by Kat Silverglate ©2025

They didn’t want to win a prize. Didn’t expect to be standing on any podiums. Just finishing the mini triathlon without drowning, falling off their bikes or collapsing from the slog up the small bridge were more realistic goals for this inexperienced group of middle-aged women. They’d known each other for most of their adult lives and had shared some of the deepest parts of themselves in women’s groups and during bible studies. But this? Doing a race most of them were afraid they couldn’t complete? Something about risking failure in front of each other took the concept of “being known” and converted it into a potential horror film. These women were about to face some of their hidden fears out loud in public -- in bathing suits. A dark comedy perhaps?

The exposure of things we tend to hide began with Urania Melendez. We call her Uri for short (pronounced “ohh-d”). 

Uri: “Guess what? I’m gonna do the race!”

Friend 1: “That’s awesome!”

Uri: “There’s just one little problem.”

Friend 2: “OK?”

Uri: “I don’t know how to swim.”

Friend 3: “You’re paying money to participate in a mini-triathlon and you don’t know how to swim?”

Uri: “My husband’s gonna teach me.”

Who does that? Who signs up for a race that includes swimming in the open water when they can’t swim? To the casual observer, this woman would appear fearless in her approach to life. Undaunted when faced with hard challenges. Full of confidence.

On one of the first training meet-ups, the group decided to do a road ride. Most showed up with borrowed or used road bikes, which are lighter than normal bikes. Designed for racing. Uri showed up with a heavy, rusted, old, commuter bike. “I’m gonna use this till I learn how to ride,” she announced. While we practiced clipping our bike shoes on and off the pedals and then riding a few miles in a pack, Uri struggled with all her might to move her lead-weight bike fast enough to keep up. To the casual observer, she appeared fearless in her approach to life, undaunted by challenges, and filled with confidence.

On one of those early rides in a park that is surrounded by the Everglades (think wildlife), we biked over a dead snake. A huge we’re-not-sure-if-you’re-completely-dead snake. When we looked back to see if Uri saw it, she had come to a full stop and looked a little shaken. When we went back to see if she was ok, here’s what she shared. Not in these exact words, but this was the gist of it.

“I’m sorry. I just need a minute. You guys don’t know this about me, but when I see something scary, my mind starts to imagine the worst possible scenario. When I saw that snake, the movie in my mind started to play. I imagined wild animals coming out of the bushes and attacking me. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s something I’ve done for a long time and I don’t know how to make it stop.”

It was one of those moments where you feel the holiness of friendship. The inside-pass to the place others don’t go without top secret clearance, multiple security checks and a first-born-child as ransom for trust violations. Clearly we’d been invited to holy ground.

We agreed to pray. But more, we started to talk about strategies for what to do the next time a movie started. Someone offered 2 Cor. 10:5 where Paul teaches the church in Corinth to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and… take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” Another offered Romans 12:2 “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Then Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Eventually, someone randomly yelled “STOP THE MOVIE!”

“What if you said ‘STOP THE MOVIE’ as soon as one started? Like a director deciding what scene to play or where to focus the camera? What if you used that pause to remind yourself that you can hold every thought captive to Christ… to renew your mind with the truth about God… to declare that He will work for your good because you are His and love him?”

“Stop the movie,” she declared with a twinkle in her eye. “Stop the movie,” she whispered with curious hope in her voice. Of course this was just the beginning of a healing journey for Urania and a “knowing better” journey for her friends. Doors eventually opened to questions about why the movies started.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 70% of US adults will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime. This translates to around 223 million people. 30.5% report experiencing four or more traumatic events. The Epidemiology of Traumatic Event Exposure Worldwide, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4869975.  Dr. Anita Phillips, trauma therapist and minister, defines trauma as a negative event that changes, for the worse, the way you see yourself, others or God. Phillips, Author of The Garden Within. By these standards, Uri was in the 30.5% of repeat survivors. The movies in her head seemed related to those traumas.

Urania was born in Managua Nicaragua in 1965 to Jilma Gonzalez and Rafael Conrado.

“I don’t have many memories of mom. I do have pictures of her dressed in white. She had trouble conceiving so she decided to wear only white to honor God while she waited for Him to bless her with a child. my brother arrived in 1963. She wore white again while praying for me. She looks like an angel in those pictures. she was joyful, loving and loved to joke around.”

Her mom and her two sisters were all pregnant at about the same time. Each had two kids giving Uri many cousins close in age and geography. Her mom’s sister died suddenly of meningitis. So, her Aunt raised her orphaned cousins. Not long after that trauma, Uri’s mother died in a tragic car accident.

