Wrapped in His Love: A message of God's Love with Marie Evensen

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In this episode of Roundy’s Rants, Raves and Reviews, host Tanya interviews LDS author and speaker Marie Evanson, who shares her journey as a convert at age 39, a mother of seven through adoption and blended family life, and a public speaker living with chronic illness. Marie discusses her writing path, including two books about learning to cultivate joy and her upcoming book, "Wrapped in His Love," aimed at helping trauma survivors recognize and feel Heavenly Father’s unconditional love. She explains how trauma can distort beliefs about worthiness, how daily journaling can help identify evidences of God’s love, and how joy is a practiced skill rooted in knowing we are children of God. Marie notes her books are available on Amazon and her video can be found on YouTube by searching her name.

00:00 Meet Marie Evanson
01:17 Adoption and Family Life
03:39 Finding Time to Write
04:12 Conversion and Joy
06:09 New Book Wrapped in His Love
07:30 Unconditional Love Explained
08:57 Belonging and Coming Home
17:30 Noticing Gods Love Daily
17:57 Journaling and Brownie Note
19:45 Answers to Prayer
21:57 Trust After Trauma
23:07 Practicing Daily Stillness
23:52 Learning Joy as Skill
27:35 Joy in the Present
30:40 Where to Find Marie
32:08 Final Testimony and Farewell

In a world full of uncertainty, how does one cope with unbearable loss and pain? A Christmas tragedy finds Steve and Maria struggling to find hope. With the love and support of family and friends, will they find peace as they walk through the fire of Uncertainty?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

There we go. Welcome everyone to Roundy's Rants Raves and Reviews. I'm here with a fellow author and hopefully a new friend, Marie. And she's got a beautiful story to tell. And her work that she's sharing and her book that she's come out with are so incredible. And I can't wait for you guys to hear about them and get them and be enlightened by them. So let's start up.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Marie, will you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do? Yeah. My name is Marie Evanson, and I am an LDS author and public speaker. And I get to travel the country and talk about my life and Christ's atonement and what it's like to live with a chronic illness. And I have my husband and I have seven kids, and we live in Utah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

That is awesome. What is it like to have you always been a writer? Or did you write while your children were young? Or how because balancing family life and doing all this is always a challenge, especially when we have as many kids as we do.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, we actually adopted our children. My husband has two kids from a previous marriage, and then we adopted our five youngest. And they are my oldest of those of that group is 20, and he has some special needs. So he still lives at home with us, and our youngest is 12. And it is really difficult to balance everything, to balance motherhood and writing and public speaking, and yeah, it's really fun, but it's a juggling act for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. So um adoptions. Well, us tend to write when they're in school, and when they're not, sometimes it's 20 minutes a day, you know, whenever I can carve out.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Right. Yeah, no, yeah. That's exactly it. Adopting, that's a beautiful thing. My husband was adopted, and we have such tender feelings about adoption and the pleasure to be able to have that.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

It's been quite the journey, absolutely. Are any of them siblings with each other or just yes? So our oldest, the 20-year-old, is a single child from a different family. And then we were asked to to take in two kids, and at the time they were seven and four, and they we found out a little bit later that they had twins and another twin sisters in another foster home. When things became permanent, they asked us to take them all in. So that was quite, we got all of the kids within six months. So it was kind of an inst insta family. Yeah. Yeah. We went from zero to five in in six months. Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

It's incredible. Usually you get them one at a time or you know, a little bit at a time, so you can like prepare. It was so beautiful to be able to keep a family together and to keep siblings together that way.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Too many sad stories out there of split up children.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

So yeah, it's pretty incredible. And now they're now they're like I said, they're 20, and our youngest is 12. Yeah, it's been quite the journey. It's been about eight years now, and we've come a long way.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Very cool. That is awesome. That is, and yet you found time to write. I remember trying, so with the my six kids and stuff like this, just trying time to breathe was always fun, even 20 minutes. And so I I had put it on hold for a while. It's like two so it's so incredible that you were able to find that time to keep writing and doing. And I wish I had now, but it is what it is, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Yeah, motherhood takes precedence always. Even still, even with the phone.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

