Pivotal People
Join us in conversations with inspiring people doing amazing things. Their insights and experiences help motivate all of us to find our purpose that fits with our abilities, gifts and life situation. Get a "behind the scenes" look at successful people making a difference in the world and benefit from their advice for the rest of us. Our guests include authors, artists, leaders, coaches, pastors, business people and speakers.
Pivotal People
Katherine Wolf of Hope Heals: Treasures in the Dark
When life handed Katherine Wolf the unimaginable—a massive stroke that she wasn't expected to survive—she forged a path of hope and resilience that inspires and encourages everyone. As 26-year old newlyweds with a six-month old son, Katherine and Jay demonstrate what a beautiful marriage looks like. Join us as we discuss Katherine's new book, "Treasures in the Dark," to discuss the intertwined journey of joy and suffering. Her new book offers 90 reflections that promise to light the way for those navigating through their darkest times, showing that even in the shadow of hardship, hope can thrive.
Katherine's story, as told in "Hope Heals" and "Suffer Strong," co-authored with her husband Jay, is one of a love that defies statistics and a life reclaimed through faith and community. We discuss the 'Good Hard Second Chance Life', a concept that embraces the full spectrum of joy and suffering.
We also discuss Katherine and Jay's contribution to creating inclusive spaces like their camp retreat for families affected by disability and their new coffee shop "Mend", both offering respite, joy, and connection. We share how you can engage with Hope Heals to be a part of their uplifting work.
Connect with Katherine and Jay at
www.HopeHeals.com
https://hopeheals.com/
@HopeHeals on social platforms
Order Katherine's new book
https://hopeheals.com/treasures/#treasures-retailers
Order Stephanie's new book Imagine More: Do What You Love, Discover Your Potential
Learn more at StephanieNelson.com
Follow us on Instagram @stephanie_nelson_cm
Follow us on Facebook at CouponMom
I'd like to welcome Catherine Wolfe to the Pivotal People podcast. If you don't know Catherine, I don't know where you've been. But if you know Catherine, you are going to love this conversation. We are talking about her new book and a new exciting project she's doing, and if you don't know Catherine, you are going to be so happy that you discovered her today. The reason we're talking today is because she has come out with a new book.
Speaker 1:I'm going to read her bio because the woman does so many things. It's unbelievable. She is a survivor and advocate who leverages her redemptive story to encourage those with broken bodies, broken brains and broken hearts. Catherine is a stroke survivor and she had an experience that changed her life and I appreciate that she is letting God use her experience to help change our lives for the better. I just told her before we started recording this.
Speaker 1:I've read all three of her books. I wish I had read them sooner. It is like this. To read a Catherine Wolf book feels like this. Do you know the feeling you have when you get to spend two hours with a really good friend, like the friend who knows you so well and you know them so well? You can totally trust them. You really like them, they really like you and when you leave that meeting, you truly I call it. Those are my soul-filling friends and I am so thankful for those friends. And when I read Catherine's book, I'm going to cry. I felt like that and I thought, okay, catherine doesn't have the bandwidth to be all of our friends but you can read your books and she's not pointing us to her.
Speaker 1:Of course she's pointing us to Jesus. So, anyway, we're going to talk about your new book, which is Treasures in the Dark 90 Reflections on Finding Bright Hope Hidden in the Herding and it comes out soon. So, catherine, welcome.
Speaker 2:That's enough of me talking, oh thank you, I'm honored to be here and I love seeing you in your Hope sweatshirt, that's right.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you the story later, but you look awesome. Well, I have to tell you a little little advertising. I'm wearing Catherine's Hope sweatshirt. You can go to her website, hope Heels, and you can buy really neat stuff and it's comfortable and it's cute and it's reasonably priced, which, you know, that matters to me.
Speaker 2:And I'm wearing one too. I love that we both are so.
Speaker 1:Catherine, could you share with us top line first. I know it's a big story, so that's why everyone has to buy the books, but could you share with us a little bit of your story and what has really brought you to share your message?
