Jorden

That August, both Jorden and her dad were working at an outdoor music festival. They were on the stage listening to an artist perform when they heard there was a severe thunderstorm warning in the area. Jorden’s dad went out on the stage to warn the crowd, but a massive wind came up, hit the stage and tore it down, trapping people under the collapsed stage debris.

Jorden managed to run down the back stairs of the stage. The wind was so harsh she could feel sand whipping against her ankles. She looked up at the stage to see scaffolding dangling down and blowing in the wind. For a brief moment she panicked and thought her dad was caught under the staging, but he came running around the corner.

‘We thought we were caught in a tornado,’ Jorden says.

They found shelter in a nearby production trailer, but people started yelling at them to get out, so they headed into the production compound. The winds were still so strong that a white festival tent was being ripped out of the ground.

“I remember seeing one of the production guys laying on the ground against a trailer wall, holding his side,” Jorden says. “In the end we found out he had broken ribs.”

Minutes later, the wind suddenly stopped. There was heavy rain, thunder and lightening, as people started to help the people stuck under the stage debris.

There were many people injured. And one woman died.

After the event, Jorden had a really hard time dealing with what had happened. She would often see other people smiling and laughing, and she couldn’t understand how they could be happy. “I thought, don’t they understand what happened? A person died. She was a mother.”

Jorden’s stress and fear developed into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). She started having flashbacks, panic attacks, and unstable moods. A gust of wind, sudden loud noises, or certain songs on the radio would trigger panic attacks. She couldn’t go anywhere near staging without panicking. Jorden felt alone and alienated.

Jorden had to drop her university course load down to three courses a semester. “I had gone from being able to do so much, to not being able to do hardly anything,” she says.

Around that time, one of her hockey teammates talked to her about Jesus.

It was the first time anyone had ever suggested to me that I could have a relationship with the God of the universe.

“God just took hold of my life, and I gave my life to Christ.” She stopped drinking and smoking weed, and she got really involved at her church. One time she even invited her entire hockey team to attend church with her. “But I wasn’t miraculously healed of my PTSD. My family issues didn’t just go away,” she says.

There were multiple times, in moments when she didn’t feel loved, that Jorden made impulsive decisions that she now regrets. She was looking for comfort in any place she could find it. She says, “Within seconds I knew what I had done wrong and I knew that I wanted to live my life for Christ but there’s still that inner struggle. It’s so easy to turn our gaze inward and we make mistakes.”

At the beginning of this year, Jorden had the opportunity to do some outreach in India. While there, she got to share her story with some men who were struggling with addiction. “It was exciting, I was able to see that God uses all things for good,” she says. Just a couple months ago, Jorden was able to attend an outdoor music concert for the first time in six years. She had no anxiety.

She says, “Knowing Jesus isn’t a quick fix in life. We still struggle, but we can’t let that get us down. God is working all things for good. It’s worth it to keep pressing on and pressing into him in all things.”