Hi, I’m Brittany
I was the kid who never raised her hand in class.
Not because I didn't care. Not because I wasn't paying attention. But because something in me was always convinced that what I had to say wasn't worth saying.
Self-doubt was my constant companion. The idea of being the center of attention made me want to disappear.
So if you had told me then that one day I would be a pastor, a podcaster, and someone who helps women find their voice and their healing, I would have laughed. Nervously. While trying not to be noticed.
But that's the thing about God. He doesn't call the confident. He calls the willing.
And slowly, painfully, beautifully, He called me.
The Long Road to Firm Ground
I grew up in the church but my walk with God was anything but simple.
From a young age I battled depression, anger, self-doubt, and a persistent feeling of inadequacy. In college those struggles deepened and I coped in ways that made everything worse. I questioned whether God was real. Whether a good and loving God could exist in a world with so much pain.
I did the research. I asked the hard questions. And eventually I came to believe, deeply and personally, in the God I had grown up hearing about.
But believing and walking it out were two very different things.
It took years. Church. Therapy. Mistakes. Lots of honest conversations with God. And eventually graduate school, where I trained as a marriage and family therapist and began to understand for the first time why people get stuck and what it actually takes to change.
All of it was working together, even when I couldn't see it.
By my early thirties I was planted in a church I loved, married to my husband Wesley, and walking more consistently with God than I ever had before. Things felt solid. Good even.
But there was still a missing piece.
I believed in God. I just wasn't sure He could speak to me.
The Moment Everything Changed
I was newly pregnant with my second child when I went to a women's conference. At the start of the weekend our pastor handed each of us a small gift and asked us to hold it and simply ask God what He had for us that weekend. I didn't expect to hear anything. But sitting there I felt something I can only describe as God's voice saying two words: it's a girl. Having a daughter was something I had always dreamed about but never said out loud. Too afraid to want something I couldn't control. And yet there it was. A whisper I couldn't explain. I held onto it through my whole first trimester. And then at my twelve week appointment there was no heartbeat. The grief was devastating. But God met me in it, through friendships, through timing that could only be described as divine, through moments that felt too specific to be coincidence. The next morning I sat down to journal and just let it all out. God I don't understand. You told me it was a girl. What happened? In the middle of writing my phone rang. A number I didn't recognize. I never answer those. I answered. It was the doctor's office. They had information they thought might help me process what had happened. The baby, they told me, had Turner syndrome, a condition where one X chromosome is missing. It only affects girls. Which meant the baby was a girl. I don't know how to fully explain what happened in that moment. But having God's voice confirmed, hearing that what I thought I heard was real, something broke open inside me. A faith I didn't know was possible. A knowing that God could actually speak to me, specifically, personally, in the middle of my worst day.
It was New Year's Eve. I wrote in my journal:
“I lift my hands and surrender my plans to the one who planned the earth. I choose to trust. I choose to worship. I choose to look and wait in expectation for the good. Happy New Year, indeed.”
What Came Next
That season set me on a trajectory I never could have planned.
Over the next few months I felt God calling me to two things I never would have chosen on my own: to start a podcast and to step into ministry on staff at my church.
Me. The girl who never raised her hand.
I said yes to both, terrified, unqualified-feeling, and more certain than I had ever been about anything.
A month or two later I was pregnant again. Believing again. Praying for this girl God had promised. And I felt Him put a name on my heart: Illyana.
Illyana is named for the Illiamna flower, a wildflower with a remarkable quality. Its seeds can stay dormant in the ground for up to a hundred years. They won't bloom until fire comes to the forest. The very thing that creates devastation is the only thing that can crack the seed open and bring the flower to life.
That's my daughter. That's my podcast. That's my life.
And that's where the name Made Whole comes from.
In scripture the biblical definition of healing is restoration to wholeness. Not perfection. Not having it all together. This is the invitation of Made Whole — for God to take the very worst things and turn them into the most beautiful things. Like a potter with clay. Like wildflowers after fire.
Where I am Today
I have been married to my husband Wesley for over ten years. We have three kids ages 7, 5, and 3. We are soon to be foster parents.
I was previously licensed as a marriage and family therapist. These days my work lives at the intersection of faith and psychology rather than in a clinical setting. I am trained in Restoration Theory, a neuropsychology-backed, biblically-rooted framework that has become the foundation of everything I teach.
I serve on the pastoral team at the Movement Church in Orange County, California, something the girl who never raised her hand could never have imagined.
Made Whole is the thing I wish I had found years ago. It is the integration of everything God has walked me through, the therapy, the theology, the hard seasons, the Holy Spirit moments, the slow and sometimes painful process of becoming who He made me to be.
I built it for the woman who is doing all the right things and still feels stuck. The one who loves God and still can't shake the anxiety, the anger, the patterns she hates. The one who suspects there is more available to her but doesn't know how to get there.
I know her well.
I was her.
And I know what's on the other side.
I hope to see you there.