Speaker 2:Absolutely as a 26 year old newlywed, been married two and a half years and had a six month old baby. At the time I had a massive brainstem stroke and very nearly died and became severely disabled, as I largely remain today, and I had no medical history, no family history, no indication there was anything going on with my body. My whole life I was in perfect health until that ruptured at age 26 and the AVM that ruptured. Arterial venous malformation was a birth defect. It was something I had since I was born and it was a small collection of blood vessels that would rupture when I turned 26.
Speaker 1:Go ahead, Share that story in Hope Heels, which was, I mean, so moving. That's the first book and you wrote that with your husband, Jay.
Speaker 2:Yes absolutely Well. It was important to write that with Jay because they're parts I don't know. I was unconscious for several months after the stroke and only woke up from a normal day where I had a headache to two and a half months later in the hospital bed becoming fully disabled. So it was very needed for him to fill in those two and a half months of drama.
Speaker 1:Well, and one of the things that really touched me was how your family rallied around and how your father-in-law, Pastor Jay Wolfe, who is I've met him, he's so wonderful. He married the two of you, that's right, and he talked about marriage, the firm foundation of marriage. And wow, at the age of 26, they were married young, they had a child young. You really showed us in your book what marriage is all about and I am amazed at your young age that the two of you just.
Speaker 2:I read the statistic in your book that 90% of marriages of people under the age of 30 who experienced traumatic brain injuries and in divorce it was shocking and actually the first time we had heard that statistic or learned of this was the social worker in the hospital told my husband that pretty much this is unsurvivable for your marriage the clinical catastrophe to this degree does not end in the couple staying married that there's no way he would not experience tremendous burnout.
Speaker 2:And you know we tell a famous story of his dad saying you know, we're in California, we're close to Yosemite, let's take a couple days' time and drive up to Yosemite. I don't want you to get burned out on being in the hospital all the time with your wife. And the social worker had told Big J to ask that and he said no, I'll wait and go to Yosemite when Catherine can go with me one day. And you know the social worker's truly rolling her eyes like yeah, right. And then we did, five years after the stroke, get to go to Yosemite and take our little child, who was then almost six, with us and visit that beautiful place.
Speaker 1:Well, that's amazing, and what struck me in your story, in all of your books unless I've read Treasures in the Dark is actually a devotional book. I love devotional books. It's 90 days. We said that I read it straight through, and what I love about it, though, is every devotion ends with just a solid sentence, like something we can hold on to. Here is the lesson, and she says if it's true for me, don't you think it could be true for you? So you can read it straight through, and then? It's a nice hardback. You obviously. I'm going to go back and read it each day, because it's a whole lot of really great wisdom to try to take in all at once. You want a dose every day. I was thinking, catherine, it's a beautiful hardback. How nice would it be to have it on your coffee table, and maybe someone else would pick it up and just read one day.
Speaker 2:For sure. We love the idea of truly small, consumable, little bites. And I choose to say it's not as emotional because I feel like, unlike you, plenty of sweet readers have a lot of baggage around, even church or anything related to our faith being somehow weaponized within their suffering. So I say it's a reflection guide where we call to be contemplative as we thoughtfully engage on where it's gone in our stories. And my prayer, of course, is that question at the end that if it's true for me, could it be true for you too, is what is most universal, is most personal. What is most personal is most universal in our stories, and we share these important sufferings of all different kinds, but it's the same hope and that's what you talked about throughout your books is that everyone has their own degree of pain and suffering.
Speaker 1:It's not a comparison, but your whole message is how can we use that experience? How can we, you know, a message out of our mess? Could you talk, catherine? I so love your good, hard second chance life. Good hard second chance life.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yes, I very much love this notion of the good and the hard coexisting. I actually have my own podcast called the Good Hard Story podcast, because I believe so deeply that the good story and the hard story can be the very same story. Those are not mutually exclusive at all. They coexist. They have to, absolutely. That's the reality of life on earth and what did you say?
