Candace Nassar (00:00
Leslie, thank you for your willingness to open your heart and share your journey so that other women walking the path of raising children without moms in their life, for whatever reason, can find comfort and hope. So welcome.
Leslie Colburn (00:14)
Thank you so much for having me, Candice. I’m super excited to be here.
Candace Nassar (00:18)
We’re so excited to have you speaking to our moms and we also have some dads that are listeners So I know it’s going to be a real blessing So first of all, can you just start off by telling us a little about your mom and what she was like and the kind of influence she had on you growing up?
Leslie Colburn (00:34)
So my mom, her name was Jill, and she was an amazing mom. I just, I’m so grateful for the kind of mom that she was because now as a mom, I get to take what she taught me and be the kind of mom that I want to be to my girls. She was a single mom. I have one sister. And so she was a single mom for all of our childhood really from about the time I was one. And then she was an educator. So we had the summers with her and then she would teach school in the winter.
Candace Nassar (01:05)
Mmm.
Candace Nassar (01:09)
Mm.
Leslie Colburn (01:10)
So one of the things that I love, love, love about my mom was her sense of adventure. And she would take us on road trips in our little Honda car. And we would just go see a lot of the United States in our car. We would take off time in the summer and go on those adventures. And she would have like Twizzlers and snacks that we didn’t normally get in our day-to-day life. And she would.
Candace Nassar (01:32)
fun.
Leslie Colburn (01:33)
we’d have those treats and like raviolis out of a can and things like that so she was very adventurous for sure. She was also a very so in her education I don’t know if you if Jim Fay is still a prevalent he’s a writer and a speaker and he was he had love and logic ways to raise your kids with love and
Candace Nassar (01:52)
Yes, I love that book.
Leslie Colburn (01:52)
Yes, so as a teacher she took a seminar on that and then as then she would bring it into how she parented my sister and me. And it’s a love and logic for anybody that doesn’t know it’s raising your kids with empathy, natural consequences and responsibility. And so I remember her raising us like that and so like in the time of my life when I was.
Candace Nassar (01:59)
wow.
Leslie Colburn (02:12)
you know, learning the hard way, I guess you could say in my teens, it sounded something like, Leslie, I’m so sorry that you just wrecked your friend’s dad’s girlfriend’s car. That was a bummer. What are you what’s your plan? What are you going to do about it? And then it evolved into basically I had to pay for it. And she well, I had to borrow money from her. But she then charged me interest on money.
Candace Nassar (02:23)
Yeah
Candace Nassar (02:30)
Mm-hmm.
Candace Nassar (02:37)
smart mama.
Leslie Colburn (02:38)
I know. And at the time I was like, this is just cruel. It’s just cruel and mean. And now I raise my girls a lot in the same way, like natural consequences and that empathy, you know, you got to be responsible.
Candace Nassar (02:50)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s such a great, we actually in our curriculum have a whole lesson. We have a biblical parenting series and I do a whole lesson on boundaries basically with kids and how to do it. And we talk a good bit about that book. So just as an aside, I think it’s fantastic.
Leslie Colburn (03:10)
My mom would probably be right on board with that. She was a wonderful mom.
Candace Nassar (03:14)
Great. Well, she sounds, yeah, she sounds terrific. And, I love that. And I love the adventure. know you, I wonder if that’s why you ended up in Wyoming. I don’t know where you raised there. Okay. Cause to me that seems like an adventurous place to go.
Leslie Colburn (03:23)
I was raised here, yep.
Leslie Colburn (03:29)
Especially in the winter. No, it’s beautiful.
Candace Nassar (03:37)
Okay. Cause to me that seems like an adventurous place to go. Yeah. That’s great. Well, so tell us how old you were when you lost her. And how did that loss shape your early adult years?
Leslie Colburn (03:40)
Yeah, so I was married at 25 and my husband has two girls, so we had an immediate family. When I was pregnant with my first, my first pregnancy, my daughter, I was 26. And two months after she was born, my mom was diagnosed with cancer.
