Jennifer Bolejack Ortiz, Testimony of Transformation

My name is Jennifer Bolac Ortiz. I am a mother of three. My oldest is in college, then I have a 12-year-old and a six-year-old. My story, Psalms 34:18, that verse immediately always is kind of the summary of my story, where it says that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and those who are crushed in spirit. And my journey has definitely taken me through the times of having broken hearts, being brokenhearted and being crushed. So the first part, I married Bradley Bolack, and he became the associate pastor of Celebration 7th Day Adventist Church. We did ministry together. He preached and I did music, and it was a beautiful partnership. He is the father to all three of my children. And our journey took us to... my son was about six months old. He had suffered from anxiety and depression since I had known him, and I think just with the weight of the ministry and everything kind of piling on top of him, he took his life. And that was in November of 2018. So he left me as a single mother, as a widow, to at the time it would have been 12, 6, and 6 months old, basically newborn. I had never had a loss before that, and so this was the first time that I had ever experienced grief. To hear the term 'broken heart,' I didn't have a frame of reference before, and this truly, there's no way anybody could possibly articulate what it feels like to have a broken heart, where it just hurts. It hurts so much that it's not just a mental kind of hurt, it's more than an emotional kind of hurt, it's a physical kind of pain, and it just hurts so much you can't breathe. I was definitely in a place of hopelessness. I struggled so much. I had a lot of great advice, and I immediately went to see a Christian counselor, process through things. It helped my family. We did family counseling together, and through that I was able to grow. I grappled with a lot of different feelings, especially anger. And my anger at first was directed all towards Bradley and his decision to take his life. Why would he do this? Why would he leave me with raising the children by myself? Why would he give up like that on me? And then there was a song by Lauren Daigle called 'Rescue,' where she says, 'I will send out an army to meet you in the middle of your hardest night. It's true. I will rescue you. I will send out an army to find you in the middle of the darkest night. It's true. I will rescue you.' And I heard that song and it made me so angry with God. It made me so angry because I thought, why? What is this promise? Where are these angel armies that you promised to send when your children are suffering, when your son was suffering, when my husband, the father of my children, is suffering? Where were you? I was so mad at God. I was so mad. And when I spoke to my counselor, he said, 'Let me challenge you in a different way. How do you know that God didn't rescue Bradley from his overwhelming feeling of anxiety, from the depression, from all these demands that he felt like he couldn't meet? And every day he's waking up in pain and he's waking up suffering. Maybe this was God's way of rescuing him.' And that completely shifted my mind and made me do a 180. Honestly, that moment is what helped me to see God in a brand new way. And so funny to say that because you suffer a loss like that and you're struggling, and you have your day-to-day and your kids are kids, and so to have to try to do this by yourself, but then to think about how good God is to everybody despite the brokenheartedness and despite the things that are bad in this world, God is still good. So that was a huge shift for me. I did heal from that. I met Javier, who was a military man, and he had three of his own children. We kind of brought together and we did marry, and he just brought so much adventure and light in a different way to my life and to my children's lives. But a month after we got married, he was rediagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer. And so we spent our year married together in and out of hospitals, radiation, chemo. If any of you have ever had a loved one who had cancer, if you've ever been a support person for them, if you struggle going through cancer yourself, you know the treatment, you know the pain, you know the roller coasters, the ups and downs. That was hard. That was very hard. So when you go back to the verse and I think about being brokenhearted, and then when he says that he's close to those who are crushed in spirit, when you watch somebody that you love who is in so much pain and you can't do anything, you're so helpless, you can't help them. There's nothing you can do. You've given them all the medication you can to help with pain management, and there was a point for about a month and a half towards the end of Javier's life where every night he would beg me to pray that God would take him because he was suffering so much and he hurt so much. And I just said, 'Any, what can I do? How can I help? I can get you a warm compress or cold or something. I can't give you any more medication.' And he would say, 'Pray, baby, pray.' I was like, 'Okay, okay, I'll pray. What do you want me to pray for? You know God can take away the pain.' And he said, 'No, pray that he just lets me rest. Just let me rest.' When you are crushed and you have a loved one ask you to pray that they die, I can't even... there are no words to describe. There's really no more being crushed in spirit than that. He did finally was laid to rest after his battle. At the end of it all, God is good. Our families, his ex-wife and I became very good friends, and our kids are still really good friends. I tell them they will always be my kids even though I had only known them for a short time. We were only married for a short time, but the bond that our families have formed, and because my kids experienced grief already, it's so amazing to think of God putting different puzzle pieces in place for exactly what needed to happen and when. And when Javier died, my kids were only concerned about his kids because they already knew what it felt like to lose their dad. The way that our kids have been able to heal together is incredible, and it's only by the grace of God because this would have happened no matter what. Javier's cancer would have come back, he would have died, but he was able to die in a loving home with his wife, with a family around, and leave his children in a way that they had the support to be able to come out of it. And it's just incredible when you think of it that way, just how amazing our God is. So whatever it is, if I believe that you are good above all and that you mean good for those who love you no matter what, then my life is truly in your hands, my children's lives are in your hands, my husband's life is in your hands. You make the decisions. I will live my life for you, and that's it.