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Libby recently chatted with author Becky Graves. Becky is nearing the end of her fight with terminal cancer, and yet offers us a lifetime of Joy and Hope in her new devotional and years of work in Haiti. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below and be blown away by her love of Jesus.
You can get her book, read her devotions and learn more at fearisnotmyfuture.com!
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
Hey, this is Libby on Uplifting Life Songs, and I am joined today by a special guest, Becky Graves, author of the new book, Fear is Not My Future. Becky, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today.
Thanks for having me, Libby.
Yeah. A brand new book is here. It’s a 30-day devotional guide, right? Tell us a little bit about it.
So one unique thing about my devotional is I published it two weeks ago from room 216 at the Novant Medical Center. I was hospitalized on that Thursday, and it seems important, more so than it had been, to get the book to press. And so my son came over on that Thursday night.
We worked through some final edits together, and we hit publish. This book is the work of my heart. It sums up 14 years of serving in the country of Haiti, as well as seven years of grappling with an incurable cancer called granulosa cell tumor.
And I took writings that I had done specifically for Haiti, writings that I had done specifically regarding my cancer journey, and I brought them together in a devotional that has been kind of my declaration since my cancer returned in 2023 that fear is not my future. That is a powerful statement. I want that to be my declaration too.
Anxiety, pain, struggles, those don’t control or define us or what lies ahead for us. How are you able to face whatever the future is without fear?
I will say that Haiti has been my greatest teacher through the years. I have learned in the ministry there in Haiti that there are things that are simply out of my control.
They are completely in God’s hands. And I’ve learned through the years I can spend emotional energy on things that I have no control. My expending that energy will have no effect on the end result.
And so the Lord has very mercifully through the years taught me some difficult lessons about letting go of the things that aren’t mine to hold. I read an analogy years ago that it’s like we’re all given a bucket and you can only put so much in that bucket. And that’s our bucket to carry.
And we have to be strategic with what are we putting in our bucket? What are we carrying? Because if you put something in that bucket that’s not yours to carry, something that you’re actually supposed to be carrying might fall out. And so Haiti taught me, trust the Lord with the things that are out of your control. I mean, work hard, work really hard on the things that you can affect or you can affect change.
But on the things that are out of your control, give them to the Lord, trust his goodness, trust his sovereignty, trust his providence, and then rest, just rest in him.
Yes, I think a lot about Psalm 23, where it says, you know, make me lie down in green pastures. And I wish that like finding rest wasn’t something that I felt the need to be forced into, you know, but it’s really challenging, like you said, to be able to let go of the emotional energy that we hold on to.
How did your passion and connection with Haiti even start?
Well, there’s a story for you. I never wanted to go to Haiti. It was never my dream.
It was never what I considered to be my calling. I was living a very comfortable upper middle class housewife existence. I was consumed with the things that a lot of women are in that socio demographic, like, am I going to Target this week? Am I going to meet my friend for Starbucks? Are we going to repaint the bathroom? And my husband brought up the idea of a missions trip to Haiti with our three young children.
And I was completely opposed. I went on the US State Department’s website, and you see all the travel warnings, and you hear all of the bad things. And I was like, absolutely not.
We’re not doing this. But my husband was very persistent. And despite the fact that I had a lot of resistance in my heart, I was open to the Holy Spirit’s leading.
And over time, the Holy Spirit showed me, you know, we’re not, I’m not just calling you to teach a Sunday school class. I’m not just calling you to teach a women’s Bible study. I’m not just calling you to sing in the church choir or play the piano.
I’m calling you to something more. And so in 2012, I said yes to my husband. I said yes to the Holy Spirit.
And we took what we thought would be a one week trip to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. And it completely changed our lives.
Tell me a little bit about what happened. Your whole family went, you went with your three young children and your husband?
Yeah, so all five of us went together. We went with an established organization. It was a very safe by Haiti standards trip.
We stayed on a compound. Everything was very controlled. But what got my heart was during that week, they would take us out to rural communities.
And for the very first time in my life, I came face to face with real poverty, came face to face with real human beings created in God’s image, whose lives were so different than mine, not because of anything they had done, but simply because of where they were born. And I remember very specifically, it was one of our last days there still didn’t really have a vision for going back or this being something long term. But we were in a church building, if you could call it that it was a center block building, you know, open air.
And there’s a sea of children. And there was one little girl. And she was so painfully thin, but she had the biggest smile on her face.
