Key Takeaways

  • Suffering is not a punishment. Perspective is something you actively choose, even in the hardest seasons.
  • The values and faith practices you invest in before a crisis are the very things that carry you through it.
  • Surrender is not giving up. For Bridgette, it was the most courageous decision she ever made.
  • Community is not a nice idea. For a mum living inside a NICU, it was the reason she kept going.
  • Asking for help is not weakness. Humbling yourself to receive support is its own kind of strength.

When Life Brings You to Your Knees

Here is something most of us quietly believe but rarely say out loud: when something goes terribly wrong, it must mean we did something to deserve it. Bridgette Loulach knows that feeling well. And she is here to tell you it is not true.

Bridgette is the founder of Glimpse of Heaven Australia, a Sydney-based charity initiative that has delivered thousands of hampers to homeless families, refugee families and people doing it tough across New South Wales. She built it quietly, anonymously, as a sixteen-year-old HSC student grieving the loss of her grandmother. No name. No face. Just a growing Instagram community she hoped might help someone feel a little less alone.

What she could not have known then was how much she would one day need the very thing she was building for others.

A Routine Appointment That Changed Everything

At twenty-three weeks into her second pregnancy, Bridgette went to see her obstetrician for a standard checkup. Her toddler Raphael was with her mum. She was planning to be home in time for dinner.

She never went home that night.

Her doctor could not find any fluid. Within hours she was admitted to hospital, separated from her son for the first time in his life, and facing a level of uncertainty that no birth plan or parenting book had prepared her for. Weeks later, at twenty-seven weeks, her baby arrived in an emergency caesarean at one in the morning. Her husband ran down a corridor with the medical team to resuscitate their son while Bridgette lay in recovery, praying quietly into the dark.

She could not hold him. She did not know if he would survive the night.

The Life Bank Account

People who knew Bridgette were not surprised she held herself together. She was surprised, though. Because Bridgette has lived with anxiety since high school. Hospitals terrified her. Needles terrified her. Separation from the people she loved terrified her. And now every single one of those fears was happening at the same time.

So how did she find the strength to surrender instead of spiral?

She calls it the life bank account. Everything she had invested over the years, her grandmother’s example of trusting God in her final weeks, a decade of building community through Glimpse of Heaven, the daily practice of turning to faith in smaller moments, all of it was sitting in that account. And when her worst nightmare arrived, she found she had something to draw on.

“What were the values my family instilled in me?” she said on Finding Sanctuary. “Faith, trust. What did I witness through my grandmother? Surrender. That was her whole thing.”

Surrender, it turns out, is not passive. It is a decision you make over and over again, in the middle of the night, when the monitors are beeping and you do not know what tomorrow looks like.

Community Is Not Optional

The other thing that carried Bridgette through was the people who refused to let her go under alone. Prayer requests went out the morning after Charbel was born. Within hours, photos began arriving on her phone. Candles lit in churches across Europe. Home altars in Sydney. Rosaries being said by people she had never met in person.

She had spent years creating that kind of community for strangers. Now she was living inside it.

And inside the NICU itself, she found another kind of community. The parents room. The pumping room at 3am. Conversations with other mothers who did not need her to explain what the beeping meant or why she had not slept properly in weeks. Because they already knew.

Some days she was the one being consoled. Other days she was doing the consoling. Both, she says, took courage.

Coming Home to the Ordinary

Baby Charbel spent close to six months in hospital. He had multiple procedures, several transfers between Westmead and the Children’s Hospital, and a long, relentless NICU stay that stretched from April to just before Christmas.

And through all of it, Bridgette prayed for the most ordinary things imaginable. The crumbs on the kitchen bench. The fingerprints on the glass. The mess her toddler made that she used to clean without a second thought. She prayed to go to the grocery store. She prayed for a Saturday night at home.

The mundane, she learnt, was never mundane at all.

Today, Charbel is doing well. He babbles. He says Mum. He adores his big brother and his big brother adores him right back. His medical teams call him a miracle. His mum calls him a warrior. And she says something that is very hard to argue with: if Charbel can smile, we can all smile.

Finding Sanctuary When You Need It Most

Bridgette’s story is one of the most powerful reminders that suffering is not a sign you have been abandoned. It is, as she puts it, an invitation to check into your life bank account, put your hand up, and humble yourself to receive the help that is there.

If you are carrying something heavy right now, whether that is postpartum anxiety, grief, a medical crisis, or simply the weight of a season that has gone nothing like you planned, the team at Hills Sanctuary House is here to walk alongside you. Reach out at hshl.org.au to learn more about the counselling and support services available to you.

And if you want to hear Bridgette’s full story in her own words, listen to her episode of Finding Sanctuary below. It is one you will not forget in a hurry.