(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

Good morning. Welcome to the final Faith Stories class of the summer. I'm glad to see everyone here this morning and just want to remind you this this this is the last class for the year so don't come don't come here next week. 

Next week is there's no connection classes it's Labor Day weekend so we're gonna have the services will still be happening but no class and then we will roll into the fall programming in two weeks so I just want to make sure you were aware of that. I am going to go ahead and introduce our final speakers for the summer Matt and Katie Brown. They have been married for 14 years and have two children Lucas who's 10 and Mia who is 7. They've been here at Faith Church for four years where Matt volunteers here on the IT support team and Katie is on the Women of Faith Bible Study Committee and does some work with faith kids as well. 

Matt works as a radiologist and Katie was working as a speech pathologist but now stays home with the kids. They both enjoy swing dancing, board games, hiking and reading and various other interests some of which you may or may not hear about in their story so let me pray for them and we'll get going. Heavenly Father thank you for this morning for this chance to gather together. 

Thank you for this class and just the many stories that we've heard over this summer about how you've been at work and I pray for Matt and Katie this morning. I pray that you would just give them just a peaceful mind, calm nerves and the words to say and I just pray that our hearts would be open to hearing about you ultimately Lord and I just thank you for for how you are at work in all of our lives and I pray this in your name amen. Matt and Katie come on up. 

Hello everyone. Good morning. Thank you for coming to our faith story. 

As you heard I'm Matt. I'm Katie. And this is our story. 

Start with kind of my childhood. I grew up, yes it worked, I grew up on the south side of Indian Greenwood. Two younger sisters. 

This is me and my sisters and my dad hiking probably McCormick's Creek. That's where we went most of the time. So grew up attending a non-denominational church. 

That church has always been a part of my life. I've you know have always believed in God, grown up in that tradition and there was never really a time I didn't know God though about when I was 12 I did kind of consciously make the choice, no I am going to follow God and follow Christ. More pictures. 

This is me with our dog Sandy. This will be relevant in a little bit kind of. And then went to Center Grove High School, was involved in all sorts of things at school. 

I was in Boy Scouts, Taekwondo, band, played in the pep band, so went to the basketball games where we sat behind the opposing goal and tried to distract the free throw shooters. Was in the academic teams and also was involved in a group that did a Friday morning Bible study at the school and led that a couple of times. I think I have one more. 

Two more. So this is me with my mom and sisters in our Taekwondo uniforms. We all did Taekwondo. 

It was a fun family activity and like I said I was in Boy Scouts. So I also grew up in Greenwood with my parents and my younger brother Mike. Okay there's me and my brother and my parents and my brother and I. There's me with our dog Sandy. 

We both had yellow Labradors named Sandy. That's the extent of the relevance. I could not not put in the dog pictures. 

I grew up going to church and knew and loved Jesus from a young age. I grew up in the Lutheran Church and was also involved in FCA or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in middle school and high school. I was not an athlete but just involved in the group. 

Was welcome to all. I continued to grow and deepen my faith as I grew older and understood more what it meant to trust in God for my salvation. So there's a picture of me Girl Scouts. 

So we knew each other through the academic teams. We were on Quiz Bowl together, Academic Super Bowl. We're friends but didn't really hang out much until my senior year when we were both looking for prom dates and we had a mutual friend set us up as prom dates. 

So prom was actually our third date. We decided to do a couple of dates beforehand. Who remembers the movie Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I'm sorry but that was our first date. 

We went to Arby's and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Somehow it survived. So we started dating into my senior year and then at the end of that summer I left for Purdue. 

Katie had one more year of high school still but I went to Purdue was studying nuclear engineering there. For me college was a great time. I had a strong community. 

Friends from high school who were there and connections with the church there and then also as Ann Marie mentioned we both joined the swing dancing clubs at school. This was actually from a competition that we got randomly paired together. My mom photoshopped out the number tag that would have showed that. 