Speaker 1:you said we're trying to bust the notion of a pain free life.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think we're called to be joy raffles and rebel with joy, and our story, the part of that, is disrupting the myth that joy can only come in a pain-free life, because the reality is there is pain in our lives, but joy can still be there as well.
Speaker 1:And you talk to so much about healing. Okay, when I read the Bible, if I go across a Bible verse that I like, I write it on an index card, so I'll remember it. Do you know? I have more index cards on Catherine's books than I have on the Bible? Right now, it is hard to read her books without wanting to write something down. Oh, funny. So let's talk about hope. Okay, obviously hope is hope. You said hope is something we can practice even when we don't feel it.
Speaker 2:Well, that's right. Yeah, the habit of hope Tell us.
Speaker 1:You had some real practical suggestions for how do we practice hope when we don't feel hopeful.
Speaker 2:I love talking about this. I believe so deeply that the practice of hope is what carried me when the feelings of hope had failed me in my entire ordeal. And I think there are so many important pieces to practicing hope, including Ebenezer's, are a huge thing for me. I like to put up a lot of remembrance devices that we can recognize how far the Lord's brought us. Yes, photographs, for sure, but also the paraphernalia of where you've been.
Speaker 2:We keep in the glass container my glasses that I had to wear and bring me up with one eye covered and relearn to see with essentially double vision and a very messed up one blurry vision die. And we keep that. The holding cross from when I was in ICU that I held all those months, we keep in another frame in our home and I think remembrances Ebenezer's are key in our stories. I think a part of practicing hope will always be re-narration. You know the world is narrating, everybody around us is narrating, but we get to narrate our story to ourselves, to our children, to our families, that we get to be the ones who talk about what happened to us and include the faithfulness of God to us within our story. So that's two ways I love to share.
Speaker 1:And that brings us to this other concept you introduced that I love, which is hopeful remembrance. Yes, I love this because you know, our stories are so many details to our stories. Of course, we're only picking out some of the details. Our memory can't possibly handle every single detail of our lives.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:You said how we can reframe our past stories. We recognize the redemption of the past, so we accept the complexities of the present and look forward to the goodness of the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah so you know the past, catherine, you had unbelievable any of us. As I was reading this, I was thinking of my own suffering and I was thinking about you know, this is good for all of us to reflect Okay, it's reflection. What did our suffering bring? You can really think that wait a minute and in retrospect we can always see it right. Right, oh, look at that. I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me and it was. It was, and I love this.
Speaker 1:I said to my husband this morning what I love about Catherine's writing and her message is that she is not sugarcoating anything, right, it's not platitudes, for sure, and she's authentic and you share how you felt and I know that word's overused authenticity. But I said to my husband I don't know if I've heard a more authentic speaker on faith, because you have earned the authority to give us that. What was your option? You could have said hey, by the way, catherine was an actress and a model and this tragic thing happened to her at 26. And what's amazing is you said, hey, you know what? I got a message and God wants me to share this message Absolutely. And she's on stage as she fills stadiums people. I mean, she is a sought after speaker.
Speaker 2:Oh goodness. Well, it's true, it's exciting for sure. I can't believe I get to love this life so much. Just amazing stuff has come from such horrible tragedy, which is, of course, the gospel story, that there is new life just coming out of us. I like to say that suffering makes us into new people, but Jesus and our suffering makes us into a new creation and with the new creation life we get to go and tell and embody the truth we believe. So thank you for saying that, you know. I think so. Interestingly, I think you're right to say the word authenticity is so overused in our world. But where are you? Where do you live?
Speaker 1:I live in Atlanta. I'm coming to your coffee shop, which we'll talk about next.
Speaker 2:No, I did not know that you live in Atlanta, where, oh my gosh, we live in Marietta.
Speaker 1:And now that we're on this, well, no, you finish what you're saying, but I have to tell you a sweatshirt story.
Speaker 2:You resonate so deeply with this, I think uniquely perhaps. In the Bible Belt there is really a backlash to the planet, to the overused cultural Christianity, so it's wrongly being fought with like you just need to be more authentic. But the reality is, for Christ's followers, this is truly being authentic. Being authentic is the sugarcoating. It isn't slapping a plattitude on it. It's the real, living Jesus meeting us in our hard stories. So it's very different.