So in this time when I was learning to be a mom, my mom sick and I was taking care of her as well and then she passed away almost exactly a year after she was diagnosed so my daughter was 14 months old and I was just this mom without a mom and I think so much of my what I thought my identity was was her daughter.
And so I now was this mom without a mom and trying to figure out what that looked like and all of this loss and grief of losing my best friend and the woman who was so wise and had been there my whole life. My biggest cheerleader, right? My support.
Candace Nassar (04:28)
Sure.
Candace Nassar (04:36)
Right. Yeah. And somebody you could go to and you knew you would get good advice that she, you respected how she raised you and she was obviously quite strong and a learner and all the things. So I can just imagine how that was. It was just something that you just thought you would have and then you didn’t. So,
Leslie Colburn (04:54)
Yeah, and think you’re right when you just don’t expect life to go a certain way and then it does. It goes some in a direction you never even dreamed about.
Candace Nassar (05:05)
And it’s really hard because we want to question God. And I’m sure that you had quite a bit of grief at that time. And then here you were trying to deal with a toddler. Let’s let’s just talk about how you navigated that. How did the Lord work in your life at that time?
Leslie Colburn (05:24)
You know, definitely, when we talk about grief, it’s not linear. And you know, I think there’s those, the stages of grief, and if you’re anything like me, or you like the syllabus, you like the boundaries and the way to get through something, that sounds really great. But grief is not linear. And I found myself in all of these feelings of loss.
And so, I struggled with who I was and my identity and being angry and questioning God. I was raised Catholic, so we would go to Catholic mass every week. It was more about the religion, the steps that you go through and not so much about the relationship you have with God. My husband was a Christian when he found the Lord when he was young and we got married.
Candace Nassar (06:01)
Mm-hmm.
Leslie Colburn (06:12)
So after my mom died, I just remember this moment of sitting in the car in the driveway with my husband. And I just had these feelings of so much emotion and uncertainty and not knowing who I was. he just said, you are a daughter. You are a daughter of a king. And it was in that planting of that seed.
Candace Nassar (06:25)
Mm-hmm.
Leslie Colburn (06:36)
that I started to navigate this relationship with God. It was just the starting point and it wasn’t perfect from then on out, but it was the seed that I am still a daughter and I’m still Jill’s daughter, but there’s something so much more, yeah, yeah. And so I think there’s that paradigm shift of I’m not just Jill’s daughter, there’s so much more.
Candace Nassar (06:47)
greater.
Leslie Colburn (06:56)
to being the daughter of the king.
Candace Nassar (06:58)
That’s so great. See, that’s what I love is when God meets us in our suffering and He knows what it takes to bring us to our knees and things like that are just a perfect example of how He brought you to a dependency and an obvious feeling that you needed more and you felt that loneliness that drove you to Him.
I love that. your testimony then where in the process did you actually become a believer?
Leslie Colburn (07:29)
It wasn’t until after my second daughter was born, so it was about two years later, it was gradual. You think about the ocean and how the sand gradually, the water gets deeper as you walk on the sand. It was a gradual thing. I had my second daughter and we went to church and we went to a new church where it was Christmas.
Candace Nassar (07:37)
Mm-hmm.
Leslie Colburn (07:51)
And I’m so gratefult, for choosing that day to go in because it actually wasn’t Christmas. It was like a few weeks before Christmas. And they, when we walked in, I remember just standing in the back. I was very uncertain. And they were playing a familiar song from my childhood, a Christmas song. And I’m so grateful for that because again, he met me where I was. He knew I wasn’t ready to move into a church that didn’t meet me where I was. And that song.
It was familiar to me. It reminded me of my childhood, of Christmas, of the season. And that was where I knew I was in the right place.
Candace Nassar (08:24)
You were so comforted. felt the, I’m sure you felt the arms of the Lord just in embracing you right then. So that’s, that’s beautiful. And so I’m sure though it’s content, the process continued, right? I became a believer as an adult as well, and it took me many years to instill to this day, right? We’re being, we’re being formed and shaped by him, but,
Leslie Colburn (08:32)
Yeah.
Leslie Colburn (08:44)
Yeah. Yeah.
