My family lives in San Antonio, Texas, and we visited Lutheran Church of Hope in person for the first time on Easter Sunday 2025, but our Hope story didn’t begin that day. It started five years earlier … We had been attending a Lutheran church in San Antonio, where our children were confirmed and my husband, Steven, and I were involved in classes. Then COVID hit, and the church closed. My husband’s maintenance business was on hold, and there was no work. We were busy trying to make ends meet. It was tough on our family. Then the worst happened on Mother’s Day of 2020. I had a severe cough that kept getting worse. I was opening a gift from my daughter when I coughed into a tissue—it was full of blood. I went to the emergency room alone, since family wasn’t allowed. It was decided I needed to be put on a ventilator, but when they started to insert the breathing tube, I went into cardiac arrest. Once they revived me, they were able to put me on the ventilator, and I stayed on it for ...