By all external appearances, Brittany Price Brooker has a picture-perfect life.
With a handsome husband and five adorable children, her affectionately-coined “Brooker Bunch” looks like they belong on the glossy cover of Family Magazine.
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But what you don’t see in this picturesque, no-filter-needed snapshot is the brokenness that lies beneath this blended family threaded together by the sovereign hand of God through sorrow and hardship.
A widow and a widower, with a twisted fairy-tale ending so far outside of what they imagined—but SO far greater than what they dare dreamed.
Brittany recently told her powerful redemption story of finding love after loss on Sadie Robertson’s Live Original blog.
In a poignant blog post entitled God’s Not Done With You Yet, she begins by recollecting the day her first love and the father of her children was ripped from her very hands in an instant.
“I experienced a life-changing brokenness when I least expected it,” wrote Brittany. “I was happily married to a handsome man who was my first love, first hand hold and my beloved husband. We had three little baby boys together, and I felt like I was living out my dream of being a wife and a mother.”
But after a kiss she didn’t know would be her last, the 25-year-old’s whole white-picket-fence fairy tale burst into flames.
“One day, I kissed my husband goodbye and told him I loved him as he was leaving for work, only to receive a phone call several hours later that my healthy, 30-year-old husband suddenly died as his heart went out of rhythm.”
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In total shock, Brittany remembers sitting in the frigid hospital hallway, as she only began to grasp the weight of the blindsiding tragedy.
But in that moment, she mustered up strength that was beyond her own abilities to say, “The Lord gives and takes away, He is so good.”
“I instantly became a widow at the age of 25, with three precious boys under the age of three, walking a road I could have never imagined. My dreams and my reality shifted in a moment, taking the breath out of me. I found myself asking God to give me the strength to make it minute by minute, even when I couldn’t see the road He had in front of me. As I waited, I held on with everything I had to the hope that God was greater than my grief.”
In the painful months after the loss of her husband, Brittany continued to “claim the hope from God’s Word” over her little boys, though half the time, she couldn’t believe the words she was uttering.
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Her mind swarmed with the questions that would plague any finite mind trying to comprehend the workings of an infinite, all-loving God who would allow such devastation to trample all over her life.
Did God really still have a plan for her? Could He really bring light and beauty from ashes blackened by the sting of death?
“Honestly, there were moments when I felt finished, that life as the happy full of life woman I used to be was gone forever,” she writes. “How could I dream again, when the person who was in those dreams was gone? I remember crying out to God one night saying, God what do you have for me? How can I still have life ahead of me after this?”
The simple message Jesus whispered in her heart became the hope she would cling to throughout the rest of her healing journey: “Hold on, there is joy ahead. I am not finished with you yet.”
As Brittany continued to dive into God’s Word, He began to heal her heart in unexplainable ways. Most importantly, He began to reveal how He was going to use her pain for His purpose if only she would cling to His promises.
“I watched as God started to do what He promised. He kept writing my story—not putting me to the side saying you are finished, but saying ‘You are part of a story that is bigger than yourself and I will bring it to pass, just keep obeying me.’ He cared so much for me and precious little fatherless boys, and He kept writing our story with an overwhelming amount of grace. He heard our cries for Him and He truly became enough for us. It was not Jesus plus something, but just Jesus. He brought us through the places of being so worn out from grief to a place of life and hope. He began to do a good work in me.”
Brittany decided she could either “stay treading in the waters of tragedy” or “start swimming for the shore of triumph.”