I Tried to Ignore God, But He Chased Me Down | Barb's Story

Barb is quiet as she searches for the right words. More than an hour into our conversation, she wants to make sure to get this part right.

"It's not that I was mad at God—I didn't really think about God," she says, letting out a long sigh. "It just felt like 'you're on your own. You made your bed, now you gotta deal with life.' I didn't feel judged by Him as much as—like, I left Him."

Nearly fifty years ago, fresh out of high school, Barb's world turned upside down when she learned she was pregnant. In 1970s Catholic culture, an unplanned pregnancy was cause for significant scandal. Friends and relatives encouraged her to move away to carry and deliver the baby quietly. She agreed to give the child up for adoption.

When her baby girl was born, the nurses didn't even let Barb see her before whisking her away. They pressured her to relinquish her maternal rights, but she couldn’t sign her baby away. Barb left the hospital and returned to her dad’s house and her baby went to a foster home.  A week later, wracked with regret, the nineteen-year-old marched back to the adoption agency and met her baby for the first time.

Only nineteen, Barb knew keeping Amber would change everything. She had no idea how much. 

Months later, during a routine checkup, Amber was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, affecting her ability to walk and talk. In the blink of an eye, Barb went from "young and carefree" to "young single mother of a disabled child."

"I got a lot of advice from a lot of people," Barb recalls, her voice steady but tinged with old hurt. "'You have your whole life ahead of you—put her in an institution and go on with your life.' People would say, 'Nobody's ever going to want you with someone else's child, much less with one that's disabled.'"

As much as Barb was proud and defiant, those words burrowed deep. After a while, she began to believe them. Maybe nobody would ever see her, know her, want her. She wouldn't have said God abandoned her—rather, she felt she had walked out on Him. Where that left her was lonely and angry.

Barb had been raised Catholic—her parents, with no church background themselves, worked multiple jobs to send all six kids to Catholic school. She knew about God, knew Jesus died for sins. But it was transactional, distant. "It was more like keeping God happy by my behavior," she explains. "Generally, I would consider how God felt about something after I already did what I wanted.”

I had grown up with a lot of anger, and there was a lot of anger in our home," she admits. "But I didn't care. I just viewed it as me and Amber against the world."

For the first two years of Amber's life, it was just the two of them, struggling to make a life together. Then Barb started dating Rick, a coworker who would change their duo into a trio.

"The first time he met Amber, he took one look at her and she just owned him," Barb says, smiling at the memory. "He said he fell in love with her before he fell in love with me."

Rick, it turns out, did want Barb—disabled child and all. They married in 1980 and just celebrated 45 years together. Their son Matt was born not long after. But even with Rick's faithful love, Barb still carried that anger like armor.

"I had so much anger in my heart that it was hard to let Rick in."

Then came Puddy Seccomb.

Puddy was everything Barb wasn't—a woman with social standing who knew people with money, who had the big house for hosting parties. She was chairwoman of the United Cerebral Palsy telethon where Barb had connected through Amber.

"For some reason, she decided I should have that title," Barb says, still puzzled years later. "So she did all the work but named me the chairman. I didn't realize what she was doing for me, but she took me under her wing."

More importantly, Puddy invited Barb to Bible Study Fellowship. In her youth, Barb had been taught that only Catholic priests could interpret Scripture. "I was never allowed to open the Bible myself," she explains. "I was very leery that a regular person could study it."

But she went, walking in timidly with Puddy. They were studying Romans, already at chapter 7, where Paul wrestles with his sin: "The things I don't want to do, I do, and the things I want to do, I don't do. Who can rescue me from this? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ."

"It just hit me differently—it became personal for me," Barb says. "That 'sin'—that was my sin that cost Jesus His life."

She pauses, remembering the moment. "It should have devastated me more to realize that all the sin in my life had cost Him His life, but it was almost more of a relief. Like, maybe there is someone who sees me, and knows me, and wants me, and would seek after me."

The young woman who thought nobody would want her—not with her past, not with her disabled child, not with her anger—discovered she had been wanted all along.

"In the middle of that Bible study is where God reached down and showed me that I mattered to Him."

The transformation wasn't instant. Shortly after her conversion, during a financial crisis so severe she was heading to the food stamp office, Barb sat with her Bible study materials and said out loud: "I don't know why I am doing Bible study when we don't even have food in the house."

Still new to Scripture, not knowing where to find specific verses, she opened her Bible randomly. It fell to Matthew 6: "Why do you worry about what you will eat? Your heavenly Father knows you need these things. If I feed the birds, why won't I feed you?"

"It was like He was in the room with me," Barb says quietly.

Over the years, God would prove His faithfulness repeatedly. That first glimpse of God’s grace in that Bible study has grown into a faith that has shaped the lives of Barb, Rick, Amber, Matt, and more. In the years since, God has continued to convince Barb that he fully knows her, and fully loves her. They have been transformed by the gospel, in more ways than one.

The Catholic girl who thought faith meant keeping God happy discovered something revolutionary: she didn't leave God. He never left her. Even when she was eighteen and terrified, twenty-three and angry, heading to the food stamp office with no hope—He was there, waiting for her to realize she was already wanted, already chosen, already His.