It is an extraordinary privilege for me to be with you here today.

As he said, my name is Janea, actually: Janea Christensen.

I'm a chaplain student, as he mentioned, completing my first unit of CPE at a large hospital in Spokane, Washington.

And as mentioned, my pathway to chaplaincy began with my own congenital

heart defect that progressed over time and required two open heart surgeries. The first when I was 31 years old. At the time, my husband and I had three children in our young family, including a baby,

a three-year-old, and a five-year-old.

Now, up to that point, I had lived a normal, healthy life, but unbeknownst to me, my heart had been damaged from years of working with a leaking mitral valve. When I discovered the problem and I had an artificial valve put in, my heart stopped pumping properly and caused a cascade of serious problems that required an extended stay in the ICU.

I struggled for my life. Among my problems was a very large pleural effusion, water that had gathered around my lungs and crushed them, making it very difficult to breathe. While I lay in my hospital bed, laboring with desperation for breath,

my mind kept reviewing King Benjamin’s words in the Book of Mormon. Quote,

“I would desire that you should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual.”

Although I had always been firmly centered in my faith, at that time, I did not feel spiritually or temporally blessed. And I wrestled with that scripture in the context of what was happening to me.

I wondered if I would live through this ordeal. Would I continue to be a wife and a mom to my sweet children?

I wanted to sense God all around me, to feel His love and comfort.

But I was surprised and disheartened that in that hospital room,

I felt completely alone. The doctors were trying to keep my body alive,

but I was in equal spiritual crisis and I needed help and healing.

Because of this experience, years later, when my dear sister-in-law, Mary Elizabeth,

told me that she was exploring chaplaincy and that our church was endorsing female chaplains,

my heart swelled inside of me so wide I couldn't ignore it.

My health challenges created a fervent desire to provide spiritual care for individuals undergoing crisis.

And since that time, I have pursued this path, and my sister-in-law and I are both here today, sister chaplains. And it brings me so much joy. [Applause]

Now, I wish I was here to talk with you about my experiences as a cardiac patient and how my hospitalizations and surgeries both stretched and strengthened my faith.

But I've been asked to speak with you today about suicide prevention and recovery, because I’ve had the opportunity in my life to love a family member, my 21-year-old daughter Sadie Shay, who struggled with anxiety,

depression, and later bipolar disorder, and who recently died by suicide.

Now, talking about suicide is tricky.

In fact, the term “suicide prevention” actually bothers me.

I think “support of a person with suicide ideation” is a better term.

People with suicidal ideation suffer profoundly, and they need increased love and attention. Sometimes that support can prevent suicide,

and sometimes it doesn't.

We tried to prevent our daughter's suicide for seven years

and were unsuccessful. The burden of feeling that it is your task to prevent someone from dying is indescribably heavy. And this was a task that occupied my thoughts for many years.

I wanted to believe that if I was vigilant enough, if I connected my daughter to the right resources, I could prevent my daughter's death.

But over time, God helped me to see a reality which both terrified and freed me: I was trying to control something I fundamentally had no control over.

No, we could not prevent our daughter's death, but we did support her in her suffering and we gave our best effort, despite our flaws and imperfections, walking alongside her until she couldn't do it anymore.

As I share my story, when I say the word “I,” you can substitute it for “we” because my truest friend,

my steadfast husband, is here with me today. And we shared this experience together. This is his story too.

Following the placement of my artificial valve and a miraculous recovery, we were blessed to be able to have one more child,

a baby girl with a head smothered with loopy chocolate curls.

And we now had four precious children; and the oldest was Sadie Shay.

Sadie was a gentle, tenderhearted soul. From an early age, she had a yearning to be among plants and animals.

She was always on the hunt for living creatures she could care for. When she was four, she lovingly looked after and played with a 9 x 13 pan filled with earthworms and dirt for two weeks until I mercifully release them back to Mother Earth.

She was always eager to hold a snake or a turtle or care for a wounded bird or to sit with her aunt's goats in the barn.

I frequently rescued her frog named Frodo from being dressed up in tiny

doll clothes. A prolific hugger, Sadie was always the first to notice when someone was hurting.

Compassion was her superpower.

Highly articulate, sometimes too smart for her own good,

she was also imaginative and artistic, and she spent her free time drawing and painting.

She had an exquisite singing voice that she used around our house regularly.