But and really the swing dancing group is where a lot of our college friends were still in touch with are from. Then after Purdue I went to IU for med school which brought me back to Indianapolis. And on to you. 

So I had another year of high school. So after Matt left for Purdue I finished my senior year and then the next year went to IU to study speech pathology. My graduation photo. 

In college I had a lonely first year. Not many of my friends from high school had gone to IU and it took me a while to find a good group of friends that I felt welcomed into. Near the end of my freshman year I got invited to go to a Navigators meeting by a girl on my dorm floor. 

I remember that first night there was a circle of people standing around talking before the meeting and I was standing on the outskirts of the circle. I remember how happy I felt when the people in the circle just opened up to welcome me into it and asked me how my week was going. It was very meaningful to me to feel included and welcomed after a lonely season. 

I got involved in Navigators and experienced a huge time of spiritual growth and deeper understanding of my faith. I learned more about how to study the Bible by doing things like inductive studies, finding cross references, looking up Greek and Hebrew words. I developed a more regular practice of spiritual disciplines like scripture memory and I learned from the example of others how to ask good questions and to welcome others in as I had been welcomed. 

My senior year I got the opportunity to lead a Bible study for the first time for other women in Navigators and this is a picture of my senior graduating class from Navigators with some of them some of my good friends there. Because we were at different colleges Matt and I spent most of our relationship long distance and so we spent a lot of time talking to each other in the early days of video calls on our computers. One of the things we talked about a lot was our faiths including differences in the church traditions we had grown up in. 

These conversations were challenging at times but as we talked we both grew in our understanding of what we believed and why we believed it and came to understand together what the essential truths of our faith were and what we could hold more loosely. The year after Matt started med school I started my master's degree for speech pathology at IU Bloomington still continuing our relationship long distance. I am graduating. 

Two years later I graduated with my master's degree and got a job in a school doing speech therapy at a school on the south side of Indianapolis. Seven years after we began dating we were thrilled to finally be living in the same city and we got married. So I will admit this is a recreation. 

We went back but this is me proposing that the gazebo down in Bloomington. Yes we my mom was not present with the camera for the actual event. What did you say? It's close to the union it's at the Rosewell house which is like there's a romantic tradition in Bloomington you're supposed to like if you kiss someone there at midnight you'll end up marrying them or something like that so it's a romantic spot on campus but it is near the Union there. 

So yes we after seven years finally in the same city and got married and this starts a season of many transitions and the pattern we'll bring out is just how God provided for us through these transitions. So after we got married I still had one more year of medical school and not to go too deep into the details but the way medical training works is that during that final year you are applied for postgraduate training called residencies and so for me that meant about 30 total interviews during that year most of them in driving distance. I flew out to New Jersey and down to Texas one in Miami that was terrible and at the end of the process I submit a ranked list of how I like the programs. 

All the programs meant ranked list of how they like the applicants and a computer tells you where you're going so for me and so March of 2013 the computer says I'm we're going to Johnson City Tennessee for one year and then Toledo Ohio for four years after that. The program starts July 1st so late March to July 1st is the time you have and all of the graduates have to figure out okay how do we make this actually work. So we set up some apartment tours down in Johnson City on a Saturday because I'm still in school Katie's working and meanwhile Katie's looking for places to work now less than a year out of school changing jobs and while we were there what was it you said Thursday you had found a job posting applied for it Friday got a call back and said we'll actually be there tomorrow can I interview on Saturday yeah sure so that worked great for her. 

The apartments we had set up to look at didn't work as well. One person who was supposed to show us two of the options no showed the others ended up being a bit questionable. Turns out the people who put the pictures online are really good at making things look good. 

