Joshua Swanson: Welcome to The Walk; a devotional podcast led by worship leaders. In this episode, Jordan St. Cyr, whose song Fires is hands down one of my favorites, joins the podcast today to talk about an extremely difficult subject, how to keep your faith while we wait on our miracle. Here we go.
Jordan St. Cyr: All right. It’s really great to be here with you. Um, I’m just gonna share a little bit of my story, where I come from and, and a little bit of what God has been teaching me through some of the harder parts that we’ve recently walked through.
I grew up in a very small town, about 1200 people. Trades, farming community in Central Canada. Uh, a town just south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, uh, Niverville. And, um, you know, I didn’t know a lot of, a lot of heartbreak. You know, I say the small town thing because, you know, we were kind of sheltered. We didn’t, we didn’t go through a lot, you know, I had a, uh, I wasn’t super close with my, my grandparents and when, when one of them passed it, didn’t have this huge effect on me.
And so, I grew up in a Christian home, grew up in a small, uh, really, uh, Christian community. You knew who went to church and you knew who didn’t. And uh, and it was just a real safe place to, to raise a family. And I had not known a lot of pain and suffering in my life, uh, up until about, you know, three and a half years ago. And, uh, God was grooming something in my heart, I believe, to share something important.
I grew up in a very charismatic church and, learned a lot about the big things of God. You know, if you had a need, you would pray about it and you would pray in expectation of a miracle. And I still believe that today.
Um, but if you’re out there, listening and, you standing between your miracle and the not yet, what does your relationship with God look like? So three and a half years ago, my world got flipped upside down when my youngest daughter, Emory, was born.
On her first day of life, she was rushed to have an MRI that revealed, uh, that she had a, uh, had a serious and progressive, uh, brain condition. And in her case, this meant an overgrowth of blood vessels on the left side of her head and face that were stealing blood away from the left side of her brain, um, causing, you know, multiple, uh, seizures, high risk of stroke, uh, blood clotting.
We saw the inside of, a lot of, you know, emergency rooms and ambulance rides, and we were in the doctor’s office, uh, for the better part of her year, uh, when she was born.
And so this, this really kind of opened up a door for God to minister to my heart in, a whole different way. And he drew me really deeper into this, this heart for others that I had never really, you know, in the word, you know, it says, you know, in Matthew 22, you know, love God with everything you have, right? Your heart. Your mind and your soul. Jesus says, this is my greatest commandment. And then he goes on to say, love your neighbor like yourself.
And I always believed that, but it wasn’t until this little girl intersected my life that I began a new journey, a new relationship with pain and suffering.
I was able to begin to understand the hurt that a lot of us are walking through on a daily basis that, you know, a lot of us are still believers, right? We believe in God, um, but that miracle that we’ve believed in our entire lives, uh, hasn’t arrived yet. So then how do we walk out our faith? For my wife and I are our three other kids.
I will say that now that we’re three and a half years down the road, it has become one of the most, uh, beautiful, um, at times hard things that we have walked through. Um, but it has been something that God has used in a way that we never thought possible to go deeper with him, to go deeper, uh, within our marriage and to see our kids now walk in ways of compassion that we had never seen before.
You know, our 12 year old now is just, he operates in such a beautiful way with our youngest daughter, and he’s our, he’s our sports guy. He’s our competitive guy, right? He wants to win, and then this little girl arrives and melts his heart.
And so he sees the world in a different way. And I see the way God is using, uh, our daughter as just a little light back to the heart of God.
Joshua Swanson: When we come back, Jordan brings it home with some scripture and a word on pain and suffering.
But first, some of you may already know that we have an amazing online institute for training and equipping those in the worship arts. It’s called the Worship Leader Institute. I wanted to quickly play you a clip of one of the many workshops up on the platform. Here’s CeCe Winans and her talk on rediscovering brethren dwelling together in unity.
CeCe Winans: But we must agree on our purpose in life that is not up for negotiation. We must agree on our purpose in life, and that is to work together for God. Everybody say, work together for God. Work together for God. Our outward expression of harmony will reflect our inward harmony, on purpose.
Joshua Swanson: There’s already so much amazing content up on the institute from past conferences, and we actually release four new workshops from top practitioners each month. Our subscription is only $14.99 a month, and if you use the coupon code WLIEmail, that’s WLIEmail, all one word, you’ll get a month free. So, check it out at WorshipLeaderInstitute.com.
Okay, back to Jordan.
Jordan St. Cyr: In 1 Peter 1:6-7 it says, “In this, you rejoice. Though now for a little while if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
That verse has found a way in the deepest parts of my heart because God has used the pain and suffering that we’ve walked through as one of his greatest tools to draw me back to his heart. So, I would say if you encounter people in your life that are, are going through the hardest chapters of their story, or maybe even you are, Um, don’t discount that season. This is something that God will use in a mighty way.
Joshua Swanson: Thank you, Jordan, for sharing about your family’s journey, and let’s, all commit to saying a prayer for Anne Marie. I’ll quickly throw one up now.
Lord, we just come before you as a community, of worshipers and worship leaders and those who are passionate about you, we just lift up Jordan and his daughter, Anne Marie, and his entire family, God, you are the miracle worker.
We believe in miracles and we just pray God, in your precious mighty name that Anne Marie would be fully and completely healed. We trust you Lord. We believe in you. We believe in your word, and we just ask this prayer. We put this prayer out there. In Jesus name, amen. Jordan has a beautiful song out called Weary Traveler that will play out this episode with. The theme directly ties back to this concept of walking through pain and suffering and believing that God has a miracle for us on the other side.
As always, special thanks to Matt McCarty for producing and editing today’s episode, Jacob Farlow produced our theme song. The Walk is brought to you by Worship Leader Magazine, which is an Authentic Media brand.
I’m Joshua Swanson. Here’s Weary Traveler.