She felt things deeply, and that attribute enabled her to become a talented and accomplished actress. A deep thinker,

Sadie didn’t get baptized till she was almost nine

because she needed more time to consider if this was the right commitment to make. Sadie adored her siblings. When she was 10, she made a giant bed on the floor of her brother’s bedroom and insisted all the siblings sleep together for the entire summer.

I loved to hear their giggles at night.

But somewhere in all those magical events, the childhood,

the princess dress-up days, the family bike rides and camping trips,

there was a darkness that would never leave her alone.

When she was younger, it manifested as anger.

She struggled with transitions and change. A move to a new residence is hard on most kids, but to Sadie,

it was an upheaval of epic proportions.

This is a picture of when I dropped her off at her first day of kindergarten.

It was a rough day for both of us.

Attending school was a major disruption in her world, and we had a huge party with Barbies and Shrinky Dinks and chocolate cake to celebrate 30 consecutive days of kindergarten. It felt like a grand accomplishment. As she got older,

this darkness continued to wreak havoc in Sadie’s life, and we began to recognize it as mental illness.

Early on, it took the form of anxiety and depression.

In those early years, I had very little understanding of what I was dealing with. I was born with a high happiness set point and a low disposition to worry.

I literally wake up on most mornings thinking, “Today is going to be a great day.”

But my optimism started to wane as we started observing how impactful Sadie's anxiety and depression were as she entered her teen years.

We sought out every kind of help available to us. We cycled through therapists, and eventually she would try dozens of medication, none of which she was good at taking consistently.

We did our best to fill our lives with wholesome activities. We taught healthy lifestyle habits and accessed God through prayer and priesthood blessings and fasting. And we pored over scriptures and inspired sources for answers and guidance. As she approached adulthood,

Sadie’s angst started channeling itself towards existential questions, and a faith crisis blossomed.

She asked hard questions, sometimes accompanied by anger.

But she cared deeply about truth and wanted to align her life with it.

I kept remembering the Apostle Peter's counsel to, quote,

“be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you the reason of hope that is in you.”

So I studied and I read and I collected faithful answers to big questions like some 10-year-olds collect Pokemon cards. I had dozens of spiritual conversations with her, and I understood how crucial these discussions were.

In the end, she rested on the idea that God was not real and heaven did not exist.

Supporting a loved one who struggles with mental illness and suicidal ideation is messy and brimming with innumerable complexities. We were constantly assessing and reassessing if we were parenting our daughter in the best way.

Were our efforts to show forth gentleness and long-suffering enabling bad behavior? What portion of her destructive behavior were the exercise of her own agency, and what was the result of her infirmity that she had no control over?

The answers to these questions mattered because as a parent, you're going to respond differently to an event that was caused by someone's free will to manipulate or deceive than you would if it was the result of your child's altered mind.

And at times, both were at play.

As we prayed earnestly for help,

a pattern of light emerged that helped us navigate this impossible situation.

A principle of truth would come to my mind, for example, the overarching gospel truth of Sadie’s free agency and our lack of control over that.

And this principle would help inform us how to handle a specific situation.

Shortly thereafter, a close friend or a family member would ratify that idea through something they would send me to read or through their own thoughts or gospel learning.

And this became a reliable pattern: our own personal law of witnesses. And in this way, God led us through our most heart-wrenching decisions.

Now that a full-blown spiritual crisis had entered our home, I wondered about the impact this would have on my younger kids, who were still so tender in their spiritual formation.

How, as a mother, do I help my ailing daughter? How do I honor her agency to choose her own beliefs and the harmful actions that may stem from them, while at the same time maintaining a place of spiritual light in our home, where we can still teach

and practice gospel truths,

where testimonies can still grow and be nourished?

These were questions I brought to God in tears.

We witnessed a kind of spiritual suffering that took place as Sadie—

as the result of Sadie's new beliefs.

She expressed tremendous pain in feeling that the gospel we raised her with was false, that there was no loving God who looked after her and guided her,

that there was no purpose to her life.

These thoughts, mingled with significant anxiety and extreme lack of motivation

and an inability to complete normal tasks of life, compounded inside of her.

Despair seemed to have its firm grip on her, and we mourned.

From the age of 15, Sadie would tell me she wanted to die.

That feeling was constant and pervasive for the rest of her life. No amount of therapy or medication or vacations could separate her from that oppressive feeling.

On December 20—in December 2021,

our family gathered together to celebrate the holiday.

