Divine Detour with Lori Ann Wood: when a crisis throws your life off course

When Lori Ann Wood found her life drastically altered by a medical crisis, she learned it was a divine detour leading her to answer three urgent questions we all wrestle with. Wood's new book, Divine Detour, will release in February 2023. 

Get Lori's free Resource, Hope for the Life You Didn't Choose at: https://lorieannwood.com/hope 

Learn more about her upcoming book at https://loriannwood.com/books 

Guest Bio:

Lori Ann Wood lives in the shadow of the Ozark Mountains in beautiful Bentonville, Arkansas, with her husband, the unsuspecting guy she chased all the way from 9th grade to grad school. She is mom to three world-changing young adults, one impressive son-in-law (who all live too far away) and a miniature dachshund named Pearl (who threatens to never leave). Her new favorite role is appropriately spoiling her granddaughter Hazel.

In addition to receiving the Frederick Buechner Narrative Essay Award from The Christian Century Magazine, her work has won awards from The Colorado Christian Writers Association and The Evangelical Press Association. Lori Ann has been published in numerous print journals including Just Between Us Magazine, The Joyful Life Magazine, Bella Grace Magazine, Heart Insight Magazine, and Sweet to the Soul FAITH Magazine. Her articles have also appeared on websites such as Pepperdine University Press, Yahoo Lifestyle, and MSN, and on blogs including Women | Faith & Story, Kindred Mom, WomenHeart, and The Mighty. Lori Ann also serves on the Blog Contributor Team for The Joyful Life Magazine.

But Lori Ann has not always been a writer.

A life detour reordered her priorities and rattled her faith.

In 2015, despite otherwise pristine health, Lori Ann almost died from heart failure from an unknown cause. Her heart was functioning at just 6%. She spent 14 days in ICU as doctors tried to save her life. Lori Ann was then transferred to the Cleveland Clinic where she became her doctor’s most critical patient for a year and a half. She was eventually implanted with a pacemaker and internal defibrillator. Against all medical odds, her heart function was initially restored sixteen months later. But as heart failure goes, her condition has experienced ups-and-downs since then. And as the Christian walk goes, so has her faith.

Having discovered this chronic, progressive condition almost too late, Lori Ann now writes to encourage difficult faith questions along the detours of life. Her passion is to connect with readers and help them hold onto their faith when they find themselves on a path they didn’t choose.

Her first book, Divine Detour: The Path You Didn’t Choose Can Lead to the Faith You’ve Always Wanted, will release in early 2023. Find her at https://loriannwood.com.