Speaker 1:OK, we have to talk about this. So the other thing you talk about in your book is withness. Now you talk about it in all three books. But it really struck me the whole idea of and if you can share with us it would be so helpful for so many of us how we can really be better supporters and better friends and better encouragers of our loved ones or friends who are going through suffering.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I very much suffer from trying to make it OK for everyone else in my life to go through hard things. I definitely I hate awkward silence. I want to fill it. I say dumb things, I definitely just I want to make it better. I want to put a bow on it.
Speaker 2:I don't like sad stuff. So I've really had to come at that by truly empathetically listening, truly sitting with people in the hard stuff, not trying to instantly make it OK, but instead I actually like to say that less words are the best words, that we need to stop talking, that the ministry of truth giving is powerful Absolutely, but in the moment of deep pain, the ministry of tears is decidedly more powerful. The people need to know we're with them, I'm in this, I'm not leaving. We have a deep human fear that if people see and know us, they'll leave and instead to say no, I'm here and I'm not leaving and I can handle the hard and the sad of your story, that is the great gift we get to give each other and of course, that is exactly what Jesus does. He meets us in our hard stuff and he doesn't leave.
Speaker 1:That's what I love the ministry of tears and I appreciated that lesson because it gives us permission not to have the right thing to say. I keep saying I talked to my husband about this, I'm telling everyone about you the whole idea of not having to have the perfect Bible verse. In fact, you said there's a time for truth, but not yet.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, there will be a time in every story for truth telling and processing. But in the moment it's shock, it's allow the circumstances to break your heart. You don't have to make it okay. It's okay to be broken by tragedy.
Speaker 1:Right, and I say you know my greatest thing. My mother passed away many years ago, but during that time I experienced people who came alongside me and we're in the South right, so you get the casserole brigade and it was very nice. People brought meals every night and I could tell a clear difference between women whose mother had died and women whose mothers hadn't died yet.
Speaker 2:And so you talk about that.
Speaker 1:You talk about. You know our suffering. Suffering is not the end of my story. This is entry 65. Rather, it's the beginning of a survival guide that I want to share with anyone who needs it. My journey in the darkness can blaze a trail for someone else in their own wilderness. Now, when I hear someone's mother died I don't even you know if it's a friend I just go next door and we just cry. I'll make a casserole later, but you know what she needs. She needs me to come over and say nothing, nothing.
Speaker 2:I totally get it your mother died.
Speaker 1:I get it so okay. So I want to talk about your camp. So I'm going to tell this story. So I'm all excited. I am so excited about this podcast episode with Catherine Wolf.
Speaker 1:You have no idea, everyone in my family knows about it and I've been reading her books and I was walking with a friend last weekend along the Chattahoochee River. So you know that I have spent hours and hours, hundreds of hours, talking with this girlfriend over the years, walking and talking, and I am telling her about Catherine and I'm telling her about Catherine's camp, which we're going to talk about in a minute. She has this wonderful camp for disabled people and their families and you can volunteer there. And I'd seen that and I know someone who volunteered. But you know what? I saw the date oh gosh, maybe I'll do that another year. That's kind of outside of my comfort zone, I don't know. So I'm walking along with my girlfriend and telling her about this camp and a woman walks towards me, catherine, and she's wearing this sweatshirt and I said, excuse me, is that Hope Heels? Because the sweatshirt just says Hope? And she said, yes, catherine Wolf. Oh, I said, oh, my gosh, I was just talking about Catherine.
Speaker 1:Wolf in the five minutes out of hundreds of hours, yeah, and she said I got this when I volunteered at her camp.