And I just in the sea of children, I saw her. Her name is Esther. And in that moment, I knew like, this is not just a one time thing.
Like I, I’m supposed to be here. I believe I’m supposed to come back here. I believe that the Lord has something for my family here in Haiti.
How did that then take shape?
I think so often we think about a country like Haiti, and we think about giving to the poor. But I realized, giving someone a bag of rice doesn’t change their life. In fact, it enslaves them.
It keeps them exactly where they are. That bag of rice will last for a week, maybe two weeks. But nothing about that family’s life has changed because of a bag of rice.
And wanted to see people go from surviving to thriving. What does that look like? What does it look like to invest in a small group of people and really invest in them and not invest in them through handouts, but to invest in their lives, giving them skills, giving them resources that will get them ahead. And so we founded Haiti Awake with that principle.
We started out with a small group of people. Over the years, we have continued to grow the ministry, concentrating on our staff, creating real jobs that have sustainability, that have community impact. So most of the people on our staff now are educators.
We have, I love to tell people this, we have a computer lab. We actually have two computer labs in Port-au-Prince. We don’t even have electricity, but we have computer labs.
We have two libraries in Port-au-Prince where children can come and they can interact not just with books, but other resources like games and puzzles. We offer homework help in the afternoon and summer camp, which is going on right now. And we continue to offer both adults and children opportunities to further develop their lives.
14 years serving in Haiti and it’s HaitiAwake.org if anybody wants to learn a little bit more about the organization or maybe even be a part of helping. HaitiAwake.org. I want to shift gears a little bit to the seven years that you’ve been in this health journey. Fear is not my future.
You talked about kind of letting the walls of resistance come down as far as traveling to Haiti. And now we’re talking about fear not being your future when your future is, you know, what is ahead for you and how do you balance knowing what may come and letting go of that control while still doing what you can each day?
So, my dark humor with regards to my diagnosis makes other people uncomfortable. I have frequently said in recent weeks that I really hope when I pass that you’re going to say, what? Becky was just on my podcast two days ago.
What? She passed? Or wait, Becky passed? I thought she was just in Haiti last week. I tell people I’m planning to drive the Ferrari into the brick wall. Like, we’re just full speed ahead, people, until we can’t do any more.
And I’ve asked friends. I’m like, God’s grace in my life. And of course, I want to write my story.
We all like to be in control of these things. But what I would consider God’s grace in my life would be to allow me to just serve faithfully to the last moment. And that is part of this whole idea that fear is not my future.
In 2023, I realized I was facing something big when the cancer came back for the second time. And I first heard those words incurable. I knew, like, this is the path we’re on.
And I’m really big on accountability. This has been me my entire life. I started telling people I was going to graduate school before I ever applied.
Because there was accountability in that. Before I ran my first marathon, it was the same thing. I started telling people, I’m going to run a marathon, I’m going to run a marathon.
Because for me, once I publicly declare something, it’s hard to go back on that. So as we were working through in 2023, how to share information with family and friends, how to interact during this journey without being overwhelmed with feedback from people, people are very well meaning that they love to give you advice about your cancer. We could have a whole episode about that.
But we came up with the idea of a website. And as I was working through that, the idea of fear is not my future. That’s what I wanted to call it.
And then I decided I wanted to tell stories of cancer. But I also wanted to tell stories of Haiti, because again, it was through Haiti, that I recognized that fear is a valid emotion. But like all of our emotions, you give that to God and you allow him to use it for His glory.
And so for the last three years, specifically, I’ve been writing on fearisnotmyfuture.com. And when it came time to write this devotional, I had a lot of material to work from, and how I want my life ultimately, to magnify him. So that’s what this is all been about. Like I, people are, I never expected people to bring me books, my books to sign them.
And it’s just been kind of a, I had someone stop by my house today, and she was so cute. She pulls her book out of the bag. And she’s like, could you sign the copy of my book? And I’m like, of course, but I never saw myself doing this.
You got to practice that signature. Like, how does this look like an author? Like I sat down this weekend, like, not just my signature, but like, what do I want to say? Yeah, yeah. And I started signing them Christ be magnified, Christ be magnified.
And that is among many things right now, one of my prayers for my life is that Christ will be magnified.
Let’s talk a little bit about the tension of living with multiple things being true at the same time. You know, joy and grief, holding those together, pain, but hope, loss and abundance.
How do you, how do you look for and see God’s goodness in the midst of struggle?
