S3 | Ep.12 Reflection Episode: Tracing Hadassah Treu's Memorial Stones

In this reflection episode, Brenda traces three memorial stones from her conversation with award-winning author and speaker Hadassah Treu — the hidden seed planted through a grandmother's New Testament in communist Bulgaria, the God-orchestrated love story that became a season of deep joy and healing, and the three courageous decisions Hadassah made after the devastating loss of her husband that shifted her grief journey forever. Along the way, Brenda unpacks what it truly means to trust God without needing understanding, why gains are eternal while losses are temporal, and how God's definition of "good" is always bigger than ours.

Listen to the episode Brenda is reflecting on here.

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About Hadassah Treu 

Hadassah Treu is an award-winning bilingual author, speaker, and blogger living in Bulgaria. She is the author of Draw Near: How Painful Experiences Become the Birthplace of Blessings and has been featured on over 70 faith-based platforms including Proverbs 31 Ministries, (In)courage, and Her View from Home. Her blog, onthewaybg.com, has been ranked in the Top 100 Faith Blogs by Feedspot in both 2025 and 2026. Hadassah delivers a powerful message of comfort and hope drawn from her own journey through suffering and loss.

Connect with Hadassah: Website | Join My Community | Facebook | Instagram | X (Twitter) | Pinterest | YouTube | Amazon | Goodreads | Gumroad Shop

Chapters
01:00 Reflecting on Hadassah's Story
02:41 Memorial Stone 1: God Sees Your Affliction
06:55 Memorial Stone 2: The Joy of Love
13:01 Memorial Stone 3: Wrestling with Grief and Faith

#RememberGod #MemorialStones #BrendaSavanhu #HadassahTreu #DrawNear #GriefAndFaith #EternalGains #TrustGod #FaithAfterLoss #ChristianPodcast #WomenOfFaith #GriefJourney #PainToPurpose #BiblicalEncouragement #FaithOverFear #ChristianWomen #PodcastForWomen #RememberingGod #GodsPresence #HopeInGrief

