What do you do when the life you knew is suddenly gone? Most of us know something about loss. We lose people we love, relationships, jobs, opportunities, financial security, health—or simply the future we thought we were going to have. But for pastor, worship leader and author Beverly Bilbo, loss came more than once and on an almost unimaginable scale. Years before Hurricane Katrina, her family and ministry were rocked by the public moral failure of her father, a prominent pastor. Then in 2005, Katrina devastated New Orleans, scattered Beverly and her husband Garland’s congregation, displaced their family and left their church under 12½ feet of water.
But Beverly’s story isn’t simply about what she lost. It’s about what happens to faith when faith is actually tested. There were frightening days when she didn’t know whether members of their congregation had survived, whether their church could financially survive, or how they would rebuild their lives. And the effects of earlier trauma had taken a deeply personal toll: Beverly experienced panic attacks so severe that she sometimes thought she was going to die. As a preacher, she felt unable to tell people what she was experiencing. Yet it was in those seasons that the Scriptures she had known all her life became more than familiar words. Beverly says the Word of God and worship became anchors that helped carry her through fear and uncertainty.
Perhaps one of the most moving lessons in Beverly’s story is that resilience doesn’t necessarily mean getting your old life back. Some losses change us forever. There are people from their pre-Katrina congregation whom Beverly says they never saw again. But something new grew from the wreckage. Beverly and Garland rebuilt. Today they lead two church campuses, their children are in ministry, and Beverly sees something even larger in what they endured: the way we walk through our storms can influence the generations coming behind us.
In this deeply encouraging episode of The UPside Conversations, Beverly reminds us that you don’t have to survive a hurricane to know what it feels like when life changes overnight. Maybe your storm is grief, betrayal, financial loss, anxiety, family heartbreak or watching something you spent years building disappear. Beverly’s story offers a powerful message from someone who has lived it: fear can coexist with faith, devastation does not have to have the final word, and sometimes the life we build on the other side of the storm becomes a testimony we never imagined we would have.
