Christie Cregg
Hanging on to Faith in the Midst of Grief
Christie Cregg is quick to laugh, despite the immense burden of sorrow she carries. But behind the brave smile lie tears which, these days, are always close to the surface.
“When I look at old pictures of myself,” she says, “I see that a part of my smile is gone. I don’t think it will ever come back.”
Christie is from Cobbtown, Georgia, where she grew up in a little wooden shack with six brothers and no running water. She started working the tobacco fields at age 6, and by 12 she became an instant mother of six when her mom took on her brother’s children. A life of hardship had left Christie’s parents emotionally shut down, and she was headed the same way. Yet she can recall sitting on the back porch, swinging her legs and talking candidly to a very special “friend”—it wasn’t until the first time she attended church at age 10 that she realized her friend was God. “It was like a lightbulb went off that this person I’d been talking to was real,” she says.