I’ll go back to Haiti again. It didn’t take me long in Haiti to realize exactly what you just said. You can be standing in the middle of grief and there’s joy.
And often we’ve had situations in Haiti where I couldn’t separate the joy and the grief. It’s just so intermixed. And several years ago, I don’t always do my one word for the year.
I do it occasionally, but I had chosen the word intentionality. And I’m actually working on my second devotional book right now. And my, my thoughts in this are like finding the extraordinary moments in the ordinary days.
It is incredible. When you take the time to slow down, get still before the Lord, the things that you will notice in everyday life, the miracles that are right in front of you, the gifts that God gives us. But in our hurry culture, I think we miss a lot of it.
But I, I made a practice back in 2023. I live roughly 10 minutes from Wrightsville beach. And I’ve always been physically active, walking my community, running my community, but I’d never taken the time to go to Wrightsville beach in the morning.
And the Lord struck me like with that one day, like people spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to come to vacation here on our coast. And I couldn’t tell you the last time I had looked at the ocean and I started going to the beach in the morning and walking down there. And it was just amazing that the things that the Lord would show me, the people I have met, the connections that I have made the morning when I was able to see a sea turtle coming out of the dunes from her nest where she’s just laid her babies and she’s going back to the ocean.
She is following the path that the Creator set for her. There’s a lesson there in the faithfulness of God. I, um, people ask me all the time, how do you find shark’s teeth? I don’t know.
I walk the beach in the mornings, but you’ll talk to people that have lived on Wrightsville beach for years. They’ve never found a shark’s tooth. I find them on the regular and people are so jealous.
It’s funny to me. Um, and people try to, people try to get me to give them my shark’s teeth. I’m like, no, this is my shark’s teeth.
I don’t care that I have hundreds of them. Like it’s mine. But I came to in time, like those shark’s teeth, I pick them up and when I pick it up, I say, thank you, Jesus.
Those are fossilized shark’s teeth. They’ve been there for a long time on the ocean floor. They’ve come up.
They’re a reminder that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, that this world was here before I was, it will be here after I pass. And God is the sustainer through it all. I love that.
You know, one of the things that you talk about in Fear is not my Future is just living with grace and hope and enthusiasm. And I feel like that’s what your day to day looks like as you, as you’re tuned in to our Creator, you know, you’re seeing him in the face of the Esther in Haiti, and you’re seeing him in these quiet moments on the beach and in a shark’s tooth, you know, and I think that that’s so beautiful of where we are still and tuned in when we slow down and we kind of like, it’s almost like a radio broadcast, you know, we kind of get that, that right signal where we are connected to our source and our creator. And I think that that’s so beautiful.
Before we go, I just want to ask you, going through a challenging health journey, living with the mantra of fear not being your future, knowing that your struggles, your pain, anxiety, none of that controls or defines you or what lies ahead. What would you say to someone who maybe is struggling with fear or anxiety right now?
I would first of all, tell them that that fear is an emotion that was given to us by God, you know, David wrote in the Psalms, when I am afraid, I will trust in you. It doesn’t negate that fear is going to be part of our lives.
But trusting in the Lord, like making that conscious decision that I’m going to recognize this emotion for what it is. I don’t my life doesn’t have to be ruled by my emotions. But I can trust in you and finding those Ebenezer’s in life where God has been faithful in the past, and knowing that he will be faithful in the future.
If you remember, when the Israelites had crossed and they built the altar with the stones and you know, I the idea of like, what are the what are these stones mean? What will we tell our children? Those are a reminder that like, those are a reminder of God’s faithfulness. There’s a song I’m struggling to remember now who sings it, but he says in his lyrics, I will build an altar stack it stone by stone because every Ebenezer shows I’ve never walked alone. So it’s so important that before you are in the crisis, that you are developing that relationship with your creator, that you know that you are his and that he will be there for you through every storm in life.
And having that confidence is what can make all the difference and allow a person to claim for themselves. Fear is not my future.
Becky, thank you so much for your grace and your time today. Her book is called Fear is Not My Future, which is also where you can find out more about Becky, fearisnotmyfuture.com. You can check out the devotional there you can find more stories of Haiti, you can get involved at haitiawake.org and just know that we are grateful for you and your perspective and the opportunity to just connect with you today.
Thank you so much. Thank you for your time.
Thank you for allowing me to share the story of God’s goodness in my life.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)