It was Christmas Eve, and I was teaching a Christmas Eve lesson to my family about our Savior Jesus Christ, when Sadie’s mental illness blossomed fully and she slipped into a psychotic episode. She impulsively hurt herself, and my courageous husband engaged in a struggle to stop her.

My younger children ran out the front door of the house to get away from the scene, without coats or shoes. They ran barefoot through the snow, and they shivered on a park bench across the street from our home.

Our daughter died in our arms, surrounded by her father, her sister,

her grandmother, and I.

Uniting our efforts, we tried to save her, to rescue her,

as we had always done. Sometimes,

I comfort myself with that visual of our daughter entering and exiting the world, surrounded in the circle of her family’s love. It is both terrible

and beautiful. These are hard things to share.

But I do so because some events in life are so horrific that it seems as if the forces of darkness intent on crushing and destroying us rise up and have their perfect day.

Sometimes darkness takes a victory lap, and it seems like it wins.

But I witness to you: There is no crevasse or cavern so deep that with patience, God’s light and love cannot reach it.

The Lord reassures: Quote, “Therefore, fear not little flock. Do good.

Let earth and hell combined against you.

For if you are built upon my rock, they cannot prevail.”

In the weeks and months following my daughter’s suicide, despair, like a snake looking for its next meal, has come after me.

Sometimes I’ve wondered, “Is it even possible to recover after something like this?” In my battle against despair,

God has helped me to see that sometimes faith is a choice and the feeling comes later. And the best way for me to explain this concept is to compare it to love.

Most people recognize that love is a feeling. When a midwife placed my new baby into my arms, my heart exploded with the feeling of love.

This love, the noun, came to me as easy as breathing, for a child whom I did not yet know and who had done nothing to earn it.

But love is also a choice. When that same child grew to be 15 and exhibited signs of annoyance towards parents, some moderate teenage rebellion, and hostility when being awoken every single morning,

this ever-present feeling of love morphed into, really, fear and the feeling of love became harder to access.

At this point in parenting, when love the noun escapes us, what do we do?

We choose love: Love the verb, the action, comes into play.

We try to affirm our teen, and we look for ways to serve them. We try to build the relationship by stepping into their world and caring about the things that they care about. And through these efforts,

love the feeling starts to grow again inside parent and child.

In the latter scenario, love was a choice.

Actions were taken to cultivate love, and love grew. To spiritually survive this darkness,

it has been vital for me to learn that faith works much in the same way.

For most of my life, I've had the feeling of faith residing in my heart like a flame—sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, but always burning.

Yet there have been trials— like the long nights I spent in the cardiac intensive care unit,

tubes and wires protruding from my body, too weak to turn myself in bed, fighting to breathe and feeling terrified—when I have felt distant from God's love, even though I have needed it more than ever.

After the death of my daughter, I recognized that loneliness. And again, I felt ashamed that I could barely see God's hand in my life.

“What is wrong with me?” Dozens of people told me they were praying for our family. But why didn't I feel increased spiritual power?

And to make matters worse, a few months after my daughter’s death, my husband lost his job, thrusting our family into further instability and worry.

And new fears arose as I watched my surviving children struggle mightily under the weight of the trauma we had all just experienced.

Most significantly, we were, and still are, working through lingering questions regarding what we had just witnessed:

our beautiful daughter, her life filled with suffering and punctuated by her tragic death. I felt, to say as the psalmist,

“Where is God?” In this space of intense grief,

the feeling of faith had drained out of me.

Church, historically, a place of refuge and renewal for me, had morphed into a place of pain, as I listened to Church members testify how they see God's hand in the details of their life, and I sit in the pew in agony, begging God to show up in a big picture sort of way.

What does all this despair mean? Does it mean I am weak?

If I’m more grateful, could I see His hand?

When the feeling of faith left Sadie,

she interpreted it to mean that her faith was not founded on true principles in the first place. And that despair wanted to grab me too.

But God reminded me about the principle of love discussed earlier.

I know that even if I don’t have faith the feeling, I still have faith the verb. Instead of panicking that I don’t feel faith in my heart, I will trust what my mind has learned throughout my life regarding the principle of faith. I can employ faithful action and grow my faith.

I’ve asked myself, “How can I heal from this? How can I grow the feeling of my faith?”

First, I've chosen to give myself grace.

It's okay if I can't see God in my life the way I want to right now.

For me, faith the verb means strategically putting myself in places of light where I can feel the influence of the Holy Ghost.