I'm sure. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your writing and what you where you started and what you've been doing, and what has inspired you to do this.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Yeah. So I've been writing since grade school. I remember writing stories for my class and then reading them to the class when I was probably in second or third grade. So I've I've always loved writing, but I didn't actually start publishing what I wrote, you know, you know, the writer's fear and the fear of judgment and all of that. Yeah, kept me, kept things quiet for a long time. But I finally found the courage to to write after a friend of mine told me that she was writing. And I said, hey, if you can share your voice, I can share mine. I started writing about my journey to the gospel, actually. I um I learned the gospel when I was 39. And so I'm a convert to the church and I have an interesting conversion story, and I've had an interesting life. We all have stories one way or another. Yeah. But my goodness, I've lived through a lot. I have survived a lot. And when I joined the church, I received a blessing that said that one of my gifts was joy. And that was shocking to me because I'm a survivor of assault and different things. And so I I had never really felt joy before. I was very bitter and very, I wondered why I had been through so much in my life. And before I learned the gospel, I didn't even know if God was really there. And but my first two books were are about my journey to becoming joyful and how I made space for that in my life, coming from where I did. And so those were my first two books. And the latest book that I have coming out next Friday is called Wrapped in His Love. And it's it's about people who it's for people who have been through trauma. And it's how do we feel his love? Because so many times it's the coming from that place, it's very hard to feel his love and to know that he's there and to know that we deserve his love. So it's all about how to feel it and how to recognize it.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Such a beautiful thing. And to take what we've gone through and to turn it into something positive and good, I think, is so important. And for others to feel like they're not alone, because I think that's so much of our world right now is that all this feel like we're so alone and isolated in this pain, in this trauma, and these things. And we forget that we're not alone with people here on earth or with our father in heaven and our savior that way. And I love that the title itself is just wrapped in his love. It just made me feel good just even reading that and stuff like that. So you called it a love letter, too. I think can you explain how you came up with that idea of the love letter?

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Yeah, I just I explained in the book how I don't go into my trauma specifically, of course, but I talk about how that trauma informed how I thought about the gospel and and the miscalculations that I made about his love and about about us deserving it. I felt like for the longest time, if I was good enough, if I was obedient enough, if I was if I did all the right things, then maybe I would deserve it. Maybe I could possibly be be worthy of it. But I kind of had it backwards because his love has always been there. It's not something that we earn or it's not something that we even strive for, it's just always there. You know, we can almost know what it feels like being a mother, you know, with our children. We strive for that unconditional love, right? We don't quite get there, but we strive for it. Yeah, and but it's with Heavenly Father, it's always there, even in the pre-earth life, you know, it's not something that we come here to earn. It's something that we're that is that we're surrounded by completely. And it doesn't change whether we, no matter who we were, you know, I've had quite the life, and I one of the ways that I dealt with my trauma is by drinking. And so I drank a lot. And I remember when the missionaries first found me, I had I didn't have much in my fridge, but I had a bottle of wine, you know, and I drank a lot, and I just I always felt like, oh my goodness, and I came to church for the first time smelling like wine and cigarettes. And I just had this thought, oh my goodness, I don't belong here. But then the sister sat next to me and said, Welcome, and we're so glad you're here. And I just thought, oh my goodness, you know, I came dressed in jeans, and I it was just one of these, one of these things does not belong. You know what I mean? But I just felt so much love and so much. I remember the spirit saying to me when I first walked in that building that you're whole. And I'll never forget that. And when I found out that we called each other brother and sister, I remember looking around that chapel and saying, Oh my goodness, I could belong to one of the biggest families I've ever seen. You know, and it's amazing to me how much Heavenly Father has flooded my life with his love and with with instances of his love. I I started writing them down because when we come from trauma, we automatically think, you know, we're unworthy and we're there's no way that we can ever be good enough for his love. And we look for evidences to prove that to ourselves, right? Whatever we believe, we look for evidence to prove that that's true. So I decided that if God was love, then I was gonna look for evidence that he was. So I started writing down every single day instances where I felt his love, whether it was through another person, whether it was a prompting from the spirit, anything. And little by little I started growing this collection of little pieces of his love that I could recognize and I could always go back to when I doubted it. And I think that Heavenly Father does that for everything, everybody. And it's something, it's something that we have specifically our population, people who have been through trauma and been through so many things in their lives. And there's everybody has a story, and I doubt that there's anyone that hasn't been through some bit of trauma in their life. And so I think this book is really universal, and it's just a reminder that yes, Heavenly Father is there, and even though we may not feel it, it's not because it's not there, it's because we don't recognize it. And so it's kind of a call to say, hey, these are all the ways that Heavenly Father loves us. And if we just can slow down for a second, take a deep breath, and recognize all of the things that he has done in our lives. You know, even in the most traumatic times, I can remember that he was there, you know, even when I didn't believe, when I refused to believe, when I was mad at him, you know, whatever the story was, he was always there, always. And so it is love letter. It's a love letter to all those who whose hearts are wounded, and all of us who haven't quite healed, just to know that we do have a father in heaven who is perfect, and no matter how limited our families or others might have been, Heavenly Father is perfect. And it's a love that we're not used to feeling because even the most good-hearted of us don't have perfect love. We strive so hard to show it, but we don't. Our love is limited just by our humanness, but heavenly fathers isn't, and that's something that we have a hard time wrapping our head around, you know? Um, but he truly does love us no matter what what we present to him, and it's absolutely an unconditional kind of love.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Yeah, it's so incredible how much he loves us and how much he cares. And I've been trying to wrap my head around this as a parent, too. This unconditional love and things of this, and how much more that has to be up there has been on my mind a lot over the last several years about how much if I feel this much love, you know, that much love more in there, and trying to allow that myself to remember, to feel that and to recognize that. Because we do get caught up in the all the things of like we can't be and we shouldn't be in how could he lose because we're used to this temporal love and you know, with our own parents and our own families or our own friends, and how limited that love can be. It's been definitely, and I love what you've been saying about that all-encompassing eternal love that we just can't comprehend, but to trust it and to fit have faith in that love is so much what we should be doing in our everyday lives.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Yeah, and I think that once we recognize it and once we uh embrace it, then everything changes because we uh start to believe that we truly are sons and daughters of a king. And once we believe that our everything changes, our attitude about ourselves and what we allow into our lives, we have such a greater capacity to allow love into our life and to to allow people to compliment us and to believe it and to to truly worship Heavenly Father out of love and devotion. And I talk a lot about how it's not because we love him, it's because he loved us first. And he's the one that truly shows us how to love. I know with my own story, I my parents did the best they could, but they were very limited in on what they could do. My my mom had a mental illness, and my my dad was an addict himself. While they did the best they could, they they were a little bit limited in in how they could love. And so a lot of times in raising my own kids, I I have to really rely on Heavenly Father and say, Heavenly Father, show me how to do this, show me how you would handle the situation. There's so many instances where I want to respond in anger or in frustration, and Heavenly Father says no, if you brought this to me, this is how I would love you. And so, yeah, it's been an amazing experience, and to really embrace that, it changes everything about who we are and what we believe.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