So we were we were discouraged by that and Katie goes off to her interview and while interviewing the the person told her oh you should check out these apartments. We drove past them afterwards they look nice enough for what we could see from the outside and you know put in the application there off of the strength of that recommendation and it really ended up being a nice location for us so and I got the job and she got the job so yes not at all how we had planned for things to work out but as we will see through many of these transitions God provided for us you know similarly we knew we were gonna be there for a year we needed to get plugged into a church quickly and the very first church we went and visited which was Grace Fellowship Church and that was a great fit for us we wanted to get plugged into a community group they were starting a new community group for newly married couples right as we were getting there we were kind of the old married couple of the group having been married for a year already one of the couples had literally gotten married the previous week so but you know that community was great for us great to have people to work through the challenges of you know newly married life great to have community there because Johnson City gorgeous area in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains go as far east into the point of Tennessee as you want and you might almost get there it is the tip of Tennessee we had no connections there we had no friends or family before we got there so that community was very important to us you know a year later we were moving up to Toledo we had a full year for this one it was less exciting of a story you know Katie had another fortuitous job opening she had been having trouble finding school jobs in Toledo and that's you she likes working with the children not in the hospitals and again right before we move she there's a job posting for one of the schools in Toledo she gets the email can you interview today while we were sitting there packing up boxes so yes yes we could I was digging my my professional clothes out of the boxes that we already had packed so I could put something on for my video interview that day yes and once again it worked out and got the job once again not how we would have chosen to do things but you know that was she stayed at that school all four years you were there in Toledo once again we get there we have four years but you still want to get plugged in with a church community and this time it was the second church we visited but we were found a good church home that McCord Road Christian Church up there we again found a community group this time for not newlyweds per se but young married couples other couples our age some of them with children just the ability to build that community and have that support because Toledo is closer to family for us but not home we didn't really have pre-existing connections so that was four years then I had one more year of training this time a more normal application process where I got to apply and get offers and pick a place and between offers in Ann Arbor Cincinnati and st. Louis we chose to go down to st.

