Ep 31 | Darla’s Big Heart Surgery (And How Hard Things Challenge Us to Grow Deeper)

What if the hard thing you’re facing isn’t something God needs to remove before you can have peace?

What if, instead, it becomes the very place where your faith grows deeper?

We learned this in a way we never would have chosen. A year after finding out that our daughter Darla had a serious heart condition, we found ourselves standing outside an operating room, saying goodbye to our five-month-old baby before open-heart surgery.

We had prayed. We had hoped. We had watched God carry her through the NICU, multiple surgeries, hospital stays, and so many unknowns.

But we still didn’t know how this story would end.

Faith Doesn’t Mean Knowing the Outcome

One of the hardest questions we had to face was also one of the most important:

What if Darla doesn’t make it?

We didn’t want to ask that question. But we knew we had to.

Could we still say God was good if He didn’t answer our prayers the way we wanted? Could we still believe He was faithful if Darla didn’t come home?

That was the place where our faith became very real.

Sometimes we think strong faith means never being afraid, never asking hard questions, or always believing everything will work out the way we hope.

But that isn’t what we found.

Real faith meant bringing our fear, grief, and uncertainty honestly to God—and then choosing to trust Him anyway.

We didn’t have peace because we knew Darla would survive.

We had peace because we knew who God was, regardless of what happened.

You Have to Walk Through the Hard Thing

There’s a concept we’ve talked about called “the wall.” It’s that moment in life when we come face-to-face with something we can’t simply walk around.

Sometimes it’s suffering. Sometimes it’s grief, sin, disappointment, fear, or a question we don’t know how to answer.

And when we hit the wall, we have a choice.

We can distract ourselves. We can stay busy. We can scroll, escape, or pretend everything is fine.

Or we can stop and let God meet us there.

During Darla’s surgery, we couldn’t avoid the wall. We had to take her to the hospital. We had to say goodbye. We had to watch her disappear down the hallway. Then we had to sit in a waiting room and trust God with an outcome we could not control.

But there was work happening in our hearts long before that morning.

We had spent months praying, talking, crying, asking hard questions, reading Scripture, and learning to sit with God in the middle of our fear.

That preparation mattered.

Build Your Roots Before the Storm

One of the biggest lessons we took from Darla’s story is that you don’t have to wait for a crisis to grow deeper roots in Jesus.

Our daily rhythms of spending time with God and practicing Sabbath had already become part of our lives.

They weren’t magic formulas. They didn’t make suffering disappear.

But they gave us a place to continually return.

When we sat with God on ordinary mornings, we were learning to know Him. When we practiced Sabbath, we were learning that the world could keep turning without us controlling everything.

Those ordinary rhythms helped prepare our hearts for an extraordinary season.

You can begin building those roots today.

Start small.

Spend ten quiet minutes with God before the day gets loud. Sit with your coffee and pray. Read a Psalm. Take a walk without your phone. Practice Sabbath. Talk honestly with God about what you’re afraid of instead of trying to hide it from Him.

You don’t need a perfect routine.

You just need space to be with Him.

Look for the Beautiful Moments

Six hours is a long time to wait while your baby is in open-heart surgery.

But we didn’t spend every minute staring at the door.

At one point, we went to get coffee. We ate lunch. We even played a board game.

That might sound strange, but we had learned something important: worry wasn’t going to change the outcome.

There was nothing we could do from that waiting room to make Darla’s surgery go better.

So we chose to receive the moments God was giving us.

There can still be joy in a hard season.

There can still be laughter. Beauty. A cup of coffee. A good meal. A conversation with someone you love.

Hard things and beautiful things can exist at the same time.

God Is Good Beyond the Outcome

Praise God, Darla’s surgery was successful.

Today, she is walking, learning American Sign Language, smiling constantly, and bringing more joy to our family than we could have imagined.

But the deepest lesson wasn’t that God gave us the outcome we prayed for.

It was that God met us before we knew the outcome.

Our faith grew because He brought us to the end of ourselves and taught us that His goodness is bigger than our circumstances.

Romans 5 says that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

We wouldn’t have chosen the suffering.

But we can look back and see the hope God produced through it.

Whatever hard thing you are facing today, you don’t have to pretend it isn’t hard.

Bring the fear to God. Ask the hard questions. Let yourself grieve. Stop running from the places that hurt.

And then, little by little, keep turning toward Jesus.

You may not know how your story will end.

But you can know the One who is with you in the middle of it.

And that is where deep roots begin.

Want to hear more of Darla’s story and what God taught us through her heart surgery? Listen to the full episode of The Rooted Family Podcast, Ep 31 | Darla’s Big Heart Surgery (And How Hard Things Challenge Us to Grow Deeper).