But I’m not finished, I protested.

Go to bed, it repeated.

I went to bed. In the morning, a friend helped me work through the more difficult parts of our homework, and I submitted it minutes before the deadline. So this is what it feels like to trust God with even the smallest things, I thought.

Yet even though I was involved in the Catholic campus ministry at my university and carried my faith into my adult life after I graduated, I have found it hard to maintain the simple trust I found that night. I don’t have homework anymore, but the middle of the night generates new anxieties—about how my children are faring at school, about whether that cough my son has is turning into a cold, about how we’re managing our many expenses. But the good news is that those of us who struggle to lean on God’s goodness and providence have a new example to inspire us.

Yes to God in All Things. Servant of God Michelle Duppong spent much of her adult life sharing her faith with college students as a missionary for the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS). Later, she worked as the director of adult faith formation for her home diocese of Bismarck, North Dakota. At age thirty, she was diagnosed with advanced cancer, and she died a year later.

By many measures, her life and circumstances were ordinary. But her trust in God and her “little yeses” to his will, as one of her friends put it, were extraordinary. She shows all of us what trusting God looks like—and the joy it brings.

Making Room for Fun. Michelle was born on January 25, 1984, to Catholic parents Ken and Mary Ann Duppong. A year after her birth, her family settled in Haymarsh, North Dakota. Michelle loved her family’s farm, the sparse beauty of her home state, and the little Catholic church, St. Clement, that stood near her family’s property.

Mark Bartek, a friend and colleague at FOCUS, emphasized that her farming background helped Michelle to trust in God’s providence. “She just recognized that you can do so much,” he said, “but then if the Lord doesn’t provide the sun and the rain, the crop will fail.”

Michelle took the faith of her childhood with her to North Dakota State University. There she made the St. Paul Newman Center her home away from home and rarely missed daily Mass, according to her close friend and roommate, Beka Martin. And while she was committed to her studies, she always made room for fun. “If she could detect that she or someone was getting a little bit stressed out, she’d say, ‘Okay! Time for a break!’” said Martin. “Even if it was just five minutes to have a little dance party in our room.”

“Fun” is a word that comes up a lot when people who knew Michelle talk about her—and she knew a lot of people. But fun was just one fruit that bubbled over from her love for Jesus. Another was trust.

“I Want Everything Good for You.” After graduating, Michelle joined FOCUS as a campus missionary. She served at several campuses in the Midwest. Then she moved back to North Dakota to work in adult faith formation for the Diocese of Bismarck.

“Fear causes us so much suffering, especially when we agonize over the future,” she once wrote in a blog post for the diocese. “God is granting us the grace we need today to handle the present moment. Sure, it’s good to plan ahead and prepare for the future, but this should be done without worry and anxiety. We spend far too much energy worrying about what may possibly happen—and most of the time we’re wrong.”

And just as Michelle herself sought to trust Jesus better, she taught others to seek him as well. Sometimes that took the form of gentle correction, said Stephany Anderson, who was a student at South Dakota State while Michelle was a missionary there. On one occasion, Michelle pointed out to Anderson an area where she needed to grow.

“The way that she communicated it was total love—like, ‘I want everything good for you, and I’m not afraid to call you onto something bigger, and here’s what that greater [virtue] looks like, and do you want to be part of that?’” said Anderson. “And I was so on fire after that conversation.”

“What Do You Want Next?” Anchoring Michelle’s spiritual life was her commitment to prayer and the sacraments. She also took on little sacrifices to offer up for souls, like sleeping without a pillow for a week or taking cold showers, and she encouraged her students to do the same.

Life dealt its own difficulties, too, and not just that she had a hard time cheering for South Dakota State, her alma mater’s rival. Moving to new schools was trying, especially since she and her teammates were the first FOCUS missionaries at each of these new campuses. Not only did she have to begin each program from scratch, said Bartek, but she found it very painful to pull up roots so often. The moves—particularly to locations without strong young adult communities—also made it nearly impossible for her to pursue her desire for marriage and family life.

But in spite of these crosses, Michelle still exuded the joy of seeing Christ working in and through her. More campuses ultimately meant more friends, many of whom she brought to Haymarsh to visit her family’s farm. There they’d don snowsuits in the winter or ride four-wheelers in the summer, then pray at Michelle’s beloved St. Clement’s.

“She didn’t go to some foreign land, and she wasn’t walking on water,” said Bartek. “She was just living a life of holiness and a life committed to, ‘Okay, Jesus, what do you want next?’”

Taking One for the Team. But then came a blog post that nobody expected. In January of 2015, she wrote, “Recently, suffering has taken on deeper meaning for me as I embark on a new adventure. On December 29, I had surgery to have an ovarian cyst removed. Much to my surprise and shock, along with that of my family and doctors, I awoke to my mom and sister telling me that I didn’t actually have a cyst but that my abdomen is riddled with an aggressive gastrointestinal cancer.”

As shocking as the news was, Michelle knew that God would walk with her even on this journey.

“We have no idea how God’s plan will unfold in our lives and how he is using us to reach others,” she wrote. “We know that we’re all in this together and that we’re all on the same team in the body of Christ, so I see the present suffering as taking one for the team. May God be glorified by all the good that comes through this!”

Online Evangelization. Michelle and her family kept an online journal to update friends and family on her treatment and progress. Over the course of her illness, the journal attracted hundreds of thousands of visits. One former student reached out to Michelle to share that she had fallen away from the Church and couldn’t seem to find God in prayer. But when she prayed for Michelle’s healing, she felt God’s presence with her again. “You were the one who brought me closer to Christ while I was in college and, somehow, you’ve done it again,” she wrote.

Little details of the journal entries show Michelle turning to the Lord over and over again in her suffering. In one entry, her sister Renae wrote that she stayed overnight with Michelle at the hospital. When Michelle woke up with intense nausea, the sisters sang Catholic musician Matt Maher’s song “Lord, I Need You” while they waited for the anti-nausea medication to begin working.

As the months passed, it became clear that Michelle was nearing the end of her earthly life. She died on the evening of Christmas in 2015, surrounded by her family. Just seven years later, Bishop David Kagan of the Diocese of Bismarck opened Michelle’s cause for canonization.

Habits of Holiness. Michelle’s response to her illness was radical in its faithfulness. Yet it was the same faithfulness that she practiced with every little sacrifice, every small yes to the Lord, in her years of good health. Hers was a habit of holiness developed in ordinary circumstances that was then tested by suffering.

Years of study, of practice, of developing our virtues, of asking God for the grace to say yes to his will: all of this matters. Even if, like Michelle, we hone them in our youth, they echo through the rest of our lives and give us the foundation we need to live with Jesus no matter what trials we face.

It’s these habits of holiness that enable us to fulfill God’s calling for our lives. Or as Michelle once wrote, “You were made to be a saint. Do you believe that? Do you think you can do it? . . . There’s no doubt in God’s mind that you CAN do it! He made you for it.”

Laura Loker writes from northern Virginia. If you want to follow Michelle Duppong’s cause for canonization, visit michelleduppongcause.org.