Courtney’s Story

Courtney was eleven years old when her body first began to struggle — a season already shadowed by her parents' divorce, and one that would quietly shape the years ahead. Through her adolescence and into her teenage years, she spent long stretches at Seattle Children's Hospital, navigating medications with difficult side effects, rounds of chemotherapy, and a disease that was never simple and never still.

At nineteen, her kidneys failed. Later, the disease would affect her central nervous system.

Through each chapter, Courtney kept walking forward.

In her early twenties, she found some relief through a naturopathic path that eventually allowed her to step off all medications. It wasn't a cure — but it was a quieter season, and a gift.

What most people didn't see during those years was what Courtney carried privately: the fear, the shame, the walls she built to protect herself from being truly known. But somewhere along the way, something began to shift. The very journey that had cost her so much began to reveal its purpose. Her experiences taught her strength she didn't know she had. They taught her to extend compassion — to herself and to others — and to fall in love with people for the beauty of who they are, not how they appear. She learned to embrace what makes each person unique, and to find genuine beauty in life even in its most tender and difficult places.

She has come to see her journey as a gift — one that has been leading her, all along, toward her true purpose. And while she doesn't always understand the road God has placed her on, she has settled deeply into the trust that He has a plan for all of it.

It wasn't until she shared her story openly, years later, that she put words to what had most changed her:

"It wasn't until I pursued Jesus full heartedly that the process of healing and transformation actually began. I wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for Him. God brought beauty out of ashes."

Now Courtney is navigating the most serious flare up of her life. She is holding onto what she has always believed — that God still heals, that it is not His will she be sick, and that by His stripes, she is healed. She is speaking life over her body, and she is asking those who believe to stand with her.

We are honored to be among them.