Mrs Emma Walz & What It Means to Live Under an Open Heaven

When I sat down with Mrs Emma Walz, her eyes sparkled with the mischief of someone truly “living under an open Heaven”, the tagline that headlines her Instagram platform. A Texan-turned-Oklahoman, Emma is a God given southerner through and through. From the moment we begin talking, I’m struck by her lyrical speech and poetic soul. She’s a natural-born storyteller and, as it happens, a soon-to-be debut author. At just 23 years old, this Christian wife and mama-to-be speaks with a conviction that cuts straight to the heart. As she shares about her God, her marriage, and her journey, I find myself caught off guard by the depth of her faith. I want to know how someone so young walks with such clarity and joy in Christ. I want to know the secret to Emma’s radiant proclamation of the Kingdom, with a faith that is simple, sincere, and unmistakably fruitful.

Emma is happily married to her real-life Prince Charming, a certified ICU nurse, and twenty-eight-weeks pregnant—gracefully living the dream of a meaningful career interwoven with young motherhood. Oh, and her combined audience on social media of over 100K is just the icing on Emma’s soon-to-be-enjoyed baby shower cake. Her unexpected rise as a public figure happened only months ago, sparked by a viral video of the moment she and her husband discovered they were pregnant. That one reel catapulted her from under a thousand followers to her current reach, a testament to her raw emotion and relatability that draws so many women to her story. As I listen, I’m reminded of how often society tells us that being a young mother is incompatible with building a life or a career. Emma’s witness doesn’t just challenge that narrative—it exposes it as a cultural lie we would do well to replace with truth, hope, and encouragement for the next generation of women.

Emma, a self-described “chronic over-sharer,” is quick to clarify that her life hasn’t always looked as picture-perfect as it might on social media. Like all of us, she’s had her fair share of peaks and valleys. Seven years ago when she was sixteen, her world was turned upside down by a chronic illness that left her fainting up to 30 times a day. The first episode struck during a sweltering Texan summer in a truck with a broken radiator (does it get any more Southern than that?). Sadly, it wasn’t a one-off. Speaking with the clinical precision of the nurse she is, Emma explains that she has a severe form of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), a condition that disrupts the body’s autonomic nervous system. For those of us without nursing degrees, that’s the system responsible for functions like circulation, heart rate, and breathing. In Emma’s words, it’s like the whole system overheats and shuts down, just like that broken radiator.

In an unexpected plot twist, it is one of the reasons she knew that her husband was the one. At the start of their courtship, Emma opened up about her health situation, half-expecting to scare him away. Instead, he responded with: “If this is part of knowing you and this is part of loving you, then okay.” Emma fondly recalls her classmates joking that their first kiss would lead to a “ring by spring”, and by all accounts it did. They got engaged after seven months and were married seven months after that. Love, marriage, and now baby carriage.

In another line that sounds like it belongs in a fairytale, Emma says of her husband: “He is not here for the lights and sirens, he just catches me.” Swoon. Coincidentally, Emma’s debut novel The Weight of Wildflowers is a tender, tasteful romance about a marriage of compassion & convenience between a marine and a dying girl desperate for a kidney. Unsurprisingly, the couple becomes star-crossed lovers. Emma shares that much of the story was inspired by her own relationship, especially the way her husband has loved her sacrificially through seasons of illness. She also drew on his gentleness in helping her heal from past relationship trauma, which shaped the emotional depth of her characters. And if the story in her novel is anything like her everyday love story, I can’t wait to get my hands on the book she has so clearly poured her heart into.

Praise God, through prayer, lifestyle changes and supplements, Emma has largely been in remission from POTS. The only exception, she reveals, is that she has started to faint again with this pregnancy—and my heart drops for her. Every pregnancy has its own challenges, and mother-to-mother, I know how fear and anxiety can quietly creep in when something feels uncertain. But even this is a testament to the truth we so often forget: that motherhood begins at conception. From the very beginning, we care deeply and try our hardest, even when things are out of our hands. Emma, newly minted as a mother, is soaking in what she calls “the privilege of growing my own little love,” despite what has been a deeply difficult first half of pregnancy, including battling hyperemesis gravidarum. Her attitude is both refreshing and grounded. When I ask how she manages her anxiety, she offers two words: The Lord. Her biblical fluency shines through, a fruit of her upbringing under a cop-turned-pastor father. She tells me that while she can do her best, she cannot control how the Lord is knitting her daughter together in the womb, and that ultimately, her daughter is God’s daughter first. It’s a deeply reassuring thought, and one I’ll carry with me into my next pregnancy. Thank you, Emma.

