My name is Andrea Albanese, and I’m grateful to serve alongside you this weekend. This is my eighth retreat volunteering but my first time giving a devotional.
When I started thinking about what to share, one word kept coming to mind: trust.
As we all know, trust is something that takes a long time to build… but it can be broken in an instant.
I started thinking about this retreat through the lens of my daughter Evie. She just turned 16 a few weeks ago, and she has been waiting nine years to be old enough to volunteer. Today she is volunteering with my oldest son Chris & his girlfriend Sammy, and my oldest daughter Gianna. A lot has happened in those 9 years since our own family was served through an Inheritance of Hope Legacy Retreat®. Thankfully, my trust in God, once shattered, has slowly been rebuilt and continues to be strengthened. Not as I had envisioned at all but in the way God planned for my family.
When my family applied for our Legacy Retreat® in 2017, my husband Jim and I had five kids, ages 13 down to 4 at the time. Shortly after Jim’s 40th birthday, he was diagnosed with an aggressive blood cancer called multiple myeloma. What we thought was simple back pain turned into a terminal diagnosis.
Life was already chaotic with five young kids. Suddenly everything changed.
Jim faced cancer the same way he faced life—with determination, grit, courage, and faith. But even with that strength, there was no escaping the reality that our lives had been turned upside down.
We both believed in God’s Word that says,
“It is the Lord who will go before you; he will be with you and will never fail or forsake you. So do not fear or be dismayed.” – Deuteronomy 31:6
The Lord goes before us. No matter what we face. He is already there. We are never alone.
Before we came on the retreat, I remember feeling incredibly alone.
Illness can be very isolating.
On our retreat, we realized we were not the only family walking this road. We were surrounded by other families who understood exactly what this journey felt like.
And we were surrounded by volunteers.
Two volunteers were paired with our family, and they blended right in. They played with our kids, helped wherever it was needed, and gave Jim and I the space to breathe and connect with other parents.
They were truly the hands and feet of Christ to us.
One of those volunteers is actually still serving today. Annette is here with us on this retreat and continues to show up for families like mine.
I have always had strong faith in God. I believed what Scripture says in Jeremiah 29:11:
“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord,
‘plans to give you hope and a future.’”
But when you’re sitting there knowing your husband is going to die… those words can feel very hard to trust.
Trust challenges all of us, everyday. We need God’s grace to keep our hearts open when we’d rather shut them.
You don’t have to be facing the loss of a spouse or parent to struggle with trust. It can be difficult to trust God with the big and the small things in our lives.
Jim died three months after our retreat. I remember feeling completely exhausted, overwhelmed, and honestly angry at God—angry that He had taken Jim and left me alone to raise five grieving kids. Jim was my rock. He was everything to our family. I kept asking myself, How could I possibly survive without him? I truly believed I couldn’t. I remember thinking over and over, I can’t live without him.
And as my kids can attest… it wasn’t pretty.
I needed to entrust my family to God. I needed to rely on strength that wasn’t my own.
“Draw your strength from the Lord and from His mighty power.” – Ephesians 6:10
But my trust in God had been shattered. My faith had been shaken & my prayer was desperate.
Honestly, my prayer that whole first year was very simple: “God, help me.”
And somehow, He did. Not in big dramatic ways, but in small, ordinary ways:
A meal showing up.
Someone driving one of my kids somewhere.
A friend dropping off coffee.
Looking back now, I can see that God showed up through the people He placed in my life.
Our Legacy Retreat® is what I like to call the “best part of cancer” for our family. In the middle of something so painful, God gave us an incredible gift—time together, laughter, memories, and the reminder that we were surrounded by love.
Trust doesn’t always mean we feel God’s presence in the moment. Sometimes the darkest seasons of our lives feel very quiet. But trust means believing that God is still with us, even when we don’t feel Him. And very often, He sends people to us so we can experience His love through them.
That’s exactly what happened for my family on the retreat. One of the memories my kids still talk about is a volunteer spraying whipped cream straight into their mouths, making them laugh hysterically. It sounds like a small thing, but in that moment, it let my kids be kids again and reminded me that joy can still exist, even in the middle of something really hard.
Sometimes, there’s nothing we can say to fix a parent’s pain or a family’s heartbreak. But we can sit with them in it. We can carry the cross with them for a while and make it a little lighter.
That’s what you are doing this weekend. You might wonder if the small things you do really matter:
Playing with the kids.
Talking with a teenager who doesn’t want to be here.
Sitting with a parent who’s carrying something unimaginably heavy.
You may never see the long-term impact of those moments. But I promise you—they matter. Because sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer someone is simply our presence.
So for my daughter Evie and Sammy and all the new volunteers that are joining us this weekend, trust that God has you here this weekend for a reason. Trust that you will make a difference. And for all of our seasoned volunteers… you already know how powerful these retreats can be.
I’d like to close our devotional by sharing a prayer I started praying a few years ago. It’s called the Litany of Trust, and it has become a prayer that I say daily. It reminds me to place my trust back in God, especially on the days when faith feels hard.
A litany is a prayer made up of short petitions and responses. The first part asks Jesus to deliver us from the fears that hold us back. The second part reminds us to place our trust in Him.
As we prepare to meet our families this weekend, I’d like to close with a few lines from that prayer:
From anxiety about the future,
Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being asked to give more than I have,
Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of what love demands,
Deliver me, Jesus.
From discouragement
Deliver me Jesus.
That not knowing what tomorrow brings is an invitation to lean on You,
Jesus, I trust in You.
That You are with me in my suffering,
Jesus, I trust in You.
That your plan is better than anything else
Jesus I trust in You.
That You give me all the strength I need for what is asked,
Jesus, I trust in You.
That you will teach me to trust You,
Jesus, I trust in You.
Thank you for saying yes to being here. You may think you’re just volunteering for a weekend, but for some of these families, the moments you create here will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
I know that because they stayed with mine.
Trust God in the hard and in the suffering, because His love is unfailing.
Andrea is an Inheritance of Hope family member served and volunteer. Her family was served on a Legacy Retreat® in 2017, just months before her husband passed away. Andrea is passionate about serving other families like her own and sharing the hope she has found in the midst of loss. She originally shared this devotional with the Orlando Legacy Retreat® team in March 2026.