“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” — Psalm 73:26
Clayton and Sarah Owen, two of the founding members of Fellowship’s Cabot Campus, chose a life verse for each of their four children. They would do so before the child was born. Psalm 73:26 is the verse they selected for their daughter Eloise.
She was born June 15, 2006, with a severe congenital heart defect, called HypoPlastic Left Heart Syndrome (HLHS), often referred to as “Half a Heart Syndrome.” At nine years old, on January 7, 2016, she passed away due to complications from HLHS.
Eloise’s diagnosis went undetected in utero, which means her parents had chosen her verse before they ever even knew she had a heart defect.
“Trauma is a mark on your timeline,” Sarah says. “Any traumatic matter is. But it’s how you allow that to affect you and how you allow that to mold you as you move forward — and it’s only through Christ.”
The first mark on Sarah’s timeline was when she was ten years old, on Christmas Eve of 1984 in the Dominican Republic. Her parents were missionaries for six years in different countries, and the majority of their time was spent in the Dominican Republic. Sarah, her parents, and her three younger siblings were in the car on their way to another missionary friend’s house to spend Christmas Eve lunch together, when a drunk driver hit them.
The entire family experienced severe injuries as a result. Her father broke a few vertebrae in his neck. “Medically, anatomically, he should be paralyzed from the neck down,” Sarah says, “but he is the one that had to evacuate us all from the vehicle.” The car struck the passenger’s side, so her mother broke nearly every bone on the right side of her body. Sarah had a traumatic head injury that caused her to lose nearly every memory from her childhood prior to the accident. Her younger brother and sister each had a leg that was severely broken in many places, and her youngest brother — who was almost two years old, in a car seat — broke his nose. They were medically evacuated back to America, where they received treatment.
Due to his injuries and his wife’s, Sarah’s father was not able to work for a year. He was the sole caretaker of her mom, who couldn’t walk until years after the accident. At the time, the doctors weren’t sure if she’d ever walk again. Meanwhile, Sarah had to step up to help her father around the house. “I’m the oldest of four kids, and it was just a really traumatic season in our life where I was forced to grow up very quickly, and I raised my three siblings.” Thankfully, their church stood faithfully by their side. “The church really supported us financially… the body of Christ just stepped up and supported us and encouraged us.”
Sarah also reflects on how that devastating time in her family’s life helped to mold her personality. “That is a pivotal moment in my life on shaping who I am today. Although I do regret having to grow up very quickly, [I] did not have a childhood past that, that moment gave me — the Lord opened up the gifts of leadership and administration from an early age to use those giftings in confidence and grow in them as I led my family.”
Although Sarah has had many trauma marks on her timeline, she has also had several marks of God’s kindness. One such instance was a memory that the Lord allowed to be preserved in her brain from before the accident — her baptism. She was nine years old. “One of the things that I do remember is that my dad baptized me in the Atlantic in the Dominican Republic. The same day that I was baptized, an older senior adult aged man was also baptized. I don’t know how old he was, but I knew he couldn’t walk and he was blind. And he was carried by men into the ocean to be baptized. So what a beautiful picture of, no matter what the age is… just the beauty of being born again, whether you’re 9 or 90.”
Another mark of kindness has been her husband, Clayton. The two were set up on a blind date by mutual friends while Clayton was in dental school and Sarah was finishing college, and they got engaged after just three months of dating! “And here we are 25 years later with four kids, four beautiful kids,” Sarah says. They share three boys, Sam (21), Abe (20), and Zeke (10), as well as daughter Eloise, who would have turned 18 this year.
Cabot is the Owen family’s home, through and through.
Clayton owns an Orthodontic practice in Cabot, and Sarah has been serving on the Cabot School Board for the past ten years. It was a difficult decision to run, but ultimately she knew it was what she needed to do. “At that time, we had four kids, and they were all young, and they were in the schools. I asked myself, ‘Why wouldn’t I want to serve something that directly affects our family?’ …[Clayton’s] support is what platforms me to do what I do. …I love it. I get to be an advocate for students. I get to be an advocate for faculty and staff. I get to be an advocate for education changes within our state and speak to that. …When you’re doing what God has you to do, using the gifts that He gives you — even though it’s hard — you just receive joy and fulfillment from that, and purpose.”
The Owen family had attended a non-denominational church in Alabama during Clayton’s orthodontic residency and enjoyed their experience there. So, when Fellowship Elder Mike Marquez, a friend of Clayton’s from college, called them up in late summer of 2005 and asked them to pray for a potential Cabot Campus, they were fully “on board” — literally. The founding members had a playfully affectionate nickname for the earliest iteration of the campus: “We launched in what we called ‘the dinghy.’ It was our very first building,” Sarah says. “It looked like a dinghy of a ship,” Clayton echoes.
