Every person has a story, and every story reveals the ways God works in our lives. Sometimes He meets us in moments of joy and gratitude. Other times, He finds us in seasons of darkness, grief, addiction, fear, or uncertainty.
This week we share two powerful testimonies from parishioners whose lives have been transformed by God’s grace. Though their journeys are very different, both Gracyn and Melissa discovered the same truth: Christ never abandons us. His light reaches into our darkest moments, offering healing, hope, and the promise of new life.
Their stories remind us that faith is not the absence of struggle—it is learning to trust God through it.
Gracyn’s Story: Finding Light in the Darkness
I denied that I needed help for a long time, but the Savior gave me the hope and light I needed.
The darkness seemed to come out of nowhere. I started feeling anxious and depressed about all the unresolved issues in my life. I lost confidence in myself, I began questioning my faith, and the list goes on. It seemed like even small inconveniences were blown out of proportion, and my good life was suddenly catastrophic.
I felt like I was fighting an internal battle with demons inside my head.
Darkness seemed to engulf me. As these feelings consistently got worse, I started asking myself questions like, “What if I wasn’t here anymore? Would people even care?” And the demons in my mind would answer, “You’re just dust in the universe. No one would even notice if you were gone.”
These thoughts paralyzed me with fear.
But all while I was dealing with this in my mind, I acted normal. I talked to my family like everything was fine. Out of fear, I locked my feelings away from others. I felt like I couldn’t share how catastrophic my thoughts had become.
I was also in denial that something was actually wrong. I told myself I couldn’t have depression. I didn’t want to admit that I needed help. I was so afraid that if people knew what I was thinking and feeling, they would reject me or think I was weak or crazy. I felt ashamed for being unable to get out of the darkness.
I went on like this until one day, I found comfort in a pastor’s words:
“If you had appendicitis, God would expect you to seek a priesthood blessing and get the best medical care available. So too with emotional disorders. Our Father in Heaven expects us to use all of the marvelous gifts He has provided in this glorious dispensation.”
This touching message helped me finally accept that I was facing the reality of mental illness and that there is no shame in needing help. Most importantly, I was reminded that I am not weak and that healing was possible.
For so long, I didn’t think it was possible to hear the voice of the Spirit or to feel God’s love in the midst of depression. I felt like I was constantly floating in an abyss of darkness.
But a little glimmer of light from the Savior helped me hold on to hope.
By opening up about my struggles, I learned that many of my friends also experience mental health challenges. Together, we have reassured one another that we are not alone.
Who I was before I turned to Heavenly Father for help and who I am today are two very different people. I would not have the faith and testimony I have in Jesus Christ today if it were not for that period of darkness.
I am beyond grateful for the light He brings into my life, helping me overcome the fears and battles within my mind. I know that He suffered for all our afflictions and that He understands exactly what we are going through.
With Him, we can always hold on to hope and light.
— Gracyn Marken
Melissa Lynn Cissney – Faith Journey Testimony
My story in the Catholic Church did not begin with me. It began with a woman who arrived in America from Czechoslovakia with nothing but her faith and her hands.
My great-grandmother was born in 1900. She cooked and cleaned for the priests and nuns at St. Joachim Church—not because anyone asked her to, but because that community was her home, her refuge, and her calling. When my great-grandfather died young, leaving her alone with four children, she did not waver. At a time when the world did not expect single women to stand on their own, she put every one of her children through Catholic school. She built something with her bare hands and her unshakable faith.
My grandmother carried that same spirit forward, raising my mother and her brothers and sisters in that same Church. I was baptized at St. Joachim’s and made my First Communion there. The faith was never just a tradition—it was a living inheritance, woven into the hands and prayers of the two strongest women I have ever known.
And then there was the world I was living in.
From the moment I can first remember, I did not feel like I belonged. Not in my family. Not anywhere. I carried a deep inner shame from birth—a shame that was not mine but felt branded onto me. Because of the sins of my father, and because I looked just like him, I internalized a worthlessness I could not name or explain.
My inner critic was loud from my very first memory. I learned early—too early—how to mask what I felt, how to push my emotions so far down that I could almost forget they existed. I grew up in a dysfunctional, alcoholic home where lies and secrets were deep in the closet and no one dared open the door. My sensitive nature, my big emotions, were another thing I held with shame in my soul.
And beneath all of that, I was carrying something no child should ever have to carry alone. Starting around the age of three or four, while we were still in Michigan, I was traumatized by someone whom I should have been able to trust. It ended only when we moved to New York.
I would have taken it to my grave. I had buried it so deep, the way I had learned to bury everything. But I was forced to disclose it in my teenage years, and what followed was its own kind of rupture—because the world I had learned to survive in was not a place to hold that kind of truth.
In 1985, at ten years old, my mother moved us to Northern California, away from the only place that had ever felt like home. My great-grandmother passed away in 1983. My grandmother—the woman who was my anchor, my constant—passed away in 1987.
The Church, the pew, the smell of that building, the women who had built my faith with their own lives—all of it was gone. And what was left was a child who had been abused, who had never felt worthy, who had been silenced her entire life, and who had just lost everyone she loved.
I was furious at God. I could not understand how a God who claimed to love me could allow all of that to happen to a child. I could not reconcile the pure, unshakable faith of my great-grandmother with the reality of my own life.
And so, I walked away.
For years, I found myself in alcohol—trying to quiet the voices, numb the shame, and silence the memories. It was the only way I knew to survive what I had been running from my whole life: the truth of who I am.
The alcohol kept me safe and alive all those years, though I tried to end it all beginning in junior high. I love that version of Melissa; she kept me protected. The storm of me that was my alcoholism is a beautiful story of who I became to keep myself alive.
On August 14, 2019, my journey of living authentically as my true self began. The devil that once held my spirit in his grip for 32 years was unchained and untethered at the age of 44.
Sobriety gave me something I had not had in an extraordinarily long time: stillness.
And in that stillness, something began to shift. I began to feel the presence of those two women—my great-grandmother and my grandmother—as if they had never truly left. I began to understand that the faith they built was not taken from me, even when everything else was. It had been waiting for me. Quietly. Patiently. The way God waits.
I need you to know something, Father Chas. I have never seen myself as a victim. Not once.
Everything I just told you—the abuse, the shame, the dysfunction, the grief, the addiction, the silence—I look at all of it as a blessing. And I have barely told you a fraction of my story.
God did not do those things to me. But God used every single one of them to shape me into who I am. And who I am is someone who can love people—really love them—unconditionally. Without judgment. Without conditions. Because I have been in the dark, and I know what it feels like to need someone to love you anyway.
God allowed me to endure what I endured because He needed me to have a heart big enough and strong enough to show the world what unconditional love looks like.
The alcoholism—a blessing. The trauma—a blessing. The abuse, the shame, the years of feeling like I did not belong—every single one of them, a blessing. They were not punishments. They were preparation.
My great-grandmother served the Church in an apron, on her knees, in a country that was not yet fully hers. She gave everything she had—and she did it with love. My grandmother did the same.
I was baptized into that legacy. And now I understand that my life, as hard and as broken and as beautiful as it has been, is my version of that same offering.
I am not coming to Confirmation broken and crawling. I am coming whole. I am coming grateful. I am coming as a woman who has been through the fire and found God in every single flame—and who wants to spend the rest of her life showing other people that same grace.
That is why I am here.
That is my testimony.
Melissa Lynn Cissney