"I feel like I'm floating through my life a lot," Latter-day Saint singer-songwriter Calee Reed says in a This Is The Gospel podcast. "And every now and then, I get like a buoy. . . . Like, 'Ah, I've reached the thing! Here's the thing that I'm supposed to be doing! . . . And in that moment, I feel totally aligned—and then the moment passes and I'm back floating around again."
This is how Reed would describe what most of her life has been like. She says there have been clear, powerful moments where she heard God speak . . . and moments when He doesn't.
And there was a time after her divorce that she felt like God had left her floundering in total silence.
Before Reed married her first husband, she wanted to make sure everything was right.
"I had seen my sister go through a divorce, which was horrifying to me to watch that marriage crumble," Reed says.
So after dating her ex-husband for more than three years, "it was just time," she says. Having known and loved this person for so long, she felt confident her marriage would last.
But after three and a half years, Reed knew it was over.
No one outside of Calee Reed's immediate family knew she and her husband had been separated until the divorce was finalized. Reed says it was difficult to know who to open up to, and she kept the divorce private and the pain hidden.
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But on top of caring for herself during this time of crushing grief and isolation, Reed also had to care for her 2-year-old daughter.
While she was married, Reed had had a strong impression that she needed to have a baby. And now she was living in her father's basement trying to survive emotionally and physically with a toddler in tow.
"It was just really hard," Reed shares. "I didn't get married and have a baby to become a single mom. And so all the sudden, I'm raising this baby by myself, and I have to go back to work, and figure out how I'm going to pay for my life and my kid and how long all of this is going to last."
And so came the thought: "If God knew that this was going to happen, why did I have these impressions to have a child?"
As she's talked to other single moms, Reed felt like she's learned the answer.
"God knew that I would need a reason to get out of bed, and it was so hard," Reed says. "And she was very literally there at five in the morning needing me to get out of bed. My option was to either let her fend for herself as a two year old, which was not going to happen, the house would burn down, or I could get up and deal with it. And she pulled me out of this place. She kept me from going to this really bad place."
During this time, Reed was praying and fasting and doing everything right, but she still felt cut off from God's voice.
But this silence, this quiet space prepared her for the path she was about to take. The path that would lead her to become a mother to six children with a single word: "yes." A path where she would need to know without a doubt what God's voice sounded like and that He was guiding her toward happiness.
Listen to the full podcast below:
Lead image from LDS Living