Candace Nassar (08:47)
When you had those emotions of feeling lost and not having your mom around with your daughters, how did you take those emotions to God? What did you do?
Leslie Colburn (08:57)
So when we talk about grief, grief is really when the emotions tied to a loss. And it can be anything. The bigger the loss and the losing something that’s important to us, the bigger the loss, the greater the feelings.
So even we can have our ice cream cone and drop it on the floor and we lose that and it meant something to us and that’s that can be grief right just this little bit of grief but it’s something that we it it’s not as big it didn’t mean as much to us as say losing a person.
So one of the things that I did that really helped me was I invited people into that loss and one of the biggest components of that was going to see a counselor talking about it with somebody who knew how to help me. I describe it as I felt stuck. I felt stuck in this grief. I was just so sad, even after years later. And so I went and talked to a counselor. And one of the things that she told me was,
If you’re angry with God, don’t you think he can handle that? Have you told him that?
Candace Nassar (10:08)
Right.
Leslie Colburn (10:08)
And it was this moment like, yeah, God is not some far away, distant God. He is right here. He is in this with us. He is walking with us. He’s holding our hand. He can handle me telling him that I am mad, that I’m sad, that I’m lost.
And that was a really pivotal thing for me to realize that I can have this conversation, he can handle it, and he’s okay with that.
Candace Nassar (10:33)
Yeah, that’s the lamenting, right? And I think that is so important. The Bible is full of that. we a lot of times think that we can, we just turn inward, right? And God is inviting us to let it go and to give it to Him. So, you’re bringing up grief in the process. So I think it’s a great time to just unpack your acronym for grief. So why don’t you do that?
Leslie Colburn (10:53)
Yeah, so I have an acronym that has really been a key component in my healing and it’s the acronym GRIEF, G-R-I-E-F. And it’s just some things that I have learned that have helped me. And I would love to share them with your listeners and hope that you can take a little bit from something that has helped me in grief.
So the first letter is G and it stands for grieve. We have to grieve. When we have this something that mattered to us, we have to have the feelings come, right? And the word grief actually comes from the Latin word grievous, which means heavy and weighty. And so I think back, it reminds me of
Candace Nassar (11:24)
Hmm.
Candace Nassar (11:35)
Mmm.
Leslie Colburn (11:38)
I grew up in Wyoming. In my first year of college, I went to school in my hometown. And about an hour outside of where I lived, there was this place called Hell’s Half Acre. Truly that is the name of it, Hell’s Half Acre. So Wyoming, there are a lot of mountains, but there’s a lot of plains.
Candace Nassar (11:49)
my goodness.
Leslie Colburn (11:54)
So Hell’s half acre it’s like this big divot in the ground like an inverted mountain. There’s just a deep crevices and it’s rocky and it’s dry and dirt and well this company, this filming company out in California decided that it would make a great location for the filming of one of their movies, which was a movie called Starship Troopers, came out in 1997. And it’s about aliens on another planet and Hell’s Halfacre looked like another planet.
So, In 1996, I’m in college. I have my best friend, Becky, who is this wonderful, tall, redheaded, fun person. She’s been my best friend since I was 12. We go to the call casting call for extras in this movie and we get called to go out to be an extra in this movie and it was a night filming. So it’s in middle of the night. We go out there. They bus us down into this house half acre and they take us into this tent where we are outfitted with these like soldier outfits because in that movie we’re going to be the soldiers that fight these aliens.
So we get this hard armor like these suits made of rubber and our hats are made of plastic and we get these rubber rifles and so we’re doing these different scenes and they’re yelling action and we have to run out of this spaceship and and like pretend like we’re shooting these
Candace Nassar (12:57)
Gosh.
Leslie Colburn (13:19)
aliens and they give us breaks every once in a while because we’ve got this heavy artillery like uniforms on and so about every hour they give us a 15 minute break and I remember with Becky we were gonna take our break, we sit down to take a break and every time we sat down Becky wanted to take off her like her outfit her military outfit and I was getting so mad because then every time I’d have to help her put her stuff back on. you know, we were tired, we were exhausted and needless to say, when they asked if we wanted to come back the following night, we said no, like we’re done. We did this once. We might have like a nanosecond in the film where we are being filmed. I don’t even know. But anyway, all this to say, grief is heavy and
Candace Nassar (14:00)
Yeah.
