational Quote

00:20 Personal Update and Thanksgiving Reflections

02:24 Navigating Estrangement with Faith

04:19 God's Promises and Finding Hope

07:09 Practical Steps and Encouragement

15:28 Conclusion and Community Support

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:00

I saw a quote this week from Billy Graham that I feel like is what I'm trying to say here, and that quote is, mountaintops are for views and inspiration, but fruit is grown in the valleys. And estrangement is our valley. And what fruit are we going to grow and produce in our valley?

nicole: 0:20

Good morning. The last time we chatted, we spoke with Lynn and I know she was such an encouragement to you guys and that her story resonated with so many of you, which is encouraging for me because that's what I hope that that you gain is that you gain some encouragement through our time together. So, um, okay. I'm gonna continue on with the update. You didn't ask for theme to get our episode started as I figure out how to, you know, navigate this New by Yourself podcast. The update that you did not ask for, I'm gonna tie it back to two episodes ago when I gave you the update you didn't ask for, which was. The debacle of trying to find this kombucha at the Boise co-op that I could not find, and they ended up like calling the owner and it was this whole big thing that it did not need to be. I just wanna let you guys know that I braved it. My little introvert itself braved it, and I went back to the store and I got the kombucha and we had it on Thanksgiving. Yay. The sad part is, is that we didn't actually like it, so it was a whole lot of effort for something we didn't actually like, which is disappointing, but. I'm happy to support a local company but, um, I hope you guys', Thanksgiving was good. Ours was a little weird outside of, you know, talking about estrangement. My husband and I both work for a disaster relief organization and he has been gone since. Uh, the end of October minus coming home for five days. But, we are now into December and it's definitely feeling like a long time. He has been, helping in Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa and is set to be home this week and I'm so excited. But it was a weird Thanksgiving'cause we've been together, we've been married 17 years together for almost 20 and so I haven't spent. I've spent more Thanksgivings with him almost than I have not. And so it was really weird not having him, but we made the best of it and had a good Thanksgiving. So. Okay. Today we're gonna talk about God's promises. The question I wanna start with today in asking you, and really I want you to ponder and think about what does, what, what does this mean for me? So my question to you today is what are you doing in this season of estrangement? I know that we're navigating through lots of feelings and grief and. Those are all real and valid. The reality is it's here, it's not going anywhere, and we don't know for how long you're gonna be in this season. So how do we move from grief through the process to trust and hope in Jesus? When I started this platform. Or not the platform, but like talking about estrangement, I started talking about it with the hope, with the idea of bringing you hope in Jesus, which is why I created devotionals. So I, if you don't know, you can go to my website and get a devotional. There's ones, there's free ones. There's all sorts of price points because I, I want it to be accessible to anyone. Um. Because that's my, that's my hope here, is that I bring you back to Jesus because walking through estrangement without Jesus feels pretty devastating, hopeless, overwhelming, and easy to get lost in the grief. And so recentering and finding hope in him helps us navigate through the season well. I also think that it's easy just to say like, oh, we can, you can find hope in Jesus. And I like to break things down, so I wanna walk it back a little bit like, how do we know we can't, it's easy just to say have hope in Jesus, but if we don't actually believe and know the things that the Bible says in God's character, it feels more challenging to find hope in something that you don't really know or understand and really believe to be true. And so I wanna walk it back to some of the promises that God gives us in the word. Because if we start again, we start to really understand his character and his heart for us, then finding hope, just it streamlines that process of finding hope in him. So I want us to take inventory of whether we actually believe what the Bible says, because if we do, then believing there's hope in Jesus. Whether reconciliation happens or not becomes possible. Because the truth is we don't really know what's gonna happen. We don't know if there will be reconciliation or not, or if we'll continue to live in estrangement, will the Lord allow this estrangement to continue or will he intervene and he reconcile us. We live in this weird InBetween of unknowns, which is why my community is called Between Hope and Heartbreak, and I've talked about it so frequently, is because we live in this weird. In between, between hope and between heartbreak. But how do we move more towards hope and out of the heartbreak? I'm not saying the heartbreak won't exist. It still will, but I also want us to use this time, well, the, I want us to evaluate what is God trying to show us. Okay? We're in this season of estrangement. We're here. It's happening. So now what? What is God trying to show us? Teach us, reveal to us, how is he strengthening me? What is he, what character is he trying to build up in? Me? You know, we love to quote the verse. He works things. He works all things together for good, which I believe to be true, but. That requires us to acknowledge that there's probably a difference in my definition of good and God's definition of good. My definition of good would maybe would be reconciliation. That might not be God's definition of good for us. So we're gonna walk it back to God's promises and who he says he is, what he says and what he's faithful to do. We tend to only think that. Of God as providing reconciliation. And I don't wanna to lose sight of that. Obviously he can do that. Um, but sometimes I think we're so hyper-focused on that, that we can lose sight of the ways he's moving in the small, quiet daily moments. And if I'm being really honest, my fear when walking through estrangement is that I will have walked through this storm for nothing. I will come out the end or. You know, I'll come out the other side and I will still not have a relationship with my child and I won't have learned anything. I won't have grown, I will lack spiritual maturity, that I'll have gone through all of this without falling more in love with Jesus. And my fear is if that happens, I will be left wondering what was the point. We can't control much about our relationships with our kids. Yes, there are some things we can control. What we can control is our growth, our healing, our faith, our pursuit of Jesus, our character, our healing. And if in this season of estrangement we are stewarding all of that, well, if we can walk through and focus on those things, then this storm will