Speaker Bio

Valerie Reyna has been passionate about accompanying others on their spiritual path from a young age. Her first memory was of the neighborhood “priest” who would line up all the neighborhood children to receive communion regularly [even though they really came for the Nickel candy wafers]. 

Valerie was born and raised in Chicago during the riots of the 60’s. She went to Eastern Michigan University, was then married, and raised four kids in Brighton. She moved to Grand Rapids 13 years ago, when she became a grandma to the first of her 10 grandchildren. 

Valerie grew up Catholic and loved her faith, yet as a teen, she felt her spiritual hunger intensify after her parents' divorce, when church-going became scarce. At age seventeen, she was introduced to an extremely conservative sector of protestantism, then “married” into it. She and her then spouse raised a family and immersed themselves into church ministry for their entire 28 year marriage. This included church leadership as well as missions work, where they smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. This also encompassed a time during which she experienced a lot of spiritual abuse within that community. 

It wasn’t until her body crashed and sprang into a decade-long fight with an autoimmune disease that this reality started to unfurl for her. That began her “Dark Night of the Soul” journey, which also became her path of “awakening to a loving God beyond her imagination”.  She started having deeply beautiful encounters with God through the unexpected gifts of silence and solitude, and these doors kept opening other doors that caused a major shift from a life of striving for perfection on the outside to a life of deep connection from the inside. For her, this was the path of seeing herself, others, and God through a rich lens that was big enough to meet her suffering and doubts [about much of Christianity] and a way to find goodness, truth, and beauty through every hard thing and in every ordinary way. She later found this to be the contemplative path that has been laid through universal wisdom teachers and mystics handed down before religion was ever invented. She was led to this path in grad school through seminary and a master's in spiritual formation, followed by a chaplaincy residency and training to become a spiritual director. All of this training accompanied her to help others midwife the vastness of the soul, where she says, “God loves to hide”. 

This beautiful discovery continues to reveal her calling down a labyrinth of action in the world as hospital/hospice chaplain, teacher, speaker, writer, and artist where she has spent her life over the span of 20 years as a midwife to help others find that goodness, truth, and beauty as buried treasure in the depths of every person [aka God]. But being Grandma is her favorite calling to date [that and finding the sacredness of eating vanilla cake].