Leslie Colburn (14:03)
It’s the feelings that go with loss. And so we have to grieve. And sometimes just like that military outfit, we put it down and then we pick it back up for whatever reason, just the process of healing. It’s hard to just put down and leave, especially because this person meant so much to you. And I know that you and I talked to, when we grieve somebody, it isn’t always just through death.
We can grieve the loss of somebody through many other ways. Illness, they’re just not present. Like, proximal, maybe they moved away and they’re not close to you anymore. And so there’s this grief of these feelings of loss. it could be, there’s just lots of reasons that we lose somebody that we care about.
Candace Nassar (14:42)
Yeah. And I’m also thinking of just feeling the being cheated out of something. I mean, is that kind of part of that? And when you, know, and you start to feel sorry for yourself, I mean, I’ve definitely been through that just as I was sharing, I didn’t have an active mother present in my life, in my children’s life. And so, there are still times when I look around and see my friends who have their mothers and,
Leslie Colburn (14:47)
Yeah.
Candace Nassar (15:06)
you know, just that relationship still, and I just don’t have that. I don’t have that encouragement. And so what do you do with that, right?
Leslie Colburn (15:13)
Yeah, that’s definitely a feeling of just being cheated. I’ve thought that before. This is just not fair. it’s, you know, I just, so cheated. Well, and I think part of that in the same letter of G, we have to talk about mourning. The act of mourning is an expression of grief. So we have these feelings. What do we do with them?
I think, you know, the act of expressing that grief is part of the journey and that can be through tears. You know, it’s talking to somebody. I write, when I’m feeling those feelings, I write and it’s a really good form for me to express those feelings.
Candace Nassar (15:49)
Yeah, I actually journal and that and it helps me so much. And yeah, I love that because, know, in our country, we don’t like to feel grief. We don’t like to acknowledge it. I mean, you look at other cultures and they have like a whole process of grieving loss and and we are just like, let’s get over it and move on. And that’s not healthy. That’s not the way God designed us. I mean, if you look in the Bible, they mourned and they
Leslie Colburn (15:50)
Okay.
Leslie Colburn (16:16)
this.
Candace Nassar (16:17)
wore sat cloth and they do all those things, right? So I think our model is we should look at the biblical model instead of our culture and really take some time to process that and deal with it. So that’s really good. Yeah. Okay. So grief.
Leslie Colburn (16:33)
So the R is for Remember. I have felt like remembering my mom, remembering who she was, who she still is in the role that I play as a mom for my kids. It’s been really helpful for me to remember her. One of the things I do, have this necklace I wear all the time. It was hers and it’s a way for me to remember her and keep her.
in the present, really. And so people ever ask me about it, I’m like, oh, it’s my mom’s. I just very simply put it like that. And it can open a door for a conversation, or it just is a way for me to talk about my mom today. Yeah.
Candace Nassar (16:55)
Mm.
Candace Nassar (17:08)
Yeah, I like that. I do because that’s the other thing is we remember them. I’m sure that ministers to you in a different way, right? And we’re not trying to forget because that’s not healthy either. So I like that.
Leslie Colburn (17:22)
Well, and actually that reminds me, I was listening to one of your podcasts and one of your guests talked about the word legacy and how we think about legacy as something we leave behind, but it’s actually to set in motion.
Candace Nassar (17:27)
Yeah
Leslie Colburn (17:32)
my gosh, I was like, that is so amazing. My mom set so many things in motion. I want to carry them on. And I know that my girls will want to carry that on too. And so when we remember and talk about the things that matter to us in that person, it’s healing. I don’t want to just put everything in a box and forget about it. That’s not how we were designed.
Candace Nassar (17:54)
Yeah.
Candace Nassar (17:55)
Yeah, and I can see that you’re continuing traditions and things like that. That’s all part of the remembering.
