How God Walked with Me

Jane grew up in a privileged environment — maids, exotic travel, a life that looked from the outside like everything a child could want. But privilege without roots is its own kind of poverty. As an Army daughter who moved every two to four years, she was raised between religions, between cultures, between continents. Brazil. Portugal. Austria. The United States. Lutheran. Episcopalian. Christian Science. No single foundation to stand on, no clear path to follow, no place that felt permanently like home. When the world eventually fell apart, there was nothing to catch her. And it fell apart completely.

An unplanned pregnancy led to a four-year abusive first marriage that ended at twenty-three, when she was traded in for a younger model. What followed was the grinding reality of single motherhood, a dead-end career, and the slow recognition that her graduate degree — in Home Economics, a field chosen for the wrong reasons — had led her somewhere she was never meant to be. From the outside, her life looked like a series of wrong turns. From the inside, it felt like a road with no destination and no map.

How God Walked with Me is the story of what happened when Jane Henninger stopped running and finally looked back. What she found when she looked back was a life far larger and more purposeful than the wrong turns had suggested.

From Native American reservations — where she taught, wrote grants that genuinely changed lives — to the halls of Congress, where she lobbied fiercely for the people she served. From the solemn silence of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which moved her so profoundly she joined the Nevada National Guard, to the front lines of a military culture that resented women in leadership — where she served as a transportation officer and pioneer, navigating institutional resistance with the same quiet determination she had brought to every hard chapter of her life. And then, after eight years of atheism/agnosticism — eight years of blaming God for everything that had gone wrong, of carrying the full weight of her life alone — something happened in the quiet of a Good Friday service.

The burden lifted. — and the slowly dawning recognition that the moments Jane felt most abandoned were the moments she was being carried most completely. That the hand she couldn't see was present in the reservation classrooms, in the congressional hallways, in the military barracks, in the wreckage of the marriage, in the years of doubt and blame and survival.  

How God Walked with Me is a memoir of faith lost and reclaimed — of a woman who had to travel to the edges of her own endurance before she could see what had been there all along. It is for everyone who has ever looked back at the hardest chapter of their life and wondered: how did I survive that?

  The answer, Jane Henninger has learned, is that she didn't do it alone