Transcript

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Welcome to Radical Abundance. I'm your host, Teresa Janssen. You know what it's like? Your life is going just the way you want, and suddenly there's a detour. Today's guest is Lori Ann Wood, and she's written a book about those divine detours. She's experienced a divine detour as a result of a medical crisis. We're gonna hear all about the story and how it can lead to even an extraordinary. Welcome to Radical Abundance. Lori, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you, Teresa. It's so great to be here. I'm excited. Okay, Lori Ann, let's start off with that story. What happened? What was the big detour in your life that led you eventually to write this book that'll come out in February? I had a shocking diagnosis, and it was about seven years ago. I.. The funny part about it was I had a medical evaluation and I was told that I had less than 3% chance of ever developing heart disease because I had great cholesterol, I had low blood pressure. All my numbers were good. I had no family history. I had no lifestyle risk factors, so I was a good bet for not getting heart disease. But then three weeks after that evaluation, . I was in cardiac intensive care with end stage heart failure from an unknown cause. I was broadsided., of course. And what I had done is I was just feeling sluggish. I didn't have any energy. I felt like I had the flu. I had no idea that was, there was anything wrong with my heart. That was the last thing on my list of things that could be wrong with me. And I went to my pcp, my family doctor, and the words that he said to me, I knew they were gonna be significant, but I didn't know in what way. But he listened to my heart and did all the things he could do in the office. And then he said, if we're lucky, it's pneumonia. and my husband was with me. And I remember looking at him thinking that was worst case, that it was pneumonia. And my doctor took me right to get a chest x-ray and found that my heart was enlarged very enlarged. And it was actually functioning at about 6%., I was just, I was direct, admitted into I C U from that doctor's office, and I spent 14 days there in I C U. I had, d defibrillator pads stuck to my chest and a crash cart right outside my door and.. I just functioned there. We lived in I C U for a couple of weeks. They didn't want me to go home at that point because they didn't think I could survive at home. We didn't know this at the time, but later learned., she probably won't survive at home. And once I left the hospital, I had an external defibrillator vest on and I wore that 24 hours a day for nine months and within a couple of weeks flown to Cleveland Clinic and met with the head of transplant there. And I. She told me recently, she actually wrote the forward to my book, but she told me recently that I was her most critical patient for a year and a half. And she was on pins and needles that whole time, and I was just wearing my life vest, taking these high-powered meds and holding on. And then we would go in every once in a while to get evaluated and check my heart function and nothing happened. I never improved. In fact, I went 16 months with no improvement. I did get an internal device within that 16 months, but still didn't really get any measurable improve. And then out of nowhere really, I went in for something else and they tested my heart and my heart function was restored to normal at about 16 months post-diagnosis. To tell you the truth, I thought that was my story. I thought my story was one of divine healing and God's care and provision. I was gonna tell that story and that was gonna be what God had in mind for my life. But three years ago, my heart function dropped and I found myself in active heart failure again. And I've learned through the course of this disease and dealing with its effects is that heart failure is a chronic progressive disease. For most people, medical science can manage the symptoms with devices and medications and lifestyle changes. For some, they can slow the progression, but there really is not a cure, and it really only goes in one direction. So right now I'm holding steady at a lower heart.. And what I have found during that time is that I have taken some risks and I have stepped out in ways that I wouldn't have done in a safer, healthier life. And so I was able to write this book. It was born at my diagnosis, but it's not primarily about the medical events. It's really a guide for people to confront question., I hear so much going on in your story right now, and at the time that you had this divine detour enter your life, this medical crisis. Of course, you have a lot of things going through your mind, but you said that at the time you didn't even recognize where it was going. You thought your story was going to be that of divine healing, yet a heart condit. Is a chronic disease that goes one direction, not towards healing, but towards a steady decline, really. So the story wasn't about the physical, it was more spiritual and it led you to the questions. In fact, you told me there were three questions that we all have to answer. Tell me more about those three questions and how. even came to that. There were three questions I started writing. Someone dropped off a journal early on in my ICU room and I was writing like lists of people I need to write thank you notes to, or reminders. I still had kids at home reminder to, do this at school or whatever it was while I was in the hospital and my husband at one point. We should be writing this down, or you should be taking notes about what you know, the what's going on. And I didn't want to, because I didn't ever wanna relive what was going on, but I started to write it down and then those notes started to grow into a blog. And then those blogs grew into articles. And then the articles grew into this book. And what I found as I was writing is that everything I was wrestling, Was fallen into these three categories or these three questions, and the more I studied about it and wrestled with it, the more I realized that everyone is on a detour. Because if you think about it, a detour is just, you're going along on this planned route and all of a sudden you can't anymore. You're forced off of it. It's not a choice you make. You're forced off of it and it's not the prettiest road or maybe the smoothest road or the most convenient road, or even the shortest way to get to your destination. And that's what happens to all of us at some point. And while we're on that detour, we start this questioning process and those three questions that came out of it are the. questions that Jesus had to have wrestled with in the desert when he faced those three temptations. The, there's a couple of places in scripture where it talks about Jesus going to the desert, but in Matthew chapter four, the first time when Jesus, or the first temptation that Jesus faced in the desert was when the enemy said, tell these stones to become. If I'm thinking, if I'm Jesus, I'm thinking I'm really hungry. I would love for those stones to become bread. Now, is that what I should do? Is my survival and my physical wellbeing the most important thing in my life? Because if it is, I should just go ahead and eat that bread. And that became to me a question that I call a question of worry. and we all face that. We wonder is this life all there is because that reorders our priorities if it is