It really does, and it can change our lives and those around us and just our worlds that it's happening, and yeah, when we allow that change in our lives and allow that to do it, it's so powerful, and we're so busy in our lives, we just don't ever stop and think sometimes, and we don't stop or allow ourselves to do it. How do you help? How do you help others and yourself find time to reflect on that and to allow ourselves to sit and think and remember all of these things?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah. Well, I remember a talk that President Ireng gave. It was called Oh Remember, Oh Remember. And I don't know if you remember it as well, but Yeah, it's one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Yeah. He talks about how every single day he would journal and he would write about how Heavenly Father helped him that day. And I started doing that. Like I said, I would record these moments of Heavenly Father's love. And it would just, it's not an extensive practice, and it would take me maybe 10 minutes, but I would just, and I still do it today. I write what he's done for me and how I felt wrapped in his love. And so I have I have this whole book full of just little things that that he has done for me throughout the day, whether it's I felt love through a child's hug, or I, you know, a neighbor stopped by my door and brought me something, or I felt the spirit, or I read a scripture that touched my heart, or there's just so many ways that he shows us that he loves us. I write about one time that I was having a really hard time and I was filled with self-doubt and just wondering what my worth was and what my value was by really making a difference at all. And I was praying about it, and I said, Heavenly Father, help me to see myself as you see me. And as I said amen, I heard a knock at the door. And this sister from our ward, she was standing at the door and she had this Betty Crocker box of brownies. And she was really sheepish and she just kind of said, I was just thinking about you, and it's not much, but I just thought I would give this to you. And I said, Thank you so much. And we hugged. And after she left, I noticed on the box of brownies there was a little post-it note, and it said, but it's a little choked up, but it said, keep going, you're changing the world. And I remember keeping that little post-it note on my whiteboard for years. And whenever I would doubt whether I was making a difference, I would look at that and say, you know what, Heavenly Father heard that prayer, you know, and he is mindful of me. And he always is. In fact, I devote an entire chapter to how he hears prayers and how even though some of our answers don't come that quickly, they always do come. I remember something that Elder Holland said when we're waiting for answers to prayers, or it seems like those answers aren't coming. He said, we can have what we want, or we can have something better. And I love that so much because sometimes we want something so much, and it's we believe it's a righteous desire and it's the right time, and but Heavenly Father knows not only who we are, but who we can become. And so He is in the details of our lives and He knows the end from the beginning. And so a lot of times when it seems like He might be withholding a blessing, He's just waiting to give us something better. You know, and I love that so much, and I've seen that happen so many times throughout my life. Sometimes we our first reaction is to feel anger when we when we have those prayers that don't seem answered or those desires that don't seem met. But the sometimes Heavenly Father is just waiting to give us something better, and we can't see around those corners that he can see around, you know.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Wish I could sometimes. I know it would be nice to have that vision. Yeah, I'm like, I feel like my children sometimes, but why? But why? Like he knows we don't always know when we're not ready to know, and we're children still very much in a lot of ways spiritually, and yeah, gotta trust. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

