How One Woman Puts on Lipstick and Carries Her Cross To Teach Resilience: GIVEN Mentor Mary Lenaburg

Mentors play a special role at the GIVEN Institute. Through the Art of Accompaniment Mentoring Program, established Catholic women guide the GIVEN cohort after the conclusion of the Leadership Forum for a year as they pursue their personal Action Plan. Three-time author, entrepreneur, and returning GIVEN mentor, Mary Lenaburg, is one such woman who understands her mission to encourage and equip women with the tools to embrace their God-given mission with grace and grit. 

With the recent publication of her latest book with Ascension Press, Restored and Resilient: Walking Boldly with the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Mary Lenaburg urges her readers to remain confidently in Christ and trust His plan for their lives, “God wastes nothing. My job is to choose joy, put on the lipstick, pick up the cross, and go love my people well.” Giving examples from her own life, Mary inspires the women at the GIVEN Institute to embrace their lives with joy and determination.

The lessons that Mary shares with other women were hard-earned through her own mistakes, trials, and struggles. Mary and her husband of over 38 years, Jerry, raised their son Jonathan, and their daughter Courtney, who suffered severe health complications and required intense caretaking. Mary shares that this experience, “taught our whole family more about unconditional love than any book ever could before she went home to heaven in December 2014.” Through this turbulence, Mary began to write. Needing a space to record her experiences, Mary began to blog about her life as a mother to a child living with profound disabilities. She says:

“In 2007, I started a blog about what it was really like to care for a severely disabled child, because nobody else was doing it and I needed somewhere to put the words. At first I only told the pretty parts. Then a friend called me out for sounding like a ‘Holy Hannah’ when she knew I cussed, and I started telling the whole unvarnished truth. Perfect strangers wrote to say, ‘I thought I was the only one.’ That’s when I understood what God was up to.”

After Courtney passed away in 2014, Mary began public speaking. She reflects:

“After Courtney died, I stood on a stage in front of 250 empty chairs the night before my first big talk, shaking and certain I was going to fall off it. Instead I put the notebook down and spoke from my heart for fifty minutes, and women lined up for confession afterward. I went to bed that night knowing exactly where He needed me.”

Mary writes about her experience of raising her young family in her first book publication, Be Brave in the Scared: How I Learned to Trust God in the Most Difficult Days of My Life. Since then, Mary has continued to build her speaking and writing platform through various channels including the “Mary and Jerry Podcast,” which she co-hosts with her husband Jerry; her substack page, “A Seat at the Table,” and her two other book publications, Be Bold in the Broken: How I Found my Courage and Purpose in God’s Unconditional Love and Restored and Resilient: Walking Boldly with the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. 

As a speaker, Mary has presented throughout the United States and in Europe where she discusses various topics including finding hope during grief, resilience, and living out the feminine genius. Through these various outlets Mary lives out her calling, “I sit with women in the hard seasons, grief, caregiving, empty nests, marriages that need rebuilding, and remind them that if there’s breath in your body, there’s still life to live.” 

Mary remarks on the irony of her speaking and writing career, “I didn’t learn to read until third grade, was put in the remedial reading group in the first grade, and now I’m an Amazon bestselling author with three books on the shelf. God writes straight with crooked lines, friend, and I am living proof.” She notes that her father motivated Mary to pursue her dreams and was her first witness of the faith. She says:

“It came from my dad, a functioning alcoholic who had his own come-to-Jesus moment when I was nineteen and spent the rest of his life, including ten years of cancer, proving these words true: ‘Never quit. Never give up. Never lose your faith. It’s the one reason you roam this earth. God made you specifically for this time, so what are you going to do with your one life?’”

Now, Mary shares her experience with the women of the GIVEN Institute. Mary first attended the GIVEN Institute as a mentor in 2022, and then returned in 2024 and 2026. She has been a mentor for Forum participants planning to work on an Action Plan under the “Caring for the Human Person” specialty. Mary shares her involvement as a GIVEN mentor:

“Mentoring at GIVEN felt like being handed a seat at the table next to a young woman who was already on fire, and my only job was to keep the candle from blowing out while she figured out where God was sending her. The most meaningful part was watching her realize she didn’t need to be more, smarter, or holier before saying yes, because that’s the exact lie I believed for forty years, and getting to hand her the truth a whole lot sooner than I found it is the best use of my scars I can imagine.”

She also observed, “Nobody was competing. Nobody was comparing. That’s the feminine genius at its best. Not one woman shining alone, but women lighting each other’s candles until the whole room glows.”

Please pray for Mary and her mentee as they embark on their mentoring year to complete her Action Plan and for the launch of her latest book to bless those who read it. To learn more about Mary, please visit here and follow her on Instagram at @marylenaburg.