Emma, who believes deeply in the call to be a “Christ follower”, tells me she’s wanted to be a wife and a mother since she was “knee high to a grasshopper.” Perhaps that longing helps explains her marriage at just nineteen. When I bring it up, she is quick to clarify that she doesn’t recommend early marriage as a general rule. For her and her husband, it was a decision born of prayer, discernment, and obedience to God’s will. They felt called to the vocation of marriage as a biblical commandment and entered into it with a lot of intentionality. Emma reflects honestly on the importance of going beyond surface-level faith talk to understand where each of them were in their walk with The Lord. She admits she had the usual fears—especially around judgment and financial instability—but she “answers to an audience of one.” At one point, pausing mid-conversation with a bout of acid reflux, she smiles and tells me about her and her husband’s first year in an “iddy biddy apartment that flooded fifteen times and had three live bats get in.” It was hard, she says, but also one of the sweetest years of her life. There have been plenty of hiccups along the way, but her eyes light up as she says, “Every single move of God that I haven’t understood has always been revealed as the best possible outcome, sometimes years later.”

Emma has some heartfelt advice for young Christian women discerning marriage: ask him about his expectations, his faith, and his boundaries; and let him speak first. Resist the urge to lead with your own views. Let his answers reveal where he stands. And if you’re not in the same place with the Lord, she says simply, walk away. One of the guiding principles in her own discernment was loving her future children enough to be selective, choosing a man who would be a godly father to them. With the kind of wisdom that takes most people decades to acquire, Emma is also quick to clarify that once you’re married, everything changes. Within the covenant of marriage, there is space for grace, and for growing, adapting, and working through differences with commitment and love.

This beautiful mama brings the same faith-filled yet grounded outlook into her professional life. Though she dreams of becoming a midwife one day, right now she’s fully immersed in the world of intensive care nursing, and she loves it. When I ask what she enjoys most about the job, her answer is immediate and powerful. “Emergencies,” she says. “I live for the adrenaline and the organized chaos of extremely sick patients. I’m at my best when I’m running 13 different drips, a dialysis machine, and a ventilator. I love meeting Jesus at the veil and working with Him to keep someone alive. It’s a privilege to be in the room where Kingdom work happens.” In that moment, it’s obvious Emma hasn’t just chosen a career. She’s answering a calling.

Ever humble, Emma doesn’t consider herself to be in “ministry” in a formal sense, in the way that her parents are. But she articulates this season oh so beautifully as “not in ministry, but running in the ministry of life, in the calling of marriage, the calling of motherhood and the calling of building relationships and fellowships in daily life.” At this point, I find myself taking notes more for myself than for this article. I think I might be in this season too, as I imagine many of us are. It raises the essential question: how do we follow Christ fully and faithfully in the so-called ordinary moments of life?

But life is anything but ordinary, and Emma knows that well. When I ask her what it truly means to be ‘living under an open Heaven’, the phrase that crowns her online presence, she offers a joyful answer. It’s drawn from Malachi 3:10, where God promises, “I will open the windows of Heaven over you, so much so that you can’t take it all in.” I haven’t stopped thinking about that image since, with windows flung wide and blessings pouring down. And what greater blessing is there than life itself, especially the fragile miracle of new life, from the very first moment in the womb and every sacred moment after.

If there’s one truth we can carry away from Emma’s generous testimony—woven like all of ours with joy, heartbreak and grace—it’s this: God’s power is made perfect in weakness. As Emma puts it, “There have been so many times that reliance on Him was the only way I even got out of bed, so many things I’ve accomplished that I never could have without His strength.” It’s in that raw dependency and daily surrender that Heaven opens. And perhaps, that’s the invitation to all of us, whatever season we’re in, to live with the same posture Emma radiates: heart open, hands lifted, and eyes fixed on the windows of Heaven.

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