The Day Everything Changed

Season 1 | Episode 1

What happens when the life you planned begins to unravel—and the faith that once felt certain no longer knows what to do with suffering that refuses to end? In the first episode of Sacred Thorns, Rachel Walters shares how infertility became more than a medical diagnosis: it became the place where her assumptions about God, faith, suffering, and even her own worth began to change.

Drawing from years of treatments, surgeries, unanswered prayers, and the desperation that nearly allowed the pursuit of motherhood to consume everything else, Rachel traces the spiritual journey that followed. She wrestles with prosperity-gospel assumptions, well-meaning words that quietly place blame on the suffering person, and the realization that pain can become a spiritual battlefield. Along the way, she begins discovering a much older Christian understanding of suffering—one in which wounds are not evidence of God’s absence and may even become places where His grace is revealed.

This episode lays the foundation for Sacred Thorns: not a podcast about quick fixes, miracle endings, or seven steps to overcoming pain, but a place for the holy, messy middle. Because sometimes the suffering we most want to escape becomes the ground where we encounter God most profoundly—and sometimes everything changes even when our circumstances don’t.