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Faith Stories with Pastor Joe Coffey is a podcast about the real stories of real people and the real ways God moves in and through our lives. Each episode shares honest conversations of breakthrough and struggle–stories of faith, failure, drift, redemption, and the slow pull back to Jesus. From seasons of success to moments of darkness, these testimonies are reminders that no one is too far gone, no story is beyond redemption, and Jesus is still in the business of restoring what feels lost.
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Hey everyone, welcome to our podcast, Faith Stories. It's a podcast by Christ Community Chapel about how Christ can change anything and everything. I'm Joe Coffey, your host, and this is my special guest, Brandy Williams. Brandy, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Brandy, you are the Bible study table leader for women's ministry. I just have to tell you right up, right off the bat, my wife and my daughter love you.
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Oh, they love being in the group. They both mentioned it to me, so I need to start with that. So so sweet. So you are involved. You are teaching and helping people understand the Bible. Tell me how you grew up. Tell me. Like where you. Where you grew up, what life was like when. Well, Pastor Joe okay, so I grew up in East Cleveland, Ohio.
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I think the most important part of my story is I grew up to two drug addicted and alcoholic parents. And so when I was 12 years old, no Christian background at all. It was what was crazy is both of my parents were either Catholic, and my mom grew up with a Jehovah Witness background. Okay, but we never really talked about God.
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How many kids in your family? Myself. And then I have a nine. My my brothers, nine years younger than me. So you're so you're 12. When did you realize that your parents were drug addicted? Oh, my mother never kept that from me, so I would say five. Okay. She would leave me sometimes to go to the bar to find my dad and things like that.
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She would leave me by myself. So she would always say, I'm going to the bar to find your dad, and we'll be drinking and I'll be back. So you just be by yourself? Yes. For hours. Yeah. She would try to wait till I go to sleep sometimes, but I would wake up and she wouldn't be there. Okay. Yeah.
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So as a like, how did you do in school? How? I mean, how did you, you were kind of raising yourself at school. I actually kept really good grades. But I had times where my parents would be arguing because of drugs. We got to a point kind of close when I, when I got 12 years old, that they both had the same, I guess, like dealer.
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And I think that my mom was doing things with the dealer, and that could be why her and my father started arguing. Okay. Yeah. All right. So you had made it to 12 years old before I started interrupting. So what's going on at 12? I had a best friend, and I started staying with her and her mother and her grandmother for, like, weeks at a time, because at this time my household was very turbulent.
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Arguing all the time, fussing, cussing, shouting all the things, even threatening to harm each other. And I come home. Did you feel loved at all? I think I did because that's all I knew. So it was just a weird love, but it was like, this is a this is what I know. So it was normal to me, but not normal, if that makes sense.
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But I come home one day and my dad and my brothers, things were gone. And so I'm coming in. I'm like, what's going on? She said, yeah, I sent him to live with his family. And this is your last night here, too. And I said, her. She said, yeah, your friend's mother. I gave her guardianship over you. I want to live my life and get high without responsibilities.
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They're coming to pick you up tomorrow. You're 12. Yes. Okay, so your mom abandons you and tells you she's going to abandon you? Yes, yes. How did that hit you? So, from years of therapy, I think I stuffed it for a long time. But now, being 42. So this is due that math. I was in despair. I was in complete despair and very talk about the definition of people pleaser.
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If my mom could discard me that way. I tried to really live a perfect life for those people, because where else was I going to go? Right, right. And you, you had to have just a tremendous fear of rejection. Absolutely. From anybody. Yes. Point. Right. So okay, so in some ways you become a really nice person. Absolutely. Right.
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Yeah. Yeah. No one could ever say that I was me. Yeah. And not for a righteous. That's self-preservation. All right. So you're. So you go to live with this family. They have guardianship now. So somebody except they they adopted you. Oh. And so that is a part of my rejection, Pastor Joe. They didn't adopt me. She took over guardianship.
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I was with them from 12 to 19 my sophomore year in college. Me and the myself and the daughter, we got into it and she wanted me to leave, and I did. And the mother, she said, you know, you're always welcome here. But it was like, if I was really a daughter that would never come out of your mouth.