Sarah fondly recalls a moment from the early days where again, the body of Christ came alongside her and her family. The Cabot Campus Pastor at the time, Charlie Loften, who was new to the area, was informed by then-Teaching Pastor Tim Lundy that there was a family who’d just had a baby with a heart condition. “He went to Arkansas Children’s Hospital, walked in not knowing anybody, trying to find a family who was part of the praying group [for] Fellowship to start in Cabot.”
Starting a new campus was a stretching yet rewarding experience. “It was all hands on deck,” Clayton says. “…when you’re planting a church, it’s using the giftings of the people who are in that original planting group…to create that one body,” Sarah says.
The Cabot Campus had its very first Sunday service on August 20, 2006 — the culmination of much hard work, prayer, and people willing to step in and wear multiple hats to get the job done. Since then, the Owen family has delighted in watching the campus flourish. “You know, it has multiplied, God’s Word has carried forth very fruitfully,” Clayton explains. “We’ve seen many people come to the Lord, baptized over the years, and just families — [it’s] a very family-friendly atmosphere. I think people always seem to feel welcome. …But we’ve watched it grow from its infancy to where it is today, and just, you know, the Spirit of the Lord is definitely in this place.” These days, you’ll find Clayton on a Sunday morning volunteering with the Connection Team, helping with parking, greeting, and door holding, and Sarah you’ll see helping lead worship. The two also co-lead a D-Group with another couple for young marrieds.
This strong community in Cabot has been a vital support system in the darkest days of their life.
“When she was two and a half days old,” Sarah says, “she just started acting a little funny.” Delivery went well, and Eloise was doing great right after birth and when they first came home. Then, things began to shift. Eloise became lethargic, and Clayton describes that she started turning a grayish color. When they went to the emergency room at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH), Sarah recalls “the person working the check-in desk saw the color of my infant and called a code, and they came and got her.” The next few moments were surreal. “And I remember the resident came, it was a female, and she knelt down in front of me and was sitting there, while we were in shock. …She said, ‘we don’t know what’s going on, but we’re trying everything we can to save your child.’”
The late Dr. Tad Fiser, who was an elder at Fellowship, and his team at ACH, took exceptional care of Eloise. They determined she had HLHS, and she had open-heart surgery at just 12 days old. “That started our journey. Her first year of life she had two open-heart surgeries,” Sarah says. “We spent, in that first year of life, a total of almost seven months in and out of the hospital.”
From there, Eloise would go on to have more complications, surgeries, illnesses, and hospital visits over the years, but she sure packed in a lot of life in between. “Ooh she was full of sass and personality,” Sarah says. What didn’t she do? Ballet, hip hop, tap, basketball, majorette baton twirling, volleyball — anything active or on a stage! “She was mean as a snake on the basketball court,” Clayton jokes. “I mean, you’d have parents going, ‘she’s stealing the ball!’ You know she’s six years old, seven years old, she’s taking the ball away from others, and you can hear parents going, ‘she’s fouling her!’ And I’m like, ‘she’s got half a heart!’”
Sarah explains that the nighttime after a full day of being Eloise would always be trying. “We would have setbacks, nights would be really hard, because she would crash really hard and cry and be in a lot of pain, but the next day I could not tell her that she could not go jump on the trampoline. Or she shouldn’t ride her little razor scooter down the street or go play with her friends. She just, she didn’t know anything different. And I love that about her.”
Most of the providers on her medical team, understandably, would have preferred Eloise to live more cautiously, given that she was immunocompromised. But, as Sarah said the week that Eloise passed away, “her life was meant to be spent on playgrounds.”
About two years prior to her death, she began to experience severe pulmonary hemorrhages, which were impossible to predict or prevent. Sarah says Eloise’s team worked diligently to try to determine why these were happening. “Arkansas Children’s Hospital is a leading heart institute research hospital. And they have groundbreaking technology and studies in the world of cardiovascular care for pediatrics. And they reached out globally to find if there were any studies, research, or cases, either living or deceased, where you have the complication of pulmonary hemorrhages, which are hemorrhages into the lungs, and hypoplastic left heart. Both of those happen in silos. But there was nothing, nothing living or deceased where they crossed paths. And so it was unknown territory, scientifically. There were no answers, there was no understanding.”
