By Kat Silverglate © 2026
Psychologists say we are wired from birth to trust. A need arises, like hunger. Food, a matter of life or death for a child, arrives to satisfy the need. The consistency of satisfaction teaches a child to trust more and more over time. Trust followed by satisfaction is designed to create deeper and deeper trust. Cloud, H. (2023). Trust, Worthy Books 2023 pp 19.
The trust wiring in Roxanna Miyares’ extended family, going back generations, was wildly more complicated than the trust rhythm designed to create a growing security in humans.
My grandmother on my mom’s side was one of seven female siblings born in Cuba. Her first daughter, my mother, contracted severe asthma at 9 months old. My grandmother, lovingly dedicated to helping my sickly mother, overcompensated by smothering her with protection.
Whatever insecurities formed in the incubator of overprotection were exponentially multiplied when her father [Roxanna’s grandfather], a chronic gambler, lost the family home in a bet. Wanting to hear his daughter’s voice one last time before taking his life, he called to say goodbye -- only the receiver was still connected when the shot rang out; so, she heard her father die.
By the age of twelve, Roxanna’s mother and ten-year-old aunt were being prepped to leave Cuba as part of Operación Pedro Pan – a clandestine exodus of 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors ages 6 to 18 to the United States. She ended up in a refugee camp where her insecurities led to rebellion. She was punished and beaten for acting out and abused by her house parent. When Roxanna’s grandmother finally made it to the U.S. to rescue her mom and aunt, the rebellion that started in childhood had grown into a raging adolescent wildfire. They moved to New Jersey where her mother met her match – Roxanna’s incredibly handsome and charming “wildling” father with insecurities and trust issues of his own.
My grandfather, my father’s dad, left Cuba before the revolution. He was a boxer with anger issues. My dad had an explosive personality. When dad acted out, my grandfather would beat him senselessly. He started drinking at a young age and ended up on the streets of New York. My grandfather sent him back to his mother in Cuba. He finally landed in New Jersey when his mother made it here to the U.S.
Roxanna was born in 1967 to two parents with deep abandonment wounds. Her mom worked a lot, so her dad took care of her and later her great aunts.
I was the apple of my daddy’s eye. He absolutely adored me. My earliest secure memories are of my father driving me under the stars to help me fall asleep. In order to get me to eat, my mother would put my food on my father’s plate. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was deeply loved. But I also knew that something was wrong between my parents.
She witnessed violent abuse. She learned to dial her grandmother when it was out of control. She, and her aunt, would come to the rescue. And then one day, while taking a nap, somebody moved her and her belongings to her grandmother’s home. Her parents were divorcing. Dad was gone.
It was like my life with my parents died and a new life started but nobody explained what was going on. The divorce tore my extended family apart. Tore the town apart. It tore me apart. I was never the same. People took sides. My dad did some awful things. He broke one of my aunt’s fingers. He showed up with a shotgun and started shooting, demanding that I be released to his custody. My aunt took me out on the fire escape and passed me from one neighbor to another to get me to safety while my grandmother tried to talk my father out of what he was doing. It was terrifying.
And then, her father kidnapped her. He picked her up at school, put her on a plane to Florida, and didn’t tell anybody where she was. After one gloriously loving month, the police showed up and took her back to her mother and grandmother. Nobody explained why. She was simply no longer allowed to have any contact with her father. The abandonment wound landed like a toxic seed in her heart.
Her grandmother, terrified Roxanna would become rebellious like her mother and determined to do all she could to help this abandoned child thrive, began protecting her in the best way she knew how – save her from as much pain as possible. She wouldn’t let her ride a bike for fear she might fall. She was given notes to keep her from participating in physical education. She told her that the ocean was dangerous and that it could swallow her. She told her that men were no good. When she cried because she missed her father, her grandmother would break into a loud song that communicated she should sing and not cry. She learned at a young age to bottle sadness. Tears were not an option.
When she was about six, she would go in a pink bathroom and talk to God. She spoke to Him like He was in the room with her. At school one day, she shared with the nuns and her whole class that she talked to God and he talked to her. The teacher told her that this was not possible, called her mother, and threatened to suspend her if she didn’t recant. She was made to say it wasn’t true and was punished. She learned at a very young age that the god outside the bathroom was punishing but the God inside the bathroom was loving.