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Remember God, a podcast where we practice remembering God in the midst of trials. Hi, I'm Brenda, and I help followers of Jesus recall God's miracles to successfully navigate current challenges. Welcome to Remember God, a podcast to practice remembering God in the midst of trials. If you're a follower of Jesus who's in a difficult season and finds yourself wanting to take control of the situation instead of trusting God, this is the place for you. This is where we will help you remember the places where God has shown up in the past, giving you the tools and strength to navigate through today's challenges. I'm Brenda Savannu, author of Memorial Stones, Writer Coach, and Your Companion on the Journey of Remembering what God has done. Friends, I am so excited to chat with you today. I've been sitting with my conversation with Hadassah for a few weeks now, and I'm so glad I get to talk about it. And if you didn't get a chance to listen to it, please go back to last week and listen to my conversation with Hadassah. It was amazing. And so today on this reflection episode, I want to do what we always do here. I want us to slow down, trace the fingerprints of God, and pull out the memorial stones from Hadassah's story. Because what we do here is remember what God has done. We don't just hear someone's testimony and move on. We look at it, we ask where God was in this, and what does this mean, even for our own stories. Hadassah is an award-winning author, speaker, and blogger from Bulgaria. She is the author of the book Draw Near, How Painful Experiences Become the Birthplace of Blessings. And friends, the title alone tells you everything you need to know about the kind of woman she is. She has lived what she writes and earned every single word. And so today I want to trace three memorial stones from her story and match them to the memorial stones in my book because I believe that we must pick up our memorial stones. We must remember where God has shown up in our lives so that we can move forward in the present times. So let us get into it. The first memorial stone that we will trace starts in Hadassah's childhood. She grew up in communist Bulgaria. This was a place where faith was not just countercultural, it was dangerous. Churches were not open, conversations about God were forbidden. And yet her grandmother had a small, shabby New Testament tucked away in her home, a secret believer quietly holding her faith in a country that told her she could not. And as a little girl, Hedassa would go to her grandmother's house for lunch in the middle of her school day. And she got into a habit of picking up that little New Testament and reading it. She said she didn't understand what she was reading, but she read it. And one verse stood out to her in Revelation. Can you imagine this young girl was reading Revelation? And yet, as adults, we're sometimes told, don't read Revelation, it's too scary. And here was this young girl. She said she was about 10 or 11 at the time. And she said the verse that stood out to her is the promise that God will make all things new. No more suffering, no more tears. Hadassah said that verse resonated deeply with me, even as a child. So fast-forwarding a few years later into her teenage years, she was 16, coming from a difficult home. She was wrestling with depression, having suicidal thoughts, and she began to pray, or what she actually called an ultimatum. She said, she said to God, if there is a God, because she wasn't even sure, show yourself to me. Otherwise, I don't see any meaning to prolong my life. She wasn't even sure who she was praying to, but she prayed and God answered. Two classmates whom she barely knew invited her to an event that turned out to be a Pentecostal church meeting. She heard the gospel for the very first time and responded on the spot. And she gave her life to Jesus. And she was baptized in the Holy Spirit all in one evening. And that's just so amazing. She was going to her grandmother's house, reading the New Testament. She said her grandmother didn't talk to her about God. She didn't necessarily see her grandmother praying. But as she read that New Testament, seeds were planted. And she cries out to the Lord. Some friends take her to this meeting and she's saved. And that reminded me of Memorial Stone, one in my book, Reuben. Reuben is the firstborn of Leah. And Leah was unloved and unseen. And when God gave her this firstborn, right? It was a big deal to give your husband a firstborn son in biblical Israel. She named him Reuben and declared, the Lord has seen my affliction. So she had been afflicted. She knew that Jacob didn't love her. She knew that her father had forced her upon Jacob, right? And she just cried out to the Lord and named her son, her firstborn son, Reuben. The Lord has seen my affliction. And God saw Hadassah's affliction as a teenager in a country that just didn't have a place for God. She was from a broken home. She was struggling to find a reason to stay alive. And yet the God she called upon made himself real to her and brought her two friends who took her to this church. And also he had placed her grandmother in her life, who had that little New Testament Bible. So she was going to grandma's house. And at lunchtime, she was reading that little Bible, even though she didn't know what she was reading. So that is just an amazing, amazing memorial stone. When she told me that, I was like, what on earth? Talk about adventures with God, right? And so now let's move on to Memorial Stone 2. The second Memorial Stone. This one is a joyful memorial stone. When Hadasa was 28 years old, she was working on an international education project and received a presentation from the Austrian, from an Austrian man representative named Thomas. She said she saw his photo, saw his name, and she immediately paired his last name with her name. And she said it was weird, it was strange, but that was the first thing that came. Well, then Thomas came to Bulgaria for the project meeting. They spent six days together, and by the sixth day, they both admitted that they had fallen in love. So it's essentially it was like love at first sight. Two people from two different nations. They just fell in love. So Thomas was not a believer when they met. In fact, he had been hurt by the church. He had been hurt by the Catholic church. He had seen Catholic priests be abusive and he equated their behavior with God. So he distanced himself from God because he said, I can't be in relationship with a God like that when he saw that bad behavior. But Hadassah didn't push him. She didn't argue him into faith. She just lived it. And through the way she loved him and the way she walked with God, Thomas eventually gave his life to Christ in 2014. Then one day they were sitting in a garden. She put her head on his legs and she said she was looking up at the sky through a tree. And she said to God, I've never been so happy in my life. I have everything I've ever wanted. You healed me, you healed Thomas, you healed our marriage. And that was the happiest day of her life. She felt like, oh, I have everything. So here's this 28-year-old woman now. But, you know, 10 years or so earlier, she was ready to end her life. And so coming to this place to where she's like, oh, I'm just so happy now. This is the happiest day of my life was just a miracle. And this reminded me of Memorial Stone 7 in my book, Asher. Asher means happy. And when Leah had her son Asher, she said, I am happy, for women have called me happy, right? Happy is a place of contentment and a place of God showing goodness in a tangible way. And I want to linger here for a bit because I don't know about you, but sometimes I tend to rush past the happy places, the places where celebration is in order. I'm in a community where this month we are practicing being intentional about celebration every day. We're being challenged to pause, notice things, reflect on them, and celebrate them. And when you start to pause and do that, you realize that, man, I just don't do this enough. So, friend, my question for you is: when was the last time you did that? When was the last time you paused and noticed the little things that needed celebrating? We tend to celebrate the big things, but what about the little things? If you haven't done that in a while, I encourage you to do that. Happiness is also evidence