Speaker 1:I said well, I've heard about that and she said well, we were just passing, we didn't even talk 30 seconds. She said you have to volunteer. It will change your life. It changed my life. You have to Now. You would call that a Godwing. I call that a burning bush. Oh, wow, yeah. So, Catherine, I've applied to. I haven't heard yet. I'm hoping you can pull some strings. I'm hoping the background check goes well. But yes, I'm coming to volunteer at your camp.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that so much. You know which week you're coming. I'm applying for the first week and you know isn't that selfish of me.
Speaker 1:It wasn't until someone said to me it will change your life. Yeah, and I said okay, I'll do it.
Speaker 2:But that is true. It will change yours and it will change others, so it's a blessing all around for all yeah, so anyway, I just thought, okay, no.
Speaker 1:I came home and I told my husband that and he said oh, you have to sign up. That's definitely a burning bush.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you're coming, tell us about your camp. It is so amazing. We definitely did not seek out this experience. We thought this would be a sweet little regional offering for a few families who really needed encouragement when someone in the family unit has the instability. And what we saw is that just went bonkers and now there's over 80 different diagnoses coming from 40 different states and several places around the world and we recognize this camp retreat experience is unlike any we know of in the entire world that it's completely free to the campers and the only requirement is that someone within the family system have a disability and they come, they all come. And then wonderful people like yourself come to volunteer we call them compassionate companions that walk alongside our families for the week and just enjoy a vacation like experience at camp, where they're given a spa day for the ladies and grill out for the men and just top notch, high quality musical guests and comedians and just joy and fun and celebration and it's glorious, it's heavenly.
Speaker 1:You love it. What an incredible gift that you're giving people and could you share with us we haven't talked about. Obviously, Catherine is an advocate for the disabled. What caught my attention? I listened to your podcast last week and you shared the statistics 20%.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's heartbreaking 20% of the US is living with a disability and the statistics are the same, but higher, worldwide that so many sweet friends all around us are coping with physical disabilities and it's unreal. You would think that's not true. It's the largest minority group in the world, actually, but you would think that couldn't be true. However, the reality is, people with disabilities are not often out in the world, so you would have no idea how high the number is. In addition to being the largest minority group in the world, there are number one on all the lists you would never want to be on. From homelessness to suicide to divorce, people living with disabilities are at the top of all of those lists. It's such a deep sadness, so what can we do, catherine?
Speaker 2:you can come to camp and serve and get behind families and love on them and you can be a part of our amazing coffee shop community opening in just a few weeks where we long to create spaces of belonging and belovedness for people affected by disability, because we see the deepest need of persons with disabilities is to not feel alone and isolated in our world, but to feel like people are, yes, with them and not leaving, even though it's hard.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm not sure the date, if everyone wants to sign up for Catherine's email newsletter on Hope. Heels, yes yes, and you'll hear about when the coffee shop opens and you'll get these great encouraging emails. Listen to her podcast, buy her books and read her books. We've talked about your newest book, but you also have Hope Heels and Suffer Strong.
Speaker 2:Yes, I love seeing behind you right now, beautiful, pretty display. Thank, you.
Speaker 1:I'm sitting in the Catherine Wolf Library, but I'll tell you what's neat is that you know we haven't talked about Jay, your husband, but her books are written with Jay, so chapters alternate between Jay, a man, and Catherine, a woman.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it's a great book. Because so many times I'll read a book and think it's wonderful and I'll say to my husband I'd love for you to read this. He'll say is it a girl's book, right? No, this is a book for men. This is a book for men and women and all of us. And I promised her I would not keep her too long, but I have to tell you this I'm just so thankful that you would spend time with us. Oh, my goodness, what a blessing for me. What is the best way for us to get in touch with you? People are going to hear this and want to find you. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Everything is on our website, hopehealscom, and everything on social is just at Hope Heals, so it's really easy.
Speaker 1:That's great. Well, thank you so much, and I wish you the best of luck with the coffee shop and with camp and with this new book coming out. I think it's April 9th, that's right.
Speaker 2:April 9th. Will this air before that or way after? So it's available where you are.
Speaker 1:That's right. You want to preorder it? Yes, so they don't run out.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Thank you, we'll see you at the coffee shop Wonderful.
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