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And so I felt just a big sense of rejection for a long time. Wow, wow. Yeah. It makes me want to cry. I'm really sorry. Yeah, I hear that a lot, Pastor Joe. And I think I'm so used to it. It's not that I'm callous to it, but I think this is a part of my faith story that I needed when I heard the gospel.
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It literally changed my life. Okay, so tell me, when did you when did that happen? Senior year high school. I was, I think I thought my mom was going to come back. I think I always had this hope that she'd come back. The first two years she actually visited me, she would come and get me and we would go to the store or go out to dinner or something like that, and I and after a while it started dwindling down and I just wouldn't see her.
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But the I would say August of 20, 2001, I was just I know it now, but God was wooing me because I felt like, what is my place? What am I supposed to do? Everybody is always talking about their parents and how they're pleasing their parents by going to the college that their mom used to go to, just different things.
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And I just always felt out of place. And so I remember I was taking the bus to school and I was looking out the window like, something has to change or I'm not going to make it. A fellow classmate invited me to church and I went to church. I heard the gospel, but I heard my name. I heard, For God so loved me and I was absolutely just.
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My mind was blown. You could love me and my parents don't even love me. And I think it freed me in such a way that where if you love me, then I'll love you forever. Wow, wow. So I happened when you were a senior in high school. Okay, so then what happened? Oh, I was, like, totally in love with the Lord.
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So while everybody else is going to, like, one of our rivals was Glenville Tar Letters. They were going to a basketball game on a Tuesday night. And my foundational church, we had women's Bible study on Tuesday night and we were in revelation. They were like, are you going to the game? I said, what day is it? They said, Tuesday.
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I said, absolutely not, I'll be a Bible study. So I was just totally just all in, right? Right. Wow. So so you start to grow in your faith after your senior year in high school. What happens? So I go to college. Wait, how do you go to college? I started doing well again in school because now I had new life.
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Before. I didn't care about anything. I was just. I was drowning in depression and just sadness. And the Lord literally pulled me up. So now I had a new, new, like, look on life. And I'm like, oh, I want to go to college, right? I wanted to become a nurse because one of my friends had a miscarriage, and she said the nursing staff treated her so badly.
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And I heard the best nursing school was at OSU. Now, I didn't become nurse because I can't do blood and and smells, but after four times I've changed my major. I said, Lord, you brought me here. What do you want me to do? Wait. I'm still. I'm still shocked by that. So you're like a senior in high school, and you're.
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You're pretty much alone. You. Your mom's out of the picture. Basically, your guardian has asked you to. So that was my after my freshman year in college. Okay. But this. I'm still working 30 hours a week because I don't want her to have to feel like she has to dish out a lot of money for me and my senior year, I want her to take care of her daughter.
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So you're you're working 30 hours a week, and you're getting good enough grades to get into OSU. Yes. Right. Do you get a scholarship or. I did get a partial scholarship and I got financial aid. I got into a program because since I kind of did so poorly at one point in time, my grade point average wasn't good enough.
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But they had like an inner city program that I was eligible for. And so I really boosted me and helped me to get there. All right. So you go to a shoe? Yep. And you're trying to figure out what what the Lord wants you to do. Yes. And I finally take an introduction to social work. And that was it.
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I said, oh, I can help people. That's that's all at my Aldi. I want to help people, especially people who are just deep in a in a dumps of life who need someone to pull them out. And that started it. Okay. So you major in social work graduate. Yes. Right. And when you meet Nate in college. But he didn't go to college.
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His best friend went to the same college. We were both chaplains of the gospel choir. So we kind of developed a relationship. And he was getting married while he was still in college, and him and Nate were best friends. He was the best man in the wedding, and I was one of the singers in a wedding. And that's how we met.
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Okay. And then tell me about that. How did that was he following Christ then? Two absolutely. Okay. And our stories were so, different. But yet our walk with Christ was the same. I had a year before I met him. I got out a really bad relationship, very controlling, emotionally controlling. And I thought that that was the best love I was going to ever get.
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So I just took it. And then once the Lord. I mean, you're you're a your ability to probably perceive what real love was was probably nonexistent. Yeah. Right. You had never experienced it except from from Jesus. From Gus. Yes. And then but from a human being? No, not a single human being, really. I would give it to my God, father.
