Women Who Inspire: Carissa Krause
Carissa Krause is one of those “cool moms” that the kids love and the parents want to be befriend. She is a lovely example of the love of the Lord and seems to do everything she attempts with a dash of flair and a whole lot of ease. That is not to say that Carissa’s path has been easy, but it does mean that she has given her paths to the Lord and He has directed, protected and blessed. Here is Carissa’s story, in her own words. – Stephanie Kelley
This moment with you is a treasure for me. Thank you for being part of my story by reading part of my story! My name is Carissa Krause. I live in Lynden, Washington and love being a wife to my wonderful husband, Darryl and mom to our two amazing boys, Noah and Lincoln. I was three years old when I declared that I would be a teacher and even picked my college at age 10 (BIOLA University).
While I did earn my teaching certificate in elementary education with a psychology endorsement, going on to teach 2nd graders and preschoolers, God led us to resign those positions and homeschool our children. They are currently 15 and 11 respectively and have had success in both homeschooling and the public school. Through all of this, I voluntarily led worship teams for 25 years, writing Christmas and Easter cantatas and services, singing and leading from the piano. Musical worship is like air for me. You can, perhaps, imagine how difficult it was for me to step away from leading. So these days are a bit confusing, but I am confident that God has got me…even when it doesn’t feel like it.
Currently, I am an on-air host with Praise 106.5, a position that came most unexpectedly! I enjoyed hosting shows every evening during the week. However, COVID cutbacks left me with one show on Sunday afternoons. While I’m grateful for that show, I needed to, like so many other people, get a “side hustle”. I was surprised, truly, to find myself come ALIVE as a security gate operator at a local company. Asking all the COVID questions, taking temperatures…talking with real people in real time…I was in my element. If I ever questioned whether or not I was an extrovert, I didn’t anymore! I find myself INVIGORATED after my shift…which is from 4:30 to 7:30 in the morning!
My passions are my relationships. I love BIG and hurt DEEP. They are my greatest source of joy…and pain. Walking with people through their “hard” motives and encourages me as well as 3 hour coffee shop conversations or speaking at retreats…I love to teach and listen and be with people.
I am also quite fond of mountain trails, particularly with close up views of Mount Baker! I have often said that “my heart breathes in the mountains”.
What DRIVES me…and life passions, circumstances, experiences, mistakes and victories always…ALWAYS circle back to and reckon with this…is growing and maturing TRUST in Jesus. No matter how far I wander or how close I walk, the question I ALWAYS end-up wrestling with is, “Do I trust Jesus with my life…here in this moment?”
I did for the first time, at least consciously…at age 7. This moment would explain my affinity for thunder and lightning storms…and not pansy storms either … but those claps of thunder that shake your bones and blinding bolts of electricity! It was during on of those storms that I looked out my window with the Strawberry Shortcake curtains and trusted Jesus. I knew that His death and resurrection had accomplished that salvation and it was time for me to trust Him for it, for me. And honestly, I can’t think of a time when “my faith became my own” as many would testify. It seems it always has been…but the GROWING…now THAT has been tumultuous and beautiful and terribly painful and exhilarating.
It wasn’t long after that thunder and lightning storm that the REAL storm hit. Somewhere around 10 years old, I bought into the nagging thought that maybe I wasn’t really saved, or perhaps I would do or had done something to disqualify me from eternal life. Anxiety and depression hit its peak in my twenties and to say that it was hell on earth would serious dumb down the seriousness of hell…but Friend…it was horrible. Medication helped me to process the help I received and in my thirties, I was diagnosed with ADHD, OCD, Anxiety and Depression.
And I was relieved.
It was also during this time that I took then subsequently taught, the Freedom in Christ course. I’ve been passionate about Identity in Christ ever since! One of the most helpful aspects of enduring these things was that I never stopped talking, never stopped looking for help and that connected me with people that I would have never known dealt with similar things. There was a helpful community available that I think we shut ourselves off to because of shame or embarrassment. I wrestled with how I would ever get to speak or write or lead if anyone ever knew that I dealt with these things…but then, I realized that curled up in the fetal position in the corner of the living room wasn’t going to feed my kids…so I kept talking, and eventually, God healed and used those very things to speak life into other broken lives. I have found that people tend to trust more, be more vulnerable and real with someone who is being honest about his or her struggles. Don’t get me wrong, I am SO THANKFUL that I don’t deal with the anxiety today…but I am grateful for where God’s brought me…and sure enough, just like trusted mentors said would happen…I’ve come to the place where I can say, “I wouldn’t change it for the world”.
There have been a lot of those hard moments that I “wouldn’t change for the world.” It’s a little intimidating when you carry your sedated child out of an unexpected MRI and hear “good luck” from the technician! My husband and I…and everybody else…was thinking “brain tumor” as we tried to figure out what was causing his pain, drooling, squinty eyes and whiny voice. We were referred to Children’s Hospital where one of the BEST neurosurgeons in the country confirmed that Noah had a Chiari Malformation, and the following year, had a surgery to lift/shrink his bulging brain off of his brain stem and spinal cord. He recovered like a champ! Three weeks later, Darryl broke both of his wrists and fractured his skull…so there we sat on the couch one day, Noah with a huge caterpillar like scar on the back of his shaved head; me, 7 months pregnant; and Darryl double casted and a warning not to sneeze or his head would cave in. Just the other night we were commenting in Small Group how 2009 was one of the most peaceful years of our lives. We experienced GRACE through TRUST. It was incredible. Little did WE know that grace seeds were being planted…to be harvested in 2016.