As her grandmother and aunts surrounded her with love and attempts to protect her, she became overwhelmed with a sense of debt – of responsibility to be grateful for all they were doing. She was praised lavishly for being a “good girl.”
“I was the most broken thing inside, but I was taking care of everybody around me so they would be happy.”
At eleven years old, the whole family moved to Florida where her father was remarried with a child and no longer a kidnap threat. A full-blown alcoholic now with little time for her, he divorced his second wife, and she and her dad became estranged. His cancer diagnosis brings him to faith and her back into his life. They reconcile before he dies. She’s grateful but realizes there’s something missing from her relationship with God. But what?
She begins working as a legal secretary in the state attorney’s office – child dependency hearings. This exposes her to children who have been abused. She begins to pray that God will not allow her heart to become calloused. Within a week, she receives an offer to work on the reunification side of the child dependency machine. She becomes an office manager for a court psychologist. He and his wife are people of deep faith. She hears the story of how the Lord dramatically transformed this family. She knows God, but this couple helps her see a glimpse of something she wants with the Lord but hasn’t quite found yet. But what?
She meets her husband through her job, falls in love with his family and has a beautiful little girl. For reasons that aren’t essential to the story, her marriage becomes sad and loveless. Roxanna becomes depressed. At a conference, she meets a group of women of deep faith who are vibrant and alive. She finds a local church and begins studying the Bible. One Sunday, she realizes that she has known God for a very long time, but she has never given control of her life to Him. She runs to the front of the room as the pastor is closing a service, and she decides to give it all over. Direction. Control. Everything. But she has no idea how to live that out.
Eventually, she divorces and asks for rehabilitative alimony which is denied. At that moment she decides she will never again put herself in a position to rely on a man to provide for her or her daughter. She builds walls around them and decides not to trust anybody but God. It was like a fortress. They were going to become strong and self-sufficient and not need to trust anybody because trust risks pain and abandonment and they’d had enough of that.
And then God started a dance with Roxanna. He would step forward and challenge her fortress plan and she would back up until she realized that His step was attractive and trustworthy and good. So, she’d respond by taking a step in His direction.
The first major dance step happened when she met a woman at church who walked the walk. Marilyn. She was a great teacher (still is) and she took Roxanna into her care and treated her like a daughter. She trusted her because Marilyn’s life was so fruitful and powerful and true. Marilyn taught her the Word, prayed, and challenged her. Finally, she asked Roxanna and a group that met together to write a letter from God to themselves telling of His personal love for the person writing the letter. She gave them 1.5 hours to complete the exercise.
Roxanna could not write a single word. She believed in God’s love for all humanity, but she did not feel worthy of knowing it personally for herself. All those abandonment wounds made her fearful that it was for everybody else but her. A year and a half later after lots of time in the Word growing in the knowledge of God’s love, the letter came pouring out. It emerged as a manifesto of trust. Of why she could trust Him to guide and lead her all her days. How she couldn’t do this journey without trust. How He loved her more than “the most fragile bird.”
When a woman with cancer “randomly” joined her study group and shared that she felt close to God when she ran, Roxanna decided that she wanted to run too. Within a week, she was at an informational meeting with Team in Training for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society signing up for a full marathon. She was terrified but realized then that God was giving her the opportunity to learn trust. To learn that trust meant it wasn’t just her and Him, it included those He sent her way. To learn the US at the center of trust.
I am the least athletic person on the planet, but I had to learn to let people help me. I had one coach that I trusted. Carol. She was amazing. I couldn’t run, but I could walk and when I walked, I prayed and cried. Other people on the team would ask if I was OK and she’d say, “she’s spending time with God. Let her be.” By God’s grace and lots of help, I finished that race but only after nearly failing at mile 25. A coach came up to me and promised that if I made it to mile 26, there was a surprise waiting. It was a choir singing Our God is an Awesome God. It took me just under 8 hours, but I finished. The entire team waited for hours at the finish line to be there for me and with me when I crossed.
That coach introduced her to Coach Di. Roxanna had always wanted to learn to swim. She decided to go watch a triathlon race where a friend was competing. At a distance, she saw a coach in the water with a participant swimming beside her. Their heads bobbing up and down. A picture of a life in the hands of a trustworthy coach. She knew in that instant that she wanted to be able to trust someone with her greatest fear – learning to swim. When the coach came out, she told her: “my life changed today.”