Leslie Colburn (18:02)
Yeah, yeah. And so moving on to I, the I is for inviting. We need to invite people into our story. For a number of reasons, but when I invited a counselor into my grief, into this healing process, it was amazing. It helped me to see some truth. I was in my head so much and I was telling myself these stories and to invite somebody into that who had some knowledge about it helped me on my healing journey. She was able to say, hey, it’s okay to be mad about this. It’s okay to feel these feelings. Your mom mattered to you.
I was amazed when my daughter, my youngest daughter turned five, I started teaching again. I’m an educator as well. And I went back to school and I taught kindergarten. So my daughter was five and I was teaching kindergarten. Of the parents of those kindergarten kiddos, and there were about 45 students. So 45 mamas.
Five of us had moms who had passed away when we were young. Five out of 45. that’s, that’s God. That is God saying, hey, you need to invite people into, or if you’re not going to invite them in, I’m going to invite them into this. Because how healing is that to know that I’m not alone? There were other mamas who loved their moms the way that they loved their moms and they’d lost them.
Candace Nassar (19:01)
my goodness.
Wow, the odds. Yeah.
Leslie Colburn (19:21)
with young babies, like young, we had five-year-olds. that was God like gently inviting people into this for me, which I just, I’m so grateful for. And I’m still, I still know all of them.
Candace Nassar (19:22)
Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm.
Candace Nassar (19:33)
and that’s, you’re talking about community and the benefit of, I mean, first of all, God, you know, it’s James, right? He comforts us so that we can comfort others, right? And that’s exactly what you were probably able to do. Y’all were all comforting each other. Yeah, but also just that community support and knowing that you’re not alone. That’s a primary thing that we at MomQ just really talk about a lot is in our, we have gatherings, we have curriculum.
Leslie Colburn (19:47)
no.
Candace Nassar (19:59)
And it’s all about coming together and realizing that you can do these things that you that seems so hard and impossible with God’s help and with community and that support, especially if you don’t have your mother around, whether she’s lost or in another state or whatever. Anyway, love it. So inviting others in, great.
Leslie Colburn (20:19)
Can’t we all admit that raising kids is not easy? It’s just not. We need a community.
Candace Nassar (20:23)
Exactly! We need each other!
Candace Nassar (20:28)
Yes, and you know, and really Christian community where you know that it’s based on the principles in scripture and it’s not just something that people have come up with or made up or something that’s going to change over time, right, because we know God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. So that too is, I think, really important.
Leslie Colburn (20:48)
Yeah, yeah, I love that. So the E in grief is kind of a trifecta. It’s, we need to expect, we need to encourage, and we need to empathize. The example that I just gave of those four other moms who had lost their moms, I needed to expect that God is answering my prayers. He is comforting me.
You know, in this life, we’re going to have troubles. We’re not guaranteed everything’s going to be perfect. That’s just not how it’s going to be. But I can expect that God is going to provide opportunities and the community and the experiences and the comfort. When you’re grieving and when you’re so broken,
Candace Nassar (21:24)
Mm-hmm.
Leslie Colburn (21:29)
just that paradigm shift of expecting that this is going to be okay. And not okay in the way that you’re going to have your mom back or that this is going to ever be like it was before, but just that you’re going to find that comfort and you’re going to find that community. And God also gave me the opportunity to encourage, which is another part of that E.
I was able to encourage other mamas in a way that I hadn’t before and they were there to encourage me. We need to encourage people when we walk through hardships, that allows us to empathize with other people who have those hardships too. And empathizing, always, especially when I lost my mom, I just remember thinking nobody else has lost my mom.
And that’s true. I’m not you, losing your mom. I’m not any of these other mamas that were in that group. I’m not them losing their mom. I didn’t have that relationship. And so I can empathize, but I also need to be aware that it’s not my loss. And I need to be able to encourage them in a way that is good for them, but I’m not them. And so I think that that’s something to keep in mind as we
Candace Nassar (22:36)
That’s good.
Leslie Colburn (22:37)
as we are there for other people. It’s their journey.
Candace Nassar (22:39)
Yeah, you don’t want to minimize, right? It’s their journey and you don’t want to say, you know, it’s going to be okay or whatever, right? So.