“I was six. we had a babysitter because she was going to a funeral. The car got a flat and swerved. She was the only person who died. When My uncle picked us up, I knew something was wrong. It’s a blur now. Except for the nuns. We had a viewing at our house. Someone asked if I wanted to see mom’s body. One of the nuns carried me away. She was protecting my memory. I felt so loved.”

Urania and her brother were sent to live with her father’s parents in a different part of Managua. She started to wet the bed; understandable for a child grieving, but also confusing for her and hard for her grandparents to manage. On 12/23/72, her world was rocked again - literally. In bed, she felt something fall on her head. She remembers her grandfather screaming: “Get out, get out, it’s an earthquake.”

“We tried the door but the wall was moving so it was jammed. I climbed out a widow. I saw people in the street crying and screaming. My pajamas were wet from pee. I heard wailing and people talking about death. It was horrible. And then I heard a voice calling my name and my brother’s name. It was my Tio Lolo. He came to rescue us. He took us to my Aunt who took my other two cousins in when her sister died. Suddenly we were a family with 6 kids and no home because the structures hit by the quake were uninhabitable.”

The Managua earthquake claimed thousands of lives. It ranked 9 on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale – a rating of Extreme. The family of eight moved to temporary housing while the rebuilding began.

“The woman who took care of us when my Aunt worked started to walk us to church. It was along walk, but I loved everything about church. The singing. The nuns. Learning about God. My cousin would write scripts for us to do plays about church. I loved having a part in the play.”

They eventually moved into their rebuilt home and they did settle down, but by 1979, the political unrest in Nicaragua was at a fever pitch. There was a revolution. Urania and her cousins would often sleep on the floor to avoid stray bullets. Many had died this way. There were active efforts to recruit young boys to join the fighting. Those who refused were sometimes killed. After the first failed attempt to get ten family members out all together, they finally succeeded in reaching Guatemala and then Louisiana.

“We thought we’d be going back when things settled down. We were so sad when we realized we were never going back. My aunt left us in New Orleans so she could find something permanent in Florida. She was gone for a year. We had caretakers, but I didn’t speak the language. I was in high school and I didn’t speak English. God sent us two classmates who spoke Spanish. They helped us find our way around. I don’t know what we would have done without them.”

 The traumatic events continued before she left Louisiana. A major flood required the schools to evacuate. Uri would be left trying to find her cousin and her home in the midst of the flood. It was terrifying. Once, she got lost in a park and couldn’t communicate the need to go home because nobody spoke Spanish. By the time she moved to Florida, she had started to play movies in her head. Romantic movies of what life would be like if she met someone and they lived happily ever after.

In 1982, she married, finished high school through night classes and had a beautiful son. She loved being his mother. When he was four, she divorced and started to feel far from God. It was then that her romantic movies started to morph into manifestations of trauma. When scary things happened, she started to play out the worst case scenario in her head. And then a friend invited her to a Christian retreat.

She went. 

“I was supposed to write a letter to myself about what I thought God would say to me now. I don’t remember what I wrote. We mailed the letters to ourselves before leaving the retreat. The day mine arrived, I knew God loved me even though I wasn’t living a faith-filled life. I had a pain in my heart like someone had died -- heart broken by the way I’d distanced myself from God. I started to pray and disconnect from unhealthy relationships. I STARTED TO THRIVE.”

She married the love of her life. Their blended family became a unit. They found a church home. She found many sisters and spiritual mothers and fathers who were closer than family and grew with her in faith. She got a degree in interior design. And she started to make YouTube videos for people who wanted to enjoy art and design for the pure joy of art and design. She started to sprinkle her short clips with bits of joy from her life. Her movies were changing the way her kids and grands would remember her. She loved that these little movies would bring joy rather than fear to others.

With her very life she was saying a new phrase: PLAY THE MOVIE!

Oh, and that triathlon? She finished the training and race screaming “STOP THE MOVIE” as often as she felt she needed. Even today, she says it when the movies play because she knows that she can hold every thought captive to Christ, renew her mind with the truth of who He is, and remember that His plans for her are good and they always will be. To the casual observer, this woman would appear fearless in her approach to life, undaunted by hard challenges and filled with confidence. She would be the first to tell that casual observer that the joy of the Lord is her strength and with Him, she has nothing to fear.

Our Mobile Mission:

In your mission pack you will find three movie tickets and some film splicing tape used by non-digital film editors to insert film bits that have been edited. The tape connects the pieces that will be played again and again. Consider using the tickets to reflect on three life moments you replay in your mind, or behaviors that are trauma driven.

As you reflect, consider this by Dr. Anita Phillips:

Here’s her repeatable phrase:

Trauma may have shaped you but it didn’t make you... God did.

When we see God as the central figure of our lives and shift the camera to where He was, is and will always be, we can hear ourselves in our most resonate director voice saying:

“Play the movie. Look how God restores!”