Louis to do my fellowship training and the crazy thing of the timing is we get down there it's July I'm starting a new job for a year and I'm already starting to apply for okay what do I do after I finally finish and that's just how the timing works you're applying in like July for starting the next July and we knew we wanted to come back to Indianapolis and you know right like within a week after we got to st. Louis a job posting went up here in Carmel with Northwest radiology and I put in the application and by September had the job lined up and I'm still there so you know that the timing is again shows God's providence for our lives and his plan for us so finished training moved to Carmel and the summer of 2019 all right so I'm gonna jump back a little bit to when we lived in Toledo in 2015 we were excited to find out that I was pregnant we started to think about baby names and plan our nursery and all the things you do when you find out you're having a baby I wasn't I wasn't feeling very sick but being my first pregnancy I didn't have anything to compare it to so I didn't think much about it but when I went in for my first ultrasound at 10 weeks we sadly learned that there was no heartbeat and I was going to miscarry we were devastated and at the time felt very isolated and alone in this grief well I now know many women who have sadly experienced a miscarriage I didn't know anyone else who had had one at the time I'm not sure if this was because people didn't talk about miscarriage as openly at the time as they do now or just because of my relatively young age when it happened miscarriage is a confusing loss to figure out how to grieve we'd only told our immediate family that we were pregnant and afterward it was so difficult to talk about that we were only able to tell a few of our closest friends at the time that was the one of one of the things we learned that we wished we had told more of our close friends and family that we were pregnant early in our pregnancy so that they could be praying for us and supporting us during that time and more ready and able to help if something went wrong again during this time a dear friend of mine gave me a necklace with an anchor on it I've got it here she told me that it was a reference to Hebrews 619 which says we have this hope as an anchor for the soul firm and secure she reminded me that while I hoped that one day I would have a baby and get to be a mom I also had a hope in something greater and my hope and the promises of God would be an anchor that would hold me fast no matter my circumstances a few months later we were so thankful to find out that I was pregnant again but it was hard to be excited this time and I was filled with anxiety that I would have another miscarriage I remember being in church once one day in this season and singing the worship songs while I held on to my anchor necklace and prayed through my anxiety we were singing the song cornerstone as I found myself singing this verse when darkness seems to hide his face I rest on his unchanging grace in every high and stormy gale my anger holds within the veil it was a beautiful reminder of God holding me fast in this anxious season this time when we went in for our ultrasound we were so thankful to hear the heartbeat of our healthy baby our son Lucas was born in 2016 and we were also blessed with the birth of our daughter Mia in 2018 we were so thankful for the healthy births of our two children after this difficult season but this would not be the end of our need to hold fast to the anchor of our faith during difficult circumstances in fact in 2015 around the time of our miscarriage marked the beginning of a series of difficult things happening in the lives of our family and close friends that honestly continues to this day we're intentionally being a little vague about some of the details because many of these things are not fully our stories to share but that same year two different sense of close friends got divorced and another close friend went through a faith crisis and walked away from her faith one of our siblings had been providing foster care to two children for many months and what was expected to be a long-term placement leading to adoption instead they were unexpectedly unexpectedly moved to a different placement and we grieved the loss of these children in our family as well in 2017 my mom was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease while she was still in her 50s one of her siblings needed open-heart surgery after a less invasive surgery was unsuccessful we were thankful to move back to the Indianapolis area in the summer of 2019 there we are the day we moved in with our kids in our new house but you may notice by the timing the pandemic hit in the summer in spring of 2020 before we had found a church home or made many friends leading to many months of isolation and loneliness while Matt worked long hours at the hospital and I was at home alone with our two young kids since we've moved back to Indiana three of our grandparents have passed away one of our nephews was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of two my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer while also being the primary caregiver for my mom and after one of our siblings had adopted two kids with complex medical needs one of them passed away suddenly and unexpectedly through all of this grief and hardship we've seen God's provision and blessing in some clear ways our nephews and my dad's cancers are both thankfully in remission we started attending faith church regularly in the spring of 2022 after a long season of loneliness we were so thankful for the way we felt welcomed in here from the beginning I remember Jen Brightweiser inviting me to playground playdates on one of our first visits here another example is when I showed up for us the spring women's Bible study that first spring that we were here I didn't know anyone and I sat down at a table by myself a group of women who are already sitting at another table noticed me sitting by myself picked up their stuff and moved over to my table to sit with me and welcome me in it probably didn't seem like a big deal to them but it was significant to me and I was so thankful for it a similar story we were at one of the faith kids lunches early and when we're here and no we were sitting there didn't really have a group yet but Joey and Jenna made a point of coming over and sitting down and talking to us and just helping us feel welcomed and then I don't see Brittany in here I don't know if I ever told her this part of the story so as Henry said I support I'm on the IT support team and you know as Katie was getting plugged in was helping with the women of faith and the faith kids I'm like what do I do to help out and was looking for you know a role and Katie and I were talking about it's like I could help out with IT and the next day unsolicited I had an email from Brittany saying hey do you want to volunteer for the IT support team yes I don't know that she had bugged our house and heard that conversation no okay just a minor example but another example of just God saying yes you have this is where you should be some parts of our story continue to be very difficult there were ripple effects on our family from experiencing grief upon grief and it significantly affected the mental health of several members of our family my mom's Parkinson's disease has continued to progress and she is now significantly impacted by dementia in addition to her physical symptoms and needs full-time caregiving this is a daily grief as I mourn the slow loss of my mom we don't have a needy neat and tidy bow to wrap our story up we are still walking on this journey of life including both joy and it's grief we have seen God's blessing and provision in many areas of our lives and we know he is walking beside us through the difficult seasons as our hope in the in his promises anchors us through the storms and we look forward to the day he has promised us in Revelation 21 for when he will wipe away every tear from our eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away we've got a few more family photos here oh yes this is a shortly after moving to Carmel and these are pictures of outings from this last winter and spring up to Michigan skiing was Mia's first time skiing and then out to Smoky Mountain National Park

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)