of God, right? He gave Hadassah that moment in the garden, a moment overflowing with joy, with gratitude. And he gave it to her because he is a good father, right? He is a good, good father. And if you listened to the episode last week, you know that what's coming, right? This incredible moment that God gave her turned out to be something she could hold on to because darkness was coming. But before we get into that, just want to linger on Ashes some more. Friend, if there's a place that you just need to celebrate, you know, a little sliver of happiness, I encourage you to just sit there and just linger there and enjoy that because that is a gift from God. So now let's move on to Memorial Stone 3. This is the one that comes after Asher. So a month after they were in that garden, Hadassah and her husband Thomas, Thomas was rushed to the hospital. This was in 2020. And soon after that, he died in the hospital. So as you know, 2020, you know, that was the time during COVID. That was the early days of COVID. We had been in the pandemic for a few months by then. And though Hadassah is Bulgarian, she had moved to Austria because uh Thomas was Austrian. And so there she was in Austria alone in the middle of a global pandemic, far from her family. And she said she prayed with everything she had for his healing. She said she prayed up until the last moment that God would spare his life, and he did not. So she had to figure out what to do with her faith. That is weighty. Interestingly enough, she told me she never lost her belief that God is a good God. But she did question whether he was a fair God, whether he was just. She said she had the questions that Job had about why. And it wasn't just a passing thought of why, but it was a year-long wrestling match. She said Job became her friend during that season because Job also struggled with his trust in God when nothing made sense. But here's what Hadassah did. She never turned her back on God. She said she was coming to him no matter how she was, whether she was angry, whether she had doubts, whether she had accusations. She said she came to God anyway. She kept reading her Bible every morning, she kept journaling, she kept praying. She stayed connected to her community, even though that community was online, but that community came around her and supported her in the way that she needed. And then after a year of wrestling, she said three things shifted. And she made three specific decisions that she named as memorial stones. So we'll put these decisions into the overall memorial stone. Decision number one: Hadassah decided she would stop blaming God for the death of her husband. She said she decided she would never hold a grudge against God for it because she realized that blame was creating distance between her and God. And that the distance wasn't coming from God's side, but it was coming from her side. So she made a decision. Decision number two, she asked God to turn her pain into purpose. She said she didn't want her suffering to be in vain and asked God to turn it into somebody else's gain. And so out of that came her book, Draw Near, which was born out of the hardest season of her life, arguably, right? Up to that point. And that, friends, is what gets birthed from painful experiences when we bring them to God instead of running from Him. And decision number three. This one really resonated with me because I remember getting to this place in my own life. She decided that she did not need knowledge or understanding to trust God completely. She said, this is a thing she does every day, that every single day she chooses to trust him without demanding understanding and without demanding an explanation first. Wow, right? That's huge. Because speaking for myself, I sometimes I sought to understand way too much. And you know, the Bible does talk about seek understanding. Um, but also everything that God tells us to do isn't necessarily understood. And he's not gonna give us the answers to all of those things for us to understand them. And so I think there is a fine balance there. And this reminded me of Memorial Stone 11 in my book, Manasseh. When Joseph named his firstborn Manasseh, he said, God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father's house. Manasseh doesn't mean that the pain didn't happen. It doesn't mean that Joseph was pretending he didn't go through all of that pain. But what he was choosing to remember was the redemptive thing that God did, the transformative thing that God did. It was where the gains became more than the losses, as Hadassah said, right? Where he recognized that I lost all these years with my brothers, with my father. My brothers treated me terribly, but the gain was that he got to be second in command in Egypt, and he was the one who saved his family in that time of famine. And yeah, so the reason the tragic passing of Hadassah's husband reminded me of Manasseh is that she finally came to this place where she chose to stop blaming God. She asked him to purpose her pain, and she chose to not seek understanding in order to trust him. She started to see the spiritual gains over the temporal losses. And that blew my mind, right? Where she said she came to a place to where she saw that the spiritual gains outweighed the temporal losses. If we only all saw the world that way and the things that we went through that way, that the spiritual gains outweigh the temporal losses. I know I keep saying that, but it just blew my mind. I think it was amazing. And there's one other thing I want to point out from our conversation. Hadassah said God's good does not always correspond to our definition of good. Just let that sink in for a moment. She said, God's number one priority is producing the character and image of Christ in us. And that is a very different definition of good than the one we usually bring to the table. We typically define good as things have to go my way, my prayers have to get answered the way I want them answered. In Hadassah's story, it would have looked like my husband lives, right? In somebody else's story, it might look like my marriage is restored. In somebody else's story, it might look like my diagnosis has come back clear. But what if those things don't happen? Like Hadassah, her husband didn't live. So what happens when what you expected and what you hoped for actually doesn't happen? That's something to sit with, isn't it? And it's a tough thing to sit with, but it's something to sit with. So going back to Hadassah, Hadassah's losses were temporal, and her gains were the faith refined in the fire, the book that's ministering to people around the world, and she has another book coming out, and a character forged in grief, and a testimony that speaks to you and me and helps build our faith. I am so grateful for Hadassah sharing her story. And so let's recap really quickly, friends. Memorial Stone 1, Reuben, God sees your affliction. That was the Memorial Stone I traced in Hadassah's life when she was a teenager and was ready to end her own life. Memorial Stone 2, Asher, when she met her husband and she said to the Lord, This is the happiest day of my life. Thank you. Thank you for my marriage. Thank you for my husband. Thank you for all of this. And then Memorial Stone number three, Manasseh, where she made those three decisions. Stop blaming God, asking him to turn her pain into purpose, and not seeking understanding in order to trust God. That was a deep, deep conversation. And like I said, if you haven't listened to it yet, go back and listen to the full interview. Pick up her book, Draw Near. It's linked in the show notes. And if you want to start identifying your own Memorial Stones, pick up my book, Memorial Stones. That's also linked in the show notes. Friends, thank you for joining us today. That was an incredible interview I had with Adasa. And I I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Take care, friends. Until next time. Keep picking up your memorial stones. Friend, don't rush off yet. Hang around for a few more seconds and listen to the preview of next week's episode. I'm interviewing Kathleen Johnson of Scripture Girl. And this conversation, when I was done with it, I just sat and stared into space as I just let everything sink in that we talked about. It was a timely conversation for me for sure. So stick around and um have a quick listen.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

