About Christy

Reader, welcome.

Image: Woman with dark eyes and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a pink sweater, layered necklaces, smiling.
Image: Woman with dark eyes and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a pink sweater, layered necklaces, smiling.

I am Christy Wilkens, wife to a tremendously patient and tender husband, Todd, and the mother of six tireless (no, seriously: tireless) children, from preschool to high school. I love philosophy, breakfast tacos, quiet reading in the wee hours, and Jesus.

We live in a tumbledown farmhouse on five unkempt acres. I drive a 12-passenger van. We fulfill every stereotype you have about orthodox Catholics.

Except the one about a perfect faith life.

This blog is a wrestling match with God in the space between faith and doubt, suffering and redemption, ability and disability. It’s about woundedness and wholeness, and how they’re more intimately connected than we think.

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My first book, coming from Ave Maria Press in fall 2021, is the story of a Lourdes pilgrimage with a child who stretched us further than we dreamed we would ever be called to go. Our son, Oscar, was diagnosed with epilepsy and global developmental delay, due to a multitude of not-yet-understood genetic anomalies, at five months of age. He wasn’t completely and instantaneously healed in the Lourdes baths, and yet, he was healed, in ways nobody could miss.

And so was I, and so was our marriage.

Image: Woman sitting in a blue cart, with a blond infant on her lap. A man walks next to the cart. They are accompanied by two women in white veils and black capes that bear a white eight-pointed cross.
Image: Woman sitting in a blue cart, with a blond infant on her lap. A man walks next to the cart. They are accompanied by two women in white veils and black capes that bear a white eight-pointed cross.

Sometimes the best answer from God is a “No… but see here. See what I have for you instead.” Sometimes it takes us years to realize this.

We are, as a priest once put it, an “intense” family. Several of us live with disabilities both overt and invisible. We laugh a lot. We yell a lot. We hug a lot, and cry a lot, and we try and usually fail to pray a lot. It is a work in progress.

I write here to tell the story of our attempts to be faithful — to God and to each other — even though we are so rarely completely successful.

And I hope you find yourself in some part of our story, because he’s calling you to be faithful, too, even when you’re stumbling through the darkness.

Connect with me online

Facebook: @faithfulnotsuccessful
Instagram: @csawilkens
Twitter: @csawilkens
Pinterest: @csawilkens