Leslie Colburn (22:48)
Yeah, and I think, you know, when people say, know what you’re going through, that’s not a bad thing to say. It’s just, be aware that you are not them and you didn’t lose their mom in the way that they did or whatever their loss is. But there’s so much power and healing in being there for them. Even just saying, I’m not, I’m…
Candace Nassar (23:02)
Mm-hmm.
Leslie Colburn (23:04)
I don’t know the words to say. I don’t have the right words to say, but I’m going to sit right here with you. That’s okay. I think that that is one of the best things people can have done for me is to just be there. Yeah. Yeah.
Candace Nassar (23:06)
Right.
Right. Yeah.
Candace Nassar (23:16)
completely. Our model for that is in Joe because we saw his friends come in and just say all kinds of things they shouldn’t have said and they weren’t comforting at all. yeah, so just being present.
Leslie Colburn (23:25)
at all. And we don’t know. Sometimes we don’t have the words. I think just saying, don’t know, I don’t have, there aren’t words. There are no words. Because there just aren’t. Yeah.
Candace Nassar (23:35)
Hmm, that’s good. That’s good. And then the last one is faith.
Leslie Colburn (23:40)
It’s faith. Yep. It’s the biggest component. We have to have faith. We have to believe and know that God is carrying us through this. just like for me, it was, I remember being in my driveway and just, it’s not, it wasn’t this all healing in the moment realization. It was one little tiny step at a time. And Zachariah 4:10 says, do not despise small beginnings, for the Lord delights to see the work begin. And that has actually been something that I’ve kind of been praying on for the last couple of months. It’s the small steps and don’t.
Candace Nassar (24:07)
Mmm.
Leslie Colburn (24:17)
Don’t be afraid of that small step because guess what? When you’re in the middle of such deep grief and mourning, you can only take a small step, but you just take that next step. And God delights. Can you just picture him delighting to see the work begin for you taking that step toward him, just trusting in him, having full confidence in him.
Candace Nassar (24:25)
Mmm. Mmm.
Mm-hmm.
Leslie Colburn (24:36)
because his ways are not our ways. And I think that that’s where I was so long ago in the beginning. This is not my way. This was not supposed to happen. My ways are not his ways and his are so much greater than mine. Yeah.
Candace Nassar (24:39)
Mm-hmm.
Candace Nassar (24:44)
Mm-hmm.
Candace Nassar (24:48)
Much, much better. Yes, amen, amen. gosh, that’s really good. I love all of that. So why don’t you, I love that you write love letters to your daughters. I think that’s just a really neat tradition. And can you just share what those letters mean to you and to them?
Leslie Colburn (25:02)
Yeah, so Mother’s Day has been particularly hard for me. How do I honor my mom, who is no longer here, but still step into the role of being a mom that matters so much to my girls? And you know, those first Mother’s Day were particularly hard, but even now, it’s been 20, I won’t date myself, but it’s been over 20 years since my mom…
died and I still, Mother’s Day, I’m like, sometimes it just comes out of the blue and I have these feelings. So years ago when my girls were little, I started writing them love letters. I just wanted to remind them of who they were and whose they were. And I didn’t ever want them to wonder, not that they ever would, but I just never wanted them to wonder how much they meant to me and how much they mean to God.
And so I started writing love letters and I would share them with them and I tried to share them with other people. We have a restaurant here in Wyoming and so we would be open for Mother’s Day for Mother’s Day brunch. so sometimes I would put the little love letters on the tables to remind the moms that they mattered. And so about…
10 years ago, I thought, I want to write this into a book. So I wrote my first book and figured out how to publish it. my daughters at the time, were three and six. They illustrated it. So I just love that. Yeah, it was just really wonderful. And since then, I’ve published a total of six books. working on my seventh book. Actually, my seventh book is called Jilly Goat. So it’s in honor of my mom. So when we talk about ways to kind
Candace Nassar (26:18)
yeah.