The Spirit of the Living God is ready to give you everything you need and that you could possibly ever need. And what he's trying to do is get access. So what this stuff is about is about access. I'm giving him my mouth, I'm giving him my imagination, I'm giving the Spirit of the living God, my mind. I'm yielding to God. Okay. If you never print out an affirmation sheet ever again, and you spend time with the Lord saying, Father, help me, okay. He's gonna help me, he's gonna find a way to help me. These are just that, like you said, it's just trying to get me to the same place, which is that more of my life is led by the spirit, guided by the spirit, filled with the spirit. And then that is becomes my new norm. And it's like it's not gonna happen. Walking by the flesh and walking by the spirit, two separate, totally separate things. But every step I take toward the spirit, that gets stronger. And then it becomes less difficult. And then you wake up with a psalm in your heart. You wake up going, woo! I mean, it's a different life. It has the potential to be that increasingly every day of our life.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

If this episode resonated with you, there are two things I'd like you to consider. Number one, rate and review the show. This will help other listeners find the show and get the same inspiration and encouragement you got from it. And number two, I would love for you to share this episode with someone you love and someone you think could benefit from hearing this particular episode. Also, if you would like to connect with me outside of this podcast, you can find everything related to me on my website, Brendasabanu.com. There you can find my social media links if you'd like to follow. You can find a link to sign up for an email so that you can get weekly encouragement to your inbox. And you can find information about my book and coaching sessions. So, friends, thank you again so much for listening to this episode and thank you for considering sharing it with your friends. See you next time.