Hungry to learn and grow after years as a stay-at-home mom, Lacy Webb was looking for something. When a friend told her about NOSW, she agreed to enroll in an online program—but only to support her friend who was also attending.
After the three-day program in 2022, Lacy decided: “There’s no way I’m gonna miss out on the two-week course. I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get there.”
Even though it was hard to leave her family for two weeks, Lacy came to Berea for the residential session in November 2022. “And I’m so glad I did,” she says.
The program helped Lacy rebuild her confidence, manage her social anxiety and set goals.
“I feel like I am capable of hard things and I’m capable of important things, whether I have an important title, an important paycheck, I’m still important,” Lacy says.
Like many women who come to NOSW, Lacy traveled a difficult path to get here. Her dad died when Lacy was seven. Several times over the years, as a child and as an adult, Lacy moved from Ohio to West Liberty, Kentucky, and back again.
In her first year of college, Lacy met her husband, Jeremiah. They married and soon started a family with the birth of their daughter, Jayden.
“There were some hard times, being so young and trying to raise a child on one income. But we got through it and we did it,” Lacy says. “Looking back, I can see how hard that was, but I can see how it grew me as a person, too.”
During those years, Lacy struggled with anxiety and depression. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed.
In 2019, when her daughter was 10, she welcomed her son. Dallas was born at 29 weeks and weighed 2 pounds, 12 ounces. He spent 79 days in the neonatal intensive care unit. Because Lacy’s husband was unable to get much time off, Lacy often went to the hospital alone and felt torn between her two children, who both needed her.
“When you look back on it, you think, man, how did I even function? How did I get through that?” Lacy says.
Through a program called Helping Hands that supported Lacy and her family after they brought Dallas home, she was finally able to find the right therapist.
She went through another challenging time in 2020, when she and her husband attempted to adopt a foster child and the adoption fell through, leaving Lacy devastated.
In addition to therapy and her love for her children, Lacy’s faith in God sustained her. Throughout this difficult journey, she kept getting signs that she would be OK.
“God doesn’t always take the trouble away, but he always gives you a way through it,” she says. “He kept showing me that, over and over.”
Finding NOSW was “definitely a God thing,” she says.
Since graduating from NOSW, Lacy has been busy. She completed an internship with The Seeker and continues to write for the Christian publication. She also is taking an online writing course and collecting plastic grocery bags to make sleeping mats for unhoused people. And she has a paying childcare job.
“I can really look at myself and say, I’m proud of who you are, just as you are. I’m enough for myself,” she says.