Leslie Colburn (26:31)
I’m writing a book about Gilly Goat. so I have really enjoyed just sharing words of hope and words of faith and all of those things with readers. And again, it’s that expectation that God will put them, my words, where they need to go and hopefully encourage kids and…
Candace Nassar (26:49)
Sure.
Leslie Colburn (32:06.288)
mamas because who reads the most books well and grandmas. What do your grandkids call you or what? Nana. Okay, you’re Nana.
Candace Nassar (26:49)
Yes. Nana. Nana. That’s what I call myself since she’s only three and a half months old.
Leslie Colburn (26:49)
She doesn’t get to say, you get to pick it. And I’m Mimi. So all of the Mimi’s, Nana’s, and parents out there who get to cuddle up with their kids, my hope is that they can just be encouraged by those love letters that started out for my girls in honor of my mom.
Candace Nassar (27:03)
Yep, Mimi, okay.
Candace Nassar (27:18)
That’s so good. Gosh, I love that. I wish I had done that. so great idea. That’s true. I can do it for my granddaughter. Yeah. That’s right. Love that. gosh. Well, as we wrap this up, Leslie, if you could speak one word of hope into the heart of a mom who doesn’t have her mom today, what would it be?
Leslie Colburn (27:22)
You can! Do not, do not just small beginnings.
Leslie Colburn (27:38)
I just want to remind you, sorry. that you’re not alone. You’re not alone, and it isn’t a podcast or a community group per se. You have a loving God who wants for you to turn to him and ask for the things that you need and to share your heart and to grieve, he’s grieving with you.
You are not alone. And you just need to take those little steps toward him and invite the people that he puts in your life into your grief and into your experience and know that there is hope in that. Like there is healing and there is hope and your loss is your loss.
Candace Nassar (28:01)
love that.
Leslie Colburn (28:15)
And there is hope in that.
Candace Nassar (28:19)
Mm-hmm. I see. mean, I can see it in your the way you’ve dealt with it and and just your the way you remember her and and speak about her I just I know that there are listeners out there that just really needed to hear this and I I think about your your “E” Expect and it really makes me think you know, we we pray We should you know, we were praying all the time, but do we really expect God to answer?
right? And so if we’re inviting God into our grief process and we’re expecting Him to be there for us, then we can have that encouragement of knowing that we’ll get through the day and get to through to tomorrow.
Leslie Colburn (28:57)
Yes, and you journal, you journal. So I would imagine if you went back through your journal and you read your prayers, you could see now how God is present in all of that. And journaling, know, writing has been my way to mourn. And I can see how God has taken.
Candace Nassar (29:04)
all the time.
Candace Nassar (29:08)
Amen.
Leslie Colburn (29:14)
something that was just kind of a way to heal for me, like a mourning process. And now I’ve got these books that I just am in awe of how God works. I think the other thing that I would encourage your listeners and mamas to do is to like, the call to action would be to go right now after this podcast and tell your kiddos and your family that you love Jesus.
Candace Nassar (29:38)
Hmm.
Leslie Colburn (29:38)
because some of the hope and the hope that I found through the healing process was to know that my mom is not here on earth, but she is with Jesus. And there is so much hope and healing in that. Without that, there would be no hope and healing. So if we can tell our children where we’re going, that is the most important thing that they know that.
Candace Nassar (29:53)
Amen.
Candace Nassar (29:59)
Absolutely, that piece of knowing that this is a temporary loss, right? That’s incredible. Not everyone knows that and doesn’t have that comfort, but for those that do, that’s amazing and we want to let our kids know that and then just keep praying for the others. So I love it. Leslie, thank you so much for your honesty, your wisdom, and the way you point us back to Jesus in the middle of heartbreak.
Leslie Colburn (30:05)
Yeah.
Candace Nassar (30:25)
For every mom listening who is navigating this road, may your story remind them that they are never alone. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and he’s faithful to the mother. He’s faithful to mother us in the places where we feel most lacking. So we’re going to put all your information in our show notes. Looking forward to checking out Twinkle, the littlest star. I think that’s just really precious. And we thank you so much for.
Leslie Colburn (30:34)
Yes.
Candace Nassar (30:52)
for being here today.
Leslie Colburn (30:53)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
