[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGES courtesy Ashley Pigg Photography”][/title]
Despite gray skies and the threat of rain, the annual Women’s Retreat at this rural cowboy church is packed to the rafters. Every seat of every row is full of the women smart enough to sign up early; the waiting list of those not as fortunate runs close to a hundred.
Here, the women revel in the chance to spend a little time outside of farm work, day jobs and the weightiness of family life. Mostly they love being together sharing the experiences that haunt them, the hopes they cling to, the hurts they’re bearing. It’s a community that makes sisters out of strangers.
LeAnn Hart loves groups like this, not just because it’s helped her build a thriving motivational speaking career, but because no matter where she appears, she’s at home. The kind of home where you can give your testimony about the story of your life and the sorrow of your shortcomings and still be embraced.
“God said to me, ‘I’m going to need you to be still,’” she tells her rapt audience. “He said, ‘I just need you to be obedient and I’m going to uphold my end. I know that every day you’re going to walk through these moments of feeling like a failure, but just give it to me. Keep peeling off that whatever. Let me have that old skin.’”
There are a lot of titles that can rightfully and accurately be assigned to LeAnn Hart – wife, mother, Christian, entrepreneur, survivor. And while she answers to all of them, there’s one that hits a particularly sweet note in her ear. Always has, all the way back to her Louisiana beginnings.
“I’ve always wanted to be a cowgirl,” she says. “I think a cowgirl is a caregiver in the most well-rounded sense of the word. We are caregivers. It’s a selfless lifestyle because it’s not about you, it’s about taking care of what’s around you, whether it’s in your house or on your land.”
It may have taken a while to find her cowgirl groove – something she lives today on her Oklahoma spread as completely and authentically as anyone ever has – but that spirit has always been a part of her. No matter what phase of life she was living, the tragic or the triumphant, she did it with a cowgirl’s plainspoken grit, tougher-than-leather guts, pride in the work, humility before the Almighty.
Not everything came all at once, of course. The beginnings were modest, both spiritually and materialistically, but laid the foundation for what was to come.
“I grew up on a dairy farm. I grew up working,” says LeAnn. “My parents lived a hard life. My dad had multiple jobs; as a kid I can remember him working offshore, to pipefitting, to pipe lining, to working on the dairy. And that dairy farm kind of wrecked our family because it wasn’t Mom’s idea, it was Dad’s idea. And it wasn’t easy.”
It wasn’t long before LeAnn’s life went from one kind of hard to another, from rising at 2:30 a.m. to work alongside her father to struggling to relate to her mother when her parents divorced.
“I walked for a long time in a very lonely way,” she says. “I saw things through the perspective of my dad’s eyes because that’s who I was closer to as a kid. But as I got older and I developed into a teenager and into a young woman, I started to see the difficulties that Mama went through and what she needed.”
“I went through some moments where she was so angry at me that she couldn’t express herself well, but she was never really angry at me, it was just the situation.”
One constant in her life, LeAnn could always sing and at eighteen, she auditioned for Dollywood. She made the cut and was even awarded the prized number “Coat of Many Colors” over older, more seasoned vocalists. After a couple of years, she moved to Nashville under the guise of taking the next step in her musical career. Something just didn’t fit.
“Everybody around me was like, ‘We want to see you on the Grand Ole Opry.’ That was never really my plan,” she says. “So, I never had a problem leaving that lifestyle. I did make it in that world because I was getting paid to do what I loved to do. And if you’re getting paid to do what you love to do, you’ve done it. It may not be on the level of Reba [McIntire], but even God says there was only one Reba.”
LeAnn and her husband, now-retired professional bull rider J.W. Hart, formally met around the Dollywood phase. Despite their common interest in the Western lifestyle and similarly meager upbringings, it was an unlikely pairing, set up by mutual friends.
“I had been in a relationship with a bull rider for three years before that. We broke up and I was like, ‘No more bull riders. Love you guys, but no,’” she says. “J.W. and I had actually known each other for a couple years at that point. I always thought he was a jerk. Oh, he was such a jerk and so cocky! But that weekend, that cockiness was attractive, and something got sparked.”
The resulting marriage has brought the highest highs and lowest lows. J.W. and LeAnn were crazy about each other but expressed their affection differently. It was a jarring difference that took some getting used to.
“He’s not the most finesse person with his words and my love language is words. His love language is time and he’s very jealous of that whenever he doesn’t get time with me,” she says. “He’s definitely toughened me up in a lot of areas where I have kind of softened him and strengthened him in a lot of areas.”
The hardest, LeAnn says readily, were the babies that were lost. The couple suffered multiple miscarriages which was emotionally devastating to them as individuals and hammered at the foundation of their relationship.
“That really wrecked me. And it was wrecking J.W. out because I was looking through my eyes. I wasn’t looking at his perspective and how it affected him. And, he wasn’t looking at it through me,” she says. “We were both just looking in the mirror saying, ‘I am so insignificant. I am just a failure.’ And we weren’t talking about it because we were just so ate up with trying to accomplish the goal. Have the baby, do this, win this battle, get this title.”
“It’s like learning to drive a truck. You just look at the end of the truck when you’re first learning, instead of everything around you. Before you know it, PawPaw is saying, ‘You’d better get back on the road.’ That was really for four years, in a nutshell, where I was at. I was depressed and I threw that on J.W. not really thinking. We just weren’t communicating.”
The sorrow and self-loathing brought on dalliances on both sides, never physical, but just enough emotional flirtation to hurt the other. More than once, LeAnn would wonder openly if the marriage would survive, even as LeAnn the cowgirl fought like hell to hold on.
“You have to grow into the fact that you’re in covenant with one another,” she says. “You’re kind of in this bubble together. You can fight all you want to, but it’s just going to get worse if you don’t fight for each other and fight toward being on the same journey with one another.”
“And that’s an everyday process. If I’m going to treat somebody the way that I want to be treated, then I’m going to have to respond the way that I want to be responded to and not just the way that I want to respond because I’m in a bad mood or he didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.”
Right in the middle of this domestic turmoil, God tapped LeAnn on the shoulder to start telling her story, a public speaking ministry that’s grown from one local church to multiple gigs across several states. She holds nothing back from these speeches, hoping to give others a roadmap to discovering the strength of their inner cowgirl, fortified by grace.
“Public speaking was very intimidating at first, because you could feel the uncomfortable judgment all over the room. And then there was compassion all over the room,” she says. “There’s no freedom without forgiveness. The only thing that I had to give was what God had given me and that was forgiveness. I crave for people to take their eyes off of things and to allow themselves to just have the eyes of Christ for just a minute.”
LeAnn is the first to admit she doesn’t yet have everything figured out or down pat. But she’s equally aware how the more she trustingly wraps herself in the grace she prescribes for others, the easier things become, from strengthening her bonds with her husband, to accepting her miscarriages to stepping into the role of foster and adoptive mom to six kids.
“I have always been told my whole life that God never wastes anything,” she says. “I’ve gotten better over the years of just letting God have those things, those thirteen babies and taking my hand off of my marriage, taking my hand off of my kids. I’m still working at it, still just coming to a place where this is not even about us. There’s no good in me without God.”
Find LeAnn at leannhartministries.com.