Seven years later, I was coaching a Lynden Youth Sports basketball game when something “let go” in my head…and I knew it was a brain aneurysm. Doctors weren’t exactly sure how I knew that as I had not been diagnosed with an aneurysm…but I am convinced that God wanted me to understand that I was in a BAD WAY. So I looked up into the sky between the corner of the old Lynden Middle School roof and the water tower and tried to spy Jesus…coming to get me.
Truly.
That’s exactly what I did.
Then I hit my knees and grabbed my head and rocked back and forth praying, “God, what do you want me to do?”
And He, very clearly, spoke to my spirit, “I want you to reaffirm your faith.”
And I thought… “You want me to think about the Gospel. You want me to think about Jesus.”
Pictures of the life of Jesus flashed through my head.
Not visions…I had one of those in the ambulance…but pictures out of story books or movies. Distinctly, I remember a nativity scene and then the last scene of the Passion of the Christ, where Jesus walked out of His grave. At THAT moment, I heard, “Carissa, you don’t need to be afraid, I beat death.”
And Friend…there was not ONE OUNCE of fear…and I honestly figured I would die.
I don’t ever EVER want to experience that kind of pain again.
And I don’t ever EVER want my children to experience three weeks of wondering whether or not their mom would live or die.
But laying there in my brother’s arms on the sidewalk where literally NOTHING could help me except Jesus…there was extraordinarily peaceful in my heart.
There’s a whole lot more to that story, so many more God moments! I can’t share them all here, but I do want to mention that as the paramedics lifted me in the ambulance, Noah called out to Darryl, “Don’t worry Dad, my brain doctor will take care of Mom.”
Darryl didn’t have the heart to tell our boy that we weren’t going to Children’s.
Except that when we arrived at Harborview, the emergency doors opened…and there he was, with a stellar medical team.
I started to notice that Noah had a particular confidence in God and I believe God used his surgery and MY surgery to grow that confidence in him. It is also not lost on me, that part of Noah’s circumstances 7 years before, with an amazing doctor, would be so that Noah would have a certain level of peace 7 years later. For us to be overseen by the same neurosurgeon really is a grace of God.
Again, I’m truly thinking “book” when it comes to the aneurysm story…so I can’t possibly tell it all here…and quite frankly…probably not all in a book either! God is STILL showing me and growing me through it all! I WILL say, that I haven’t had a lick of anxiety since then. That has been incredible, of course. The more difficult lessons, I’m still learning. I’m learning how important it is to live into the qualities and giftings that GOD has given…and, for goodness sake…to stop apologizing for them! And, strangely enough…I’m learning that if I can trust Him with the BIG stuff…like dying…I can trust Him with the LITTLE stuff too.
I remember asking God to take care of my kids when I lay there at Harborview. If I could offer words of advice to a mother going through a major health crisis, I would say, first, be honest with your kids. Depend on God for what to say and when to say it…but never lie to them. And second, God loves your kids more than you do. And I kept telling myself that…and I would pray that God would use what I was going through to inspire them to TRUST Him.
Community, in most all moments of life, is critical. My community has provided opportunity for me to spread my wings…crash and burn…and fly. That’s all part of it, right? A SAFE community calls out a person’s identity and gives them space to figure that out. We have had a couple of young women live with us, and our heart was always to provide a safe place where it was “quiet” enough to hear God…to “figure it out”. It never occurred to me to ever go through something alone, and I wonder if having close knit community solidified that perspective, even at a young age? I would say that the more involved I am, the more opportunities OTHERS have to flank me when I struggle. Being hurt, of course, will tug at me and pull me away…but being connected makes it difficult to stay that way .
COVID-19 has certainly stretched me regarding community! My hours at Praise were cut back significantly, I’m homeschooling again and Noah is learning remotely. We miss being in church with everyone on Sundays and we’ve had to be much more intentional about connection. But I am believing that God is doing things…BIG things…and COVID is the vehicle. Remember, it mattered 7 years later, that God saved Noah’s life through the hands of a neurosurgeon who would oversee my care.
For new homeschool moms in the middle of all of this…YOU ARE DOING BETTER THAN YOU THINK YOU ARE! Get a little reading in, a little math…and talk, talk, talk with your kids. And EMBRACE THE MESSY! Yes! Homeschool is messy! And I don’t mean necessarily, a messy house…I mean, not everything is going to go as planned all the time…if anything is planned at all! I am teamed up with my good good friend for homeschooling this year and, during our Bible time…the conversation just TOOK OFF! Her 5 year old daughter was just PREACHIN’! And the boys were asking DEEP DEEP questions, like “if God loved Adam and Eve, why would He even put and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden”…oh yeah! It was awesome! And, at one point, I mouthed over to my friend, “This is SO good!”
The world needs encouragement right now. But I think we misunderstand HOW to encourage. 1 Thessalonians 4:18 tells us to “encourage one another with THESE words.”
But WHAT words?
The verses right before spell out the GOOD NEWS OF JESUS and the reality that He IS coming back! I just want to encourage you to TRUST Him! We need to spur each other on to depend on Him completely and remember that He is God in the flesh, broken into our mess because there’s simply no way we could break into His Holiness, lived a perfect life, died a scandalous and treacherous death, was separated from God the Father and buried, and was raised three days later. I NEED to be reminded daily, in His Word and through my community, that Jesus IS in Heaven, seated, very much alive, at the right hand of God…waiting for that moment when the Father says, “now”.
And then Friend, He’ll be here.
He’s coming back.
And the joy that been abundant, then elusive, broken, and whole, hard to find and blinding all at the same time…Will. Be. Complete.
“Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12