not have been wasted there. I put a devotional out on the community this last week, and I brought up the story in First Kings where, Elijah was desperate for direction. He was tired, he was afraid he was hiding in a cave, and then God told him to stand on the mountain and Elijah was supposed to be looking for God. So all of these things came and he's looking for God in these big things. The fires, the windstorm, the earthquake. Surely God's there. He's gonna make a, he told me to come. He's told me to wait. I'm waiting. These big things are happening. Surely God's in these big things, and he wasn't in any of those big things. In One Kings 1912 it says, and after that and after the fire. There was the sound of a gentle whisper, and that's where Elijah heard God in the gentleness, not in the chaos, not in the dramatic, but in a whisper. And honestly, if I'm being honest, and I think if you're being honest with yourself too, I would wonder how often we hear him in the whisper more than we do in the chaos. Especially when we're walking through a season of waiting and silence. Uh, when the prayers haven't been answered, when the relationship is still strained, when the door you're begging God to open has remained shut. What I have learned in the waiting, god's promises are not fragile. They don't bench the circumstances. They don't expire when we mess up and they're steady even when we are not. Hebrews 10 23 says, let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm for God can be trusted to keep his promise clinging to his promises. When so many things feel uncertain takes faith, and faith is a muscle that we have to build. We don't have to start big. We just have to start. We just have to start. The small movements will still build muscle. Little acts of faith can still hold power and when you are too tired to figure out what to clinging to. Let these promises be your anchor. So we are gonna get into the promises that God has for us. Okay, you guys. I don't know why I do that voice, but it's what? We're gonna talk about what the Bible says and what. God promises so that you have them to hold onto to anchor you. In this season when reconciliation fills out of your hands, God still promises these things, and these can be your anchors that anchor you to hope. Okay, so I'm gonna. Include them all in the show notes. There might be a lot, you guys, I kind of have quite a few written down. It might be, I don't know, I might not, it might be too much, but I'm gonna include, include them in the show notes, but I'm kinda gonna kind of breeze through them. So, um, God promises to be close to the broken hearted. It says in the word the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. He gives promises to those who. Seek wisdom. If you, if you lack wisdom, ask God and He it will be given to you. He promises to never leave you forsake you. I will never leave you nor forsake you. He promises peace that doesn't even make sense to the world. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will guard your heart and your minds. He promises to carry your burdens, cast your burdens on the Lord, and he will sustain you. He promises to work in ways that you cannot see. It says, I am doing a new thing and I am making a way in the wilderness. He promises that nothing, not even estrangement, can separate you from him. Nothing in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God. He promises to make beauty from ashes. He will give you a crown of beauty for ashes. He promises that your suffering is never wasted. Your labor in the Lord is not in vain. In Joshua, it says that God is for you. For the Lord of God is with you Wherever you go, It says that God will give us rest. Come to me all who are weary and I will carry your burdens and I will give you rest. It says that he'll renew your strength, but those who trust the Lord will find new strength. It says that he comforts you in your pain. He comforts us in all of our troubles so that we can comfort others. The other question I would ask you is this week, what would it look like to clinging, not to the outcome, but to God's promises? Not to just reconciliation, but what God's doing in the meantime. I want you, I want all of us to use this time of estrangement. Well, I want us to come out the other end, whether reconciliation has happened or not. And feel proud of where we're at. To feel solid in our walk with the Lord, to feel excited for the future, estrangement can take away that excitement. Someone said in my dms this week, and I thought it was so powerful, and I will probably use a lot, is it's a death of a million dreams. And that's true because there's these things that you don't think about that we walk through in an interview. Last week when I was talking to a reporter, I said that times tends to stand still in estrangement because, how do you take family pictures that doesn't feel right? How do you move forward with memories and moments that you know won't include them? That doesn't feel right. Uh, I wanna go see a show on Broadway. It feels weird not to take my daughter. I wanted to see the second wicked with her. It felt weird going without her. There's these moments in times that we don't, they sneak up on us. There's sometimes they're super small moments and sometimes they're big moments. The birth of a grandchild, a wedding. A graduation, like there's these moments that we miss because of estrangement or that they miss out for us this week. I thought about that. My son is in theater, my oldest and my oldest son, and he, uh, made it to state and they made it all the way to semifinals. And he called me and he was so excited and I was crying and. And I think she would be really excited. I think she would've been really excited for him and she missed it. And it sucks for him and it sucks for her, and it sucks all around. And so there's, um, all these missed moments that we don't even realize in between the big ones. And it's painful, and I want us to come out the other end. Despite the pain of estrangement, I want us to come out stronger, more anchored in who we are, who God says we are. I want us to be a healed version of ourselves. I want us to have grown, our character, have to be, have been strengthened. I want us to be okay. Whether reconciliation happens or not. And I don't think we can do that without anchoring ourselves in the promises of what Jesus says, of what the word says. I hope that was encouraging today, there is a free devotional, and as always, you can join our online community for moms walking through Estrangement, where we encourage and support each other. We have our monthly Zoom call coming up next weekend, and then starting in January, we're actually gonna be going through. A book that someone in the community recommended that I'm super excited about, so it's lots of encouragement and support available to you.

Speaker: 15:58

I saw a quote this week from Billy Graham that I feel like is what I'm trying to say here, and that quote is, mountaintops are for views and inspiration, but fruit is grown in the valleys. Estrangement is our valley. What fruit are we going to grow and produce in our valley? Have a great week, friends.