all there is, and I think Jesus wrestled with that as a man at that moment with the enemy in the desert. And we all do when we're detoured into the desert and we have physical pain or relational. We wonder if we need to just be concerned with our immediate life. One of the things that came out of it for me when I looked at that question of worry, was I really had to be honest with myself because I learned that my faith actually had me at the center of it and my wellbeing at the center of it, and that was something I needed to work on and change. But that question, helped to bring that to my attention. This came to you later, though, not while you were in I C U, even though the journey started there, you started, it was a progressive revelation that there were three questions. At the point in time, you started questioning about your life, your physical life, and worrying about those types of things. What. Did it make, when you began to answer that question for yourself, there were so many little sub-questions. I would say within that question of worry, things like loss and uncertainty and fear and regret, which I explore all of those in the book, but I was coming to terms with is there something more valuable? They were telling me I had a very short amount of time, so is there something more valuable? Than just this immediate life. Does God have something more for me than just this moment in what I can see? I had been a Christian as long as I can remember.. But until I really faced that upfront and really up close, I hadn't really come to a conclusion about that in, in the way that my heart was. I think I still wanted everything to resolve just right for me, and it is just the human condition. I think in Jesus's example when he didn't do that and he could. that was for me, something that I started to learn about and really changed my perspective. Lorianne. What I think is really significant here is that you were a person of faith even at that time when you're questioning, and oftentimes I think Christians really feel guilty when they start to question or worry because we are told to have faith and trust in God. Yet Jesus himself faced this question in the wilderness. Of course he was, he's perfect, but also as human. How did you feel at that time?, did you feel guilty as a Christian facing those doubts and worrying about your life or were you able to just say, you know that I have a relationship with God? That's okay. That I worry, I struggled with questions. I felt like that maybe was the reason that I wasn't getting those first 16 months, and there was no improvement I thought. I don't have enough faith. I'm not strong enough. I'm letting my prayer warriors down that were praying for me around the clock. And I didn't realize at the time how much questions can strengthen your faith because I've learned over those months and now years, that when we poke and prod and question and wrestl., our faith gets stronger and it gets more defined, and we can get our hands on it. We choose God again and again, and we don't just choose him once and put him on a shelf. That to me, was the value of those questions is that it was on my mind all the time. He was on my mind. My faith was on my mind all the time because, Those questions were nagging, and I think sometimes, like you said, we shy away from questions or think that reflects badly on us, or that God would be disappointed with a question or other people might be disappointed. But in reality, The questions are what keeps us bringing us back to him. I can, I think that's completely true because a faith that doesn't question is a faith that doesn't grow. But also those questions show that we are reasoning and struggling and working out our faith and not just blindly accepting or building our faith on tradition. Or family or our, the faith of our parents. When we struggle and really work through those issues, we come out of it with a faith that's proven and tested, and I think that's really important and you found a stronger faith on the other side of those questions.. Yes. And that reminds me of something that I really clung to during that time is that, the opposite of faith we think of as doubt, but really the opposite of faith is indifference. It's just walking away and saying, I'm done with it. I'm washing my hands of it. I don't want anything to do with it. But when we doubt, which happens to be question number two, , but when we doubt, we bring him up again and again. And he doesn't shy away from that. And scripture plays that out with job and so many other examples we have where we can, questioning God's not gonna punish us or back away. He wants to just keep that conversation going. And so that was, like I said, that was the second question because when Jesus went into the desert, that first question was about tell these stones to become breaded. But the second question was, or the second temptation was, throw yourself down and the angels will protect you. Float throw caution to the wind because God will not let his beloved be harm.. If he let you be harmed, then he must not love you. He must have abandoned you. And we formulate this question in our mind. Is God always good? Because what's happening in my life right now doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel like love. Can I know that it is love? Even when it doesn't feel like it is. God always. Good. So I looked at things like protection and resilience and vulnerability, and really started to dig down into whether the, my current pain, does my current pain indicate God's level of care for. Is that on par? Just because I'm in pain, does that mean God is mad at me or God is punishing me, or God's turned his face from me? And why doesn't, if he is a God of love all the time, why doesn't this feel like love? One of the things that I learned is that God never promised us that we won't experience the worst that this world has to offer. But he did promise that if we do, we won't be alone. And that's the, that is worth so much more than not having the trouble in the first place. Lorianne, one of the biggest questions that., I've heard people say, keeps them from faith is that question of if God is good, why do bad things happen? Or if God is powerful, why does he allow good things or bad things to happen? Why doesn't he intervene? And so again, it's a question we can't shy away from because we know this is a fallen world and that there are bad things that are going to happen. It's not a question. God allowing bad things to happen, but it's a question of the result of living in a world that is dominated by sin and yet God is sovereign, and how do we come to a place of being able to reconcile that? in our own faith. And how did that work out for you, where you're going through this real crisis and saying, God, why? That's the big question, isn't it? When we're in the midst of it, why? Where did you find that answer? That was a big part of it is why, and I think as human beings, we want things to resolve. We want to know a reason, and we're thinking people and creatures and. Know enough to know that we don't know and it really bothers us. So I think what I've realized is that God is always a God of healing. Sometimes he's heals on this side of eternity, but he always heals in the next. And we look at our part of the story, we're all just one little part of this huge story that God's writing and we look at our part of the story. And we want