Shannon Wendt is the founder and CEO of Chews Life, a Catholic company that aims to equip Catholics with high-quality rosaries — including chunky silicone rosaries for babies and young children — that are beautiful, practical and durable and designed to foster a lived devotion to the Rosary. She is the author of a new book with Ascension Press entitled The Way of the Rosary: A Journey with Mary Through Scripture, Liturgy, and Life.

Wendt spoke with the Register about how the decision to begin praying the Rosary again brought her back to a joyful practice of her Catholic faith after the sorrowful experience of multiple miscarriages.  

 This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

 

Tell us about yourself and your faith journey.

My husband and I are raising our soon-to-be nine kids; we’ve got eight kids currently — No. 9 due in April, and we home school. My husband and I met in youth group. Our faith was always a really big part of our life … but as we got married and got busy with raising a family and building a life, for both of us, that personal relationship with the Lord got put on the shelf a little bit … and that left us really ill-equipped to handle a season of suffering. 

A little bit more than 10 years ago, over the span of 11 months, I suffered three miscarriages right in a row, and each one was further along and more medically complex. By the end of that, I was angry at the Lord. I just couldn’t understand why the Lord would allow something so awful to happen.

I didn’t entirely lose my faith … but [God and I] didn’t have a relationship. I lived a life like this for about a year and a half, not really praying, just going through the motions and really just spiraling deeper and deeper into depression. 

 

So how did the Rosary factor into your return?

Eventually, I started to feel this tug back to praying the daily Rosary. It was one of the things I had put off for that vague someday when life would be a little less chaotic, a little less noisy.

I was still very broken and angry at the Lord. I didn’t want to pray. I didn’t feel like the Rosary was going to do anything, so I ignored it for as long as I could. 

 And then the Lord started to show up with some really undeniable signs. I had friends who were not even Catholic who would just hand me rosaries out of the blue. I knew at that point what God was asking. 

In the beginning, I had almost no faith that this was going to work. I just knew that I was so broken and empty and desperate, and I knew that the Lord was asking me to do this. It was just out of obedience, with really no thought that this was actually going to help. 

I prayed the first prayer that I’d had in a year and a half, and it was hardly a prayer. In my mind’s eye, I was standing by the altar and just shaking my finger up at the crucifix; there was no two-sided conversation. It was just me yelling at the Lord.

But it was that perseverance and that obedience, really, that opened the door of my heart just enough for Our Lady to come in and be a true mother to me. It was the Father, it was God, that I was so angry at. But she was really easy to let in. Our Lady was really walking with me every step of the way, leading me straight to the heart of her Son. 

I realized that every step of the way, this entire journey, where I thought that he was distant and had forgotten about me, that his Heart was really breaking right along with mine every single step of the way. 

And that, for me, is what it is all about. Our Lady leads all of us in the ups and downs of suffering, the good, the bad, to the heart of her Son and helps us repair the relationship. And that really cemented in me the mission of all that I do … to really help people understand this real relationship, this real mother that we have in Our Lady, and her beautiful and powerful role of bringing us to Christ.

 

It can be hard to keep at that habit of praying a daily Rosary. What have you found in terms of tips or insights for staying persistent in prayer and being faithful to the practice of praying the Rosary every day?

I think one of the strongest encouragements that I give people is just begin — just begin, every single time the Rosary crosses your mind. If your first thought is, “I don't have time or I don’t feel like it,” just pray one Hail Mary. And, pretty soon, you’re rewiring your brain to get rid of that excuse. That obedience, that begins a relationship. The Lord honors that gift, even that tiny, almost nothing of a gift.

And I think one of the really important things is to not let perfection get in our way. As Catholics, we do have very strong and important standards for a lot of things, especially in the Mass. There are rubrics and things that, if they’re not followed, a Mass can be invalidated. And I think we carry that same idea into prayer, and we worry that if we don’t do it just right, if we forget something or if we leave something out or whatever, then we’ve “invalidated” our Rosary. We get worried about that, so we just don’t even bother starting. 

Kids are more often distracting than they are helping us to pray. But pray it messy; pray it interrupted; pray it wiggly — just develop that habit within your family. Find a time … there’s going to be a million reasons not to. But it’s so important for us to give the Lord that offering, that obedience, and just trust that he’s the one who’s going to turn that into whatever it needs to be. He’s the multiplier. That’s his job. Our job is just to give whatever we have.