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For when I first got saved, he taught me how to read the Word of God. And that started to open me up to love. But I still didn't trust it. I did not trust people's love for me because I have to perform, and then eventually you're going to leave is what I would always think. So how did you start to feel secure with Nate?
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We meet in 2006. We get married in 2008. It wasn't until probably 2019, Pastor Joe, that I really felt like, oh, he he loves me. I got pregnant with our last son and when I was 36 weeks pregnant, I had a bottle of obstruction and my uterus ruptured and it took me down a long time of sickness. And I was in the hospital because I have to perform, and I'm thinking I have two blood clots in my legs.
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I have 18 medications they're sending me home with. I have a feeding tube because I wasn't able to eat. How, how who's going to stay with me? And the Holy Spirit had to be working in him. He turns and he looks at me. While I'm in the hospital, he says, babe, I signed up for sickness. You're going to be okay.
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And that broke me. That did it. I said, okay, he's not going anywhere and it allowed me to just relax. Wow, wow. So where are you now with your relationship with Jesus? With how your how are you serving him? What brought you here? I had gotten into another performative stage with, I think, just serving God. Being a Martha.
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I had a martha's heart. I have to do all these things. And one of my friends who was going here. So you need to come to an outdoor service which you were preaching at, love letters from God on First John, and you preached about God's love. And I feel like the Lord was like, you need to sit down, you need to rest, and you need to be fed because I love you just for you.
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And so I never stop coming looking for that because I really needed to, I guess, be read, I guess retold that I don't have to perform that this you would talk a lot about grace and it being like a waterfall. And I think I just had such a works based, not salvation, but to just be in good standing with God, right?
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That it just freed me and it made me just feel so much closer that I want to use my gifts to share God's love with other people. You know? What is your particular niche? You feel like women who have anxiety and who have lost themselves and forgotten their I didn't identify is not in being a wife, a mom, a daughter, but in Christ who sits at the right hand of God.
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Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. What message would you give to somebody who felt like they needed to earn that? They felt at least some of the holes that are the the need that you felt growing up, you had it in, I mean, in an extreme form with your mother's rejection and everything, I would actually have to say probably something you're not expecting, which is forgive.
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I needed to forgive her so that I could be free. Another passion of mine is wives. So encouraging wives to be godly wives and love their husbands, but love God. And I was like doing this like cute Bible study recipes to a more savory sweet marriage. And the first recipe was on forgiveness. And as I was preparing, the Holy Spirit was like, so when are you gonna forgive your mother?
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And I'm like, are you serious? What do you mean? And long story short, after I got saved, I didn't know where she was. For like years. We didn't talk and I would pray for her salvation. And she did get saved. And she came back into my life. But I hated her. I really did, because just all the times of calling me on my birthday saying, I'm gonna come pick you up next week.
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And I wasn't here for them for months, calling me one time telling me, I want you to be miserable like I am. Just the way she treated me was terrible. And when he spoke to me with the you need to forgive her, I said, okay, then, if you want me to do that, you going to have to help me.
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And that really freed me because her and I have a really good relationship now. Wow. Yeah. That's awesome. I wasn't open to it before. She was trying. But now I would just let people know, you know, that part where it talks about if you don't forgive, you'll be tortured, right? I never understood it, but my unforgiveness, if she called me, I would go on extreme panic, anxiety, just all these things.
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I was being tortured. Mother's day was horrible for me, holidays horrible for me. And I don't have to deal with that anymore because I let it go. So that would be my first thing. Is whoever you holding something against, let it go. Yeah, yeah. Well, Brandi, I can see why my wife, my daughter love you. And I'm glad that you're a part of their lives.
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And I'm really glad you're here. Thanks for sharing your story with us. Thank you for having me.
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Thanks for listening to Faith stories. We do this podcast because we believe that Jesus can do anything and everything. So. You're listening to this episode and you feel like you want Jesus to do more in your life than you can reach out to us. You can find the address in the description of the podcast, but we would love for you to reach out because we want to meet you where you are and then take you further along with Jesus.
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Thanks again for listening.