It took a village to help Roxanna over her fear of water and learning to swim. A community of us. And it took two years for Coach Di and a fellow team member with experience in behavioral modification, Lariane, to become the US in trust to her. They coached her together. Slowly she went from the inability to get in the pool to swimming a mile. At first, being held by others. Then with others swimming in front of and beside her. Then with people on the side of the pool and then finally in a lake and then Biscayne Bay. Little by little she was realizing that if she failed at something -- if she fell -- she would fall into God’s hands. Not one of the people He sent her way let her down. Not one. To the team and the coaches, Roxanna’s progress was astounding.
In what she considered her swimming graduation, she invited those who loved and supported her to an open ocean mile swim. She was nervous and ready. But the waves were so rough that day, she couldn’t get herself past the breakers. For 25 minutes, she tried, getting scooped up in a wave, tossed around and spit out on the shore. The officials finally called it for her. Too much time had passed for her to begin the swim.
It was in that moment I realized, the people who came out to support me loved me whether I completed the swim or not. They loved me and had supported me and I had let them see all of me. The ugly inside that was getting healed. I was letting myself be fully known without fear of rejection. A little girl that was on a kid’s team I coached came up to me and said “I am so proud of you Coach Roxy. You did your best.” It wasn’t the graduation I expected, but the 25-minute battle on the shore trusting God in front of others was profoundly healing and beautiful.
But God wasn’t finished his trust dance with her. It was one thing to trust her friends she had made in running and swimming. But now He was going to open the door to the trust of strangers in a foreign country. Through her behavioral coach Lariane, she was invited to climb Kilimanjaro. The training took nearly two years. She decided when the door opened, that she would trust God completely, going when He told her to go and stopping when He told her to stop.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I cried. I prayed. I sang. God was with me every step of the way. And when I finally got into the summit night, my peripheral vision started to fade. I had no choice but to descend. Perfect strangers held my hand down the mountain. But I wasn’t sad. I was thrilled. I had done it. I had trusted those He had put in my path. Nothing will ever be the same in my life.
C.S. Lewis in his book A Grief Observed gives this metaphor for trust in the face of abandonment – for him, the loss of his beloved wife.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people… Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.
Lewis, C.S., A Grief Observed. The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics, Harper One 2007 pp 665.
The Lord taught Roxanna the vast difference between knowing God and trusting Him and those He sends our way to be with us as we heal and grow and thrive. Until she put her very life in His hands, she couldn’t see all He had in store for her. Until she began to internalize the depth of His love for her, and the reality that He would never leave or forsake her, she couldn’t allow her abandonment wound to be exposed to others for the sake of healing.
Today, Roxanna has a bird cage in her living room. The door is permanently open as a reminder that He loves her more than the most fragile bird. That any fortress built to keep us “safe” from pain creates a prison. A false security where we are alone. Part of trusting God is learning to trust those He sends in response our deepest wounds. She has become the embodiment of Romans 15:13:
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Romans 15:13
This is exactly who Roxanna has become in her trust – overflowing with hope! A woman who has learned to dance with the Lord. Together that dance has created the love story that is her life and a woman who can tell you far more than is written here about the US in trust.
Our June 2026 Mission:
In your mission pack, you have three items. [if you are 18 or older and would like a pack, go to the contact link above and let us know! They are free.]
Start with the WOUND MEASURING GUIDE. This reminds us that we often measure the pains from our past as too large for healing. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we measure them as too small by comparison to the suffering of others. Both miss the truth that God intends peace and joy no matter what we have suffered because that is who He is. That is what He does. Consider writing an unhealed wound from your life on the back of that guide. Consider writing “I trust You to reach this.”
Now, find the LIVE BIRD sticker in your mission pack. Put this in a place you can see it all month long. Let it be a constant reminder that being alive in Christ means freedom from the wounds of the past. Are there areas where you have built a cage to protect yourself? Created a false sense of security out of fear that you will get hurt? Ask the Lord to show you any area where you are on lockdown. Ask Him to meet you there. To guide you and lead you. To ready your heart for what He sends.
Finally, find the row of SMALL BIRD stickers. These are symbols for the others He has sent your way. Can you send a card to three people who have been a part of the US in your trust? Who has accompanied you in facing your wounds? Who has the Lord sent your way?
Amen? Amen!