It means I will persistently and patiently pray, even through periods of what seems like heavenly silence.

It means I will meditate each day on the promises God has made to me personally, but also as a covenant-keeping disciple of Christ. And I will do that until I feel the truth of that in my bones.

Lastly, I will look for God's involvement in my life through a form of compassion that is the easiest for me to recognize:

the loving-kindness of family and friends who, one by one, have comforted us in the most gentle and tender ways. Their persistent caring and heartache over our loss has helped to mend my own.

I am still working on these things,

but I have felt the stirrings of the feeling of faith growing in this sacred, fragile place that God has carved out in my heart.

Recently, I was overcome with wonder when I heard a talk by Elder Holland, where he described this very principle that the Lord had taught me. In this passage, Elder Holland describes the moment of Christ's greatest agony, where he too felt completely alone and distanced from his father.

Quote: “For His Atonement to be infinite and eternal,

Christ had to feel what it was like to die not only physically, but spiritually, to sense what it was like to have the divine Spirit withdraw,

leaving one feeling totally, abjectly, hopelessly alone. But Jesus held on.

He pressed on. The goodness in Him allowed faith to triumph, even in a state of complete anguish.

The trust He lived by told Him, in spite of His feelings, that divine compassion is never absent, that God is always faithful, and that He never flees nor fails us.”

According to Elder Holland,

Christ had to trust what He knew about His Father in His mind when the feeling was absent from His heart.

C. S Lewis wrote, “Satan’s cause is never more in danger than when a human no more desiring, but still intending to do God's will, looks upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished,

asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys,” end quote.

Could it be that in this place of perceived abandonment and doubt, in this place of unanswered questions and waiting, lies the opportunity to shake the very kingdom of darkness through a brand of faith only born in this environment?

One of God's treasured blessings to our family was being able to return to our home several days after our daughter's death.

Our friends thought we would never be able to live in our home again, given the memories that we had there. And we worried about the same thing.

The thought of losing both our daughter and our home all in one night felt unreasonable and overwhelming.

As we tentatively crept back into the living space and confronted the spot of our greatest terror,

a hundred happy memories made in that space washed over me.

I saw my family smiling, gathered together, staring down a flaky, homemade peach pie. I saw teasing and laughter during game nights with friends and cousins.

I saw birthday parties and taffy pulls and joy-filled Thanksgiving dinners and lots and lots of singing. Light and love overpowered the darkness.

In Rob Gardner’s magnificent oratorio, the “Lamb of God,” Mary, the mother of Jesus, also confronts the place of her Son’s death.

I imagine her at the foot of His cross as she sings: “Here, despair cries boldly, claiming this its victory. Sweeter peace enfolds me.

Hope did not die here. But here was given. Here. Here is hope.”

Because our Savior Jesus Christ overcame death and sin, I too can say of the place of my daughter’s death: Here is hope.

I have hope in a gospel that proclaims continued learning and growth in the spirit world, a place where my daughter is released from the infirmities that plagued her mortal body.

I have hope that even in my deepest grief, I can grow my faith and trust in God through my choices. And his light will pour healing into all the cracks of my broken heart.

I have hope that Christ not only overcame death and sin, but He overcame knee-buckling despair. And He will teach me to do the same.

And I have hope that I will see my daughter again.

And when I see her afar off, I will run to her.

I will feel the curls of her hair underneath my fingers, and I will kiss her freckled cheeks. And in a family embrace,

she will once again be encircled in the arms of our family’s love. Of this I testify in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Rob Gardner has allowed us to play his beautiful song.

We are so grateful for that. So here is the song from the “Lamb of God.”

Here is hope.

[music playing]

♪♪ He who healed us arose, here was bruised and broken. ♪♪ He whose love no end knows, ♪♪ here was forsaken, left alone. ♪♪ Here despair cries boldly, ♪♪ claiming this its victory. ♪♪ Sweeter peace enfolds me. Hope did not die here, ♪♪ but here was given. He ♪♪ is hope. ♪♪ [background singers] ♪♪ [background music] ♪♪ [background music] ♪♪ He who was rejected, he knows where my longing, ♪♪ he, so long expected, carried our burdens, bore every ♪♪ sorrow. Here. Here. ♪♪ Here is hope. ♪♪ [background singers] ♪♪ [background singers] ♪♪ Hope did not die here, but here ♪♪ was given.