A lot of times when we go through trauma, that Trust is so hard. It's so hard. We we have a hard time trusting each other as individuals, and and relationships to us are such a risk. And that really does apply to our relationship with Heavenly Father, too. That is is such a risk. And for some of us who's whose abusers are men or are male, we put up a wall or a block that affects our relationship with Heavenly Father. So it's an incredible leap of faith that we have to take, even in order to begin to trust Heavenly Father as our Father in Heaven. But he, I talk about how, you know, sometimes humans we can't rely on, and humans use their agency to make choices that are not the best. But Heavenly Father is someone that we can always trust. And the more we take that week to trust him, the more that we'll know that, and the more secure our trust becomes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

It takes practice too, Term, to do this. And like you say, every day writing it down, recognizing it, taking a moment. It doesn't take long, five minutes just to do it. And we put down our phone, stop scrolling for five minutes. Exactly. And take a moment to breathe and that and do. Wonder if I we've already talked about some of the people that you've loved talking about, Brother and then who is it that you've like been influenced by the most through this journey and in your writing or in your reading throughout your life that has kind of become a foundation for you in either writing the world or in your spiritual journey?

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Sure. Well, I love President Nelson. I love him. I do. I when I got that blessing that one of my gifts was joy, I like I said, I didn't, I thought it was a joke. I thought maybe it was for somebody else. Because I really hadn't ever thought about developing joy. And it it wasn't a quality that I would ever associate with myself. But I figured if it was what Heavenly Father saw in me, that I better start practicing. So I did whatever rational human would do, and I Googled it. I literally Googled how do you feel joy? And so I read every conference talk and every scripture and everything that I could find about joy and about how to feel it. And one of the books that I came across was President Nelson's Daily Joy. And that became an anchor for me. I read that book. I don't know if you're familiar with the format of the book, but it's a daily devotional. Right. And so every day I read that book for an entire year. And that really became an anchor for me as to how to feel it and how to express it and how to create it. I, yeah, a lot of people, and I write about this in my first two books that I wrote. A lot of people talk about finding joy as if it's something that only the lucky get to find. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

Just a select view.

unknown 25:44

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

Just a pottic. Exactly. That maybe if we're lucky, we'll get to find it. If we look hard enough, or if we and I talk about how it's a skill, like any other skill, that if we start to practice it, it becomes easier and easier. And I've been in the gospel for how long has it been? I'm gonna age myself now, but it's been 13 years, and over a decade, I've been consciously practicing joy, and I can absolutely testify that it is a skill and that the more we practice it, the more it becomes second nature. You know, and joy is not having a smile on our face all the time, it's not feeling all of the other emotions, uh, but it's just a deep satisfaction of where we are right now and of who we are. And it's uh security in knowing that we are children of a king. Yeah, and that no matter what happens to us, no matter what violence we might endure, no matter whose bad choices we're a victim of, nobody can take that away from us. Right, nobody can take that away.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

I love that. Joy's been one of my things too. I was blessed with that my children will be a joy to me. Children and joy don't often always go together. So that's so true. At 12 years old, when I got that blessing, I was like, oh yeah, that'll be great. And now I'm going, think about that one again. But I love what you're saying about it being a skill because we are finding it, it's almost like everything else in life. We're always just looking for it and attaining, and we're never actually sitting in that present moment and appreciating it. Yes, and to stop and be still and to recognize it too in our lives and where it is already, rather than always seeking after something. I think is also so important for us to do is to just remember it's here with us already, and we just have to find it within ourselves and doing that.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

So I love what you're saying about being in the present moment because that's where you find it. No, it's not in the attaining, it's not in the looking back and regretting, it's not, it's right now, it's in the life that we're living right now.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

Yeah, so important. So much going on in our world. And I, if we just yeah, you just gotta find that joy because men are that they might have that they might have joy.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