it to resolve in our lifetime. And I think about the people you know who didn't have that resolved in their lifetime. The apostles, Stephen John the Baptist, those stories did not make sense in their lifetime, but they're part of this bigger story arc and so are we. So we have to realize. We can't it'd be like reading one chapter of a book and thinking that you could understand the entire story by reading one chapter. And we don't get the, a lot of times, and maybe most of us won't see the completed end of our story in our lifetime. But that doesn't mean that God is not good. It doesn't mean that he won't work out everything for the good of his people. It just means that in our lifetime we not, we might not make sense of it. I love that. Idea and especially relating it to the idea of reading one chapter in a book and thinking that we'll see the whole story arc. Because we do just have a limited perspective and we don't know where our story even intersects in the lives of stories and people that we may not even. Directly encounter that there may be indirect encounters, that God has the bigger picture, and he's a big enough God to accept our questions, our worries, our doubts. And that brings me lorianne. What's question number three? Question number three, if you remember the account of Jesus in the desert facing the enemy. The third temptation in Matthew was, Bow down to me and all of these kingdoms will be yours. What that meant for Jesus was, I know what God's plan is, but maybe there's a better plan, or maybe God's plan's not quite enough. And we do that and it's a question of control. Is God's plan enough? Can I help God's plan? Can I tweak God's plan?, what? What's my part in that? What I learned is that it was just like we were talking about, we're part of such a bigger story than we have vision to see, and that story is. A story that is more interested in our destiny than in our comfort. And so when we say God is in control, we're it's God's plan is enough. We have to wrestle with things like disappointment and waiting, which is a big one in my story Failure. When things don't happen, you get a bad test result or your spouse leaves you or your child dies and trust, am I still gonna trust in this plan? That, to me, seems like it's falling apart. And that was the third question and hard for me because I, I'm a controller, I'm a planner. And to say that God's plans enough and I'm just gonna go with that . When you have a serious health diagnosis or another problem that's really beyond your control, you start to learn that while maybe most of my life I thought I was in control, I probably really wasn't. When you wrestle with that question of control and you're looking at God's plan and you're trying to be all in you, you think about things like, am I wasting my life? How do I know that on I'm on, God's plan and that it's gonna be okay? Because right now I just feel like I'm on this detour and maybe I'm even headed for a dead., I don't know. And so that question was one of the more difficult ones for me. I think just personality wise, I can certainly understand that because I'm also a little bit of a control freak. Maybe not even just a little bit, I really can relate to that orient and I think a lot of people can. In just a moment, I want to talk about how people can get the book. And I know that you. Free offer for people too, and we'll get to that in just a moment. But before we do, I think that there are some people listening today who are struggling with some of these questions and wrestling with them. What advice would you give to someone who's in the midst of the struggle right now? Things that seem like they don't go together can be true at the same time. In other words, what's happening to me can be true. And God can still be good. I can feel like I'm grieving over the loss of something and I can still be grateful for something else. I can be doubting and still be a faithful Christian. For me one of the big one was, can I have been a Christian for all of these years and still have all these questions? It was almost embarrassing. And w what we do sometimes as Christians, because we w don't want the questions, is we put a bandaid over it and we say things like, Trust God and in God's timing or choose joy, which are all good things to think of. As long as that's not where we stop, we have to go deeper because we all know that when we put a bandaid over a serious injury, it doesn't really heal it. It just keeps us from looking at it . And if we peel back that bandaid, , it's still there. The injury is still there. And what it really needs is sunlight and air and room to breathe. And our questions are just like that. We need to bring them out and let them breathe and give them some air and sunlight and they'll start to heal. And God has never, although we think he, he doesn't like questions, that's never been his nature. That's very true. All right, Lorianne, tell us about the book, how to Get It, when's it coming out? And I'll put links to everything in the show notes. Yes. The book is coming out on February 21st, and it's called Divine Detour. The path you'd never choose can lead to the faith you've always wanted. It's it's a book of 40 essays and it explores these three questions. The reason that I did them in essays is because I wanted them to be, individuals standalone questions and wanted the reader to be able to resolve that question, or at least to be able to tackle that question by itself before they move on to a different essay. And so they're standalone essays, but they include some of the really raw journal entries that I started in the hospital, but they also include just stories from. My childhood and, being a mom and all the things that everyone wrestles with. So even if it's not a healthy detour, you're on. it would still be something that would be beneficial. You can get it by going to my website@loriannwood.com slash books and you can find all the information there. That's great. I'm definitely going to check it out. Very excited to have the launch of a. First book. That's very exciting. So congratulations to you, and I know you said that you had a free offer for our listeners today. Tell us about that. One of the things I realized is that when you're on a detour, if you're like me and you have all these questions, and before you really are embracing the fact that I should be asking these questions and talking to God about, I was giving God the silent treatment. I was like, wow, I've been a Christian this long and this is how you treat me. I'm just gonna shut you out. And I had a hard time praying during those early days. Thankfully, I had prayer warriors and prayer chains going. But I had a hard time praying for myself, and so I created a resource that's called Five Prayers and Promises When You Can't Talk to God, and it's available for anyone that would like to check it out. It's just a prayer starter maybe some scriptures. A story and a link to some other resources that might be helpful if you find yourself in that situation, and listeners can get that by going to lori ann wood.com/hope. That's great. Lori ann wood.com/hope. That's wonderful. We all need hope, especially when we're in the midst of questions in turmoil. Lori Ann, I cannot believe that our time is over. It has just flown by. Thank you so much for being on Radical Abundance, and I wish you a radically abundant day. Thank you, Teresa. It was wonderful.