Dr. Christine Laurent — shown at her 1976 graduation from Catholic Memorial High School, Waukesha, with her mother, Sylvia Wall — has found “God winks” that lift her faith in the face of multiple family tragedies. (Submitted photo.)

 

It’s unusual for anyone to experience even one of the tragedies that have marked the life of Dr. Christine Laurent, a nursing professor at Marian University in Fond du Lac.

Losing her 7-year-old brother to cancer as an 8-year-old the day after Christmas in 1966. The murder of her father five years later when she was a teenager. The pain of his killer’s escape from prison and much later learning about that killer’s 33 years living as a free man. And the death of her mother from cancer in 1990.

Dr. Laurent has felt God’s sustaining hand through it all.

Dr. Christine Laurent. (Submitted photo)

“My entire life has been one ‘God wink’ after another. And it was almost like that idea of hope all along saying, ‘Terrible things have happened to you, but here are little inklings of the hope you should have and hold on to,’” she said. “Because it’s going to get better.”

Dr. Laurent says the idea of ‘God winks’ came from the book titled “When God Winks,” by author Squire Rushnell.

“It’s just like the question of faith. How do you explain faith? You feel it. You can give examples of it,” says Dr. Laurent, a Brookfield native who now resides in Neenah and belongs to the city’s St. Margaret Mary Parish, where her husband, Dan, is a deacon.

“God winks are much the same way.”

She says that the loss of Patrick, one of her five brothers, to leukemia as a child led to a long search for a God wink.

“He was 7, and I was just barely 8. He and I made First Communion together, but he passed away the day after Christmas,” Dr. Laurent says.

The God wink came 13 years later.

“Two years after I got married on New Year’s Eve, when I was expecting my first baby and her due date was my second anniversary. I remember telling my mom, ‘I don’t care when this baby comes — Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, just not December 26 because that’s a sad day. It’s Pat’s day.’”

Her child arrived on “Pat’s day,” which ultimately helped her see God’s providential path of healing.

“It was never a sad day again,” Dr. Laurent says. “It was like a message from God saying, ‘I’ve heard your prayers and I care about you.’”

Dr. Laurent’s encounters of God’s faithfulness withstood an incredible challenge with the tragic events of her father, Gerald Wall, being shot to death in 1971 when she was a teen by someone who was looking for drug money outside of a supper club in Brookfield.

“The whole thing about my dad was just so unexpected. It was just such a blow,” said Dr. Laurent.

Two men were convicted in the murder, but one escaped from prison in 1978, leaving Dr. Laurent’s family with the pain of unserved justice.

That felon made his way to California, took on the identity of a child who had died in a crash in the Grand Canyon, moved to Florida and married a woman who knew nothing of his previous identity. Eventually, she did find out, and he committed suicide nearly 40 years to the day after her father’s murder, and police could close the case on his escape.

“None of that was shared with the family. We just happened to learn of it through a childhood friend of ours,” she said, who three years later saw a Facebook post about the man, his two identities, his murder conviction and his hidden life.

Dr. Laurent said the God wink of learning this shocking outcome came to her as a silver lining through it all.

“I did feel a sense of something left undone all those years since he escaped,” she says. “God winked, I believe, to help my family have some closure.”

Dr. Laurent has certainly found God winks in everyday matters as well.

But the death of her mother, Sylvia Wall, from cancer in 1990 — and the context her mom’s life story gives her as a woman who wanted to pursue college but instead worked to sustain her family — acts as a constant God wink, revealing the good within her own journey and how God works within it.

“My parents didn’t go to college, but they had all those hopes for their children against great odds, and my mom never gave up that hope. I just feel like in my life, every struggle I’ve faced, I’ve faced them knowing I am at least part of the strength that she had, and that I honor her in that way by working towards my goals,” said Dr. Laurent.

“The fact that she worked so hard to give all of us the chance, that just buoys my spirit, and just keeps me going. I feel like I honor her.”