On New Year’s Day of 2016, she had another episode that caused significant brain damage, and was on life support for five days. After Clayton and Sarah made the decision to take her off of life support, Clayton says, “we got to sit around Eloise with our immediate family and sing the doxology, ‘praise God from whom all blessings flow.’” The doxology was a particularly meaningful song for Sarah’s family growing up; they sang it before meals and over one another at family gatherings. Clayton and Sarah also would go on to sing it to their young children — in fact, it was the first song they knew by heart. “And I’ll never forget that, what a sweet moment, before we said goodbye.”
Yet another timeline mark of God’s extraordinary kindness is that Eloise came to a saving faith in Jesus Christ and was baptized on Mother’s Day of 2015, just before her ninth birthday. As full as she lived here on earth in just nine years, the Owens have tremendous peace knowing she is living that fullness a hundredfold in the presence of her Savior. Sarah says, “After losing Eloise, the hope of Heaven became so much sweeter.”
Clayton and Sarah both credit their strong Christian upbringings for holding them steady in the wake of Eloise’s passing. “My parents instilled in me a very solid faith foundation to prepare me for what was going to happen in 2016,” Sarah says. “I look back and people say, ‘How did you do that? How did you lose a child? How did you stay married?’ It’s because the divorce rate after the death of a loved one is — the odds are against you. And I equate it back to that firm, solid foundation of faith. The knowing of who God is, even in the darkest and the hardest times. The knowing of His sweetness and goodness.”
Part of God’s goodness was displayed in His patience with Sarah in coming back to church. “The beautiful part of my story is that it took me 19 months to get back, to walk back into the fellowship of believers, but He was waiting for me.” She says it was a nearly two-year conversation that she had to have with God, wrestling with her grief and anguish. “I say I never fell out of love with Christ. I never fell out of relationship with Christ. …I still loved Him. I just didn’t like Him. I didn’t like who He was or what He did, and I chose not to see His presence in my life. But He waited for me, and it was so sweet.” In light of her whole experience and the lessons she’s learned, Sarah has this advice for parents who also find themselves experiencing the unfathomable: “make sure you don’t walk through this alone. You don’t have to be alone.”
Clayton and Sarah generously and graciously donated Eloise’s heart and lungs to scientific research, since her case was one of a kind. Their contribution to Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) and scientific research did not stop there, however. A few friends of Sarah’s approached her at the visitation to see if she and Clayton would be alright with them creating an event in Eloise’s honor. They landed on doing a walk, calling it “Walk for Wheezy.” Just like the life verse, the nickname “Wheezy” came about — courtesy of a close family friend — while Sarah was still pregnant. “It really birthed out of The Jeffersons, it’s an old TV show, Weezy Jefferson, and it was just kind of a comical thing that he called her. Well, when she was born, in those first couple years of life, she was on oxygen and the generator wheezed, and so it just stuck that she was Wheezy.”
Her friends felt how deeply Eloise’s passing had affected Cabot, which is what prompted them to approach Sarah. “We had to have her visitation at the high school fine arts auditorium, because we had thousands of people nationwide come in response to this. They just saw the outpouring of our community. They saw that Cabot was hurting, Cabot was grieving, Cabot needed something more than just a funeral to celebrate the life of this little girl,” Sarah explains. The first Walk for Wheezy (W4W) happened in February of 2016, with 500 people in attendance, and it raised $17,000 for the Cardio Vascular Intensive Care Unit at ACH.
After the first walk’s success, W4W became a nonprofit and agreed to a 10-year partnership with ACH to raise awareness and funds for research, with a goal of raising $500,000. This February, 2025, will be the last year of W4W, and they’re currently at $440,000. They’re fully confident they’ll be able to reach their goal. One example of how ACH has been able to use these funds thus far is the creation of the Walk for Wheezy Lab, completed in January of this year, which Sarah explains is “between pulmonology and cardiology, where they’re doing testing on patients who have the combination of these issues.”
What has been the most meaningful and rewarding for them, though, has been the chance to share the gospel and their testimony through W4W and various related speaking engagements. “Here we are, eight years later, hearing stories of how people either came to know Him or were reconnected with Him or found hope in the midst of a dark time, seeing that we fully relied on Him, even while we were angry and crying and miserable and suffering, and even in the darkest parts of grief, still fell back on that firm foundation that He was the solid rock we stood on,” Sarah says.
Clayton says a phrase from Sarah’s father, Pastor Sam Shaw — echoing that sentiment of Christ as the solid Rock — has become a motto for the Owen family. “Sarah’s dad preached a sermon one time that we have carried with us from the time we were married, and it’s: ‘Life is difficult. Jesus is Lord. I will rejoice.’”
Life is difficult.
Jesus is Lord.
I will rejoice.