That's right. In fact, that's one of the scriptures that made me decide that this gospel was true. Um, I read that scripture and it leapt off the page, and I knew I just knew that it was that statement was absolutely true. Yeah, that we are created to have joy, we're not created to survive this life, even though that's what we have to do sometimes if we can only get through it, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:10

But we're our purpose is joy, yeah, and God's greatest purpose is us having that joy, he wants us to have it. It's not like he's dangling it there as a carrot, exactly, it's his purpose for us too, his purpose, and that's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

It's like that's in all of his promises. Think about all of the the things that he's promised us that families are forever. That's joy, yeah, you know, eternal life. That is absolute joy. Yeah, yeah. It's it amazes me because, and I write about this in my book too. About about imagine for a second that that we were born without the ability to see or to hear or to taste or to smell or to touch. Could we survive it? Absolutely. But would we enjoy it? Probably not.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

Yeah, all of we we were created for joy, all of those senses, and everything he gives us is so that we can learn that, yes, yeah, so powerful. Ah, where can we find your stuff? I know your next book's coming out next Friday. This will probably post right after that. So everyone should be available when you get this. Where can we get your books? Because now I want to go back and look, read all of these and too. Where can we find your stuff?

SPEAKER_00 30:54

Well, they're all on Amazon. So they're yeah, you can get them all on Amazon and yeah. Can we follow you anywhere? Follow your journey, what's coming next? Well, I like I said, I do I do speak publicly and I do speak at women's conferences, at state conferences around the country, and I also did a video about my conversion story and my kind of my journey to joy for a state that I lived in. And you can find that on YouTube. If you just type in my name, you'll find it. So you'll get a little bit of my journey there as well.

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Awesome. I'll try to put that in the links when I'm doing things. I'll throw it in so people can find it. That would be beautiful. I always love every one of us has a conversion story, whether we're coming from outside the gospel first or from inside of it. And I think every one of them is so precious to finding that and finding our father in heaven and what he wants for us. Yeah, where we are in that change.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yeah, so much. I think that even yeah, like you said, even people that have been lifelong in the gospel, that they have this moment where the gospel becomes theirs. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Absolutely. Well, any last message, anything you want to leave us with and have us go away, really focused on tonight?

SPEAKER_00 32:17

Just that our Heavenly Father loves us and that He wants to bless us. There is never a time when He doesn't want to bless us. And even when we are going through the hardest thing, He is there and He is He's inviting us to become exactly who He knows we can be. I think about his son so much and how much he loved his son and how much suffering his son had to endure. And just because we suffer, it doesn't mean that Heavenly Father is gone, or that it just means that we are in such good company.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

Yes, the best of company, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:10

Exactly, and that we'll make it through it. I know there's a scripture, and it's so hard sometimes when we're going through the monk, but there's a scripture that says that he'll never give us more than what we can endure, and it's absolutely true. And as we're enduring, he is right there with us, he's there to give us comfort and peace and hope. And there is nothing, there is nothing that this mortal world can inflict upon us that the gospel cannot fix. There's nothing, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

Well, you said there just reminded me of this last week's come follow me lesson with Joseph, and I was teaching the gospel doctrine class, and I was like, and I it came to me as I was preparing for that lesson, it's like God was always there through everything Joseph was going through. Yes, all of that, God was always there. Joseph turned to him, and Joseph saw it and knew he was there because he turned. It wasn't that God wasn't there, but we he's always there for us, and we just have to turn to him and see it.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

That's it's so difficult to do, because we like I said, we don't have that vision. We can't see what's in front of us sometimes, you know. We can't see the future, we don't know it's two weeks ahead, we don't know it's a month ahead. We so it's so hard because this is right now is all we can see, and when we're going through the misery of something, it's so hard to hang on. But I I just testify so much that Heavenly Father is there, he is aware of us, and he will help us make it through, and that at the end, just like Joseph could see it, that we'll be able to see his love and we'll be able to see who he is, who he wants us to be.

SPEAKER_01 35:08

Absolutely, and it's so great what he wants us to be.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Absolutely, it's so much more than we ever thought we could be.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Thank you so much, Marie. This is what I needed to hear today, and I hope whoever needs to hear this that you're listening and that this reaches you, and that you're able to feel that love and remember joy in your life and to see that joy. Everyone, go check out Marie's books, especially her new one that's coming out. Um, and follow her. And hopefully, you'll get a chance to hear her speak one day at your state conference or one of your women's conferences. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you here with me and to be able to talk with you one on one. Thank you so much, Tanya. I appreciate it. Thank you guys. Hey, everyone, check it out, and we'll see you next time on Ramdi's Rants, Raves, and Reviews. Know you're loved.