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Forgiven, Forgiving

Our forgiveness comes in waves. God’s forgiveness comes in one flood—once for all.


Forgiveness is one of the most beautiful and one of the hardest words I know.

When I am hurt by someone, I may forgive them today, but tomorrow the wound still aches. Grief and trauma don’t move in straight lines—they come in waves. Healing takes time. And so forgiveness is not always a one-time declaration; it is often a repeated act of surrender. Lord, I forgive again. Lord, help me let go once more.

How I wish forgiveness worked the way we want it to—that we could just say it once, and never feel bitterness, anger, or sorrow rise back up again. But the truth is, our hearts are human. We wrestle. We revisit the pain. We forgive, and then we forgive again.

Jesus understood this when Peter asked Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:21–22). Forgiveness is not math—it’s mercy. It’s a continual letting go, an ongoing practice of releasing others into God’s hands.

But here’s the difference: while our forgiveness often has to be repeated, God’s forgiveness does not.

When God says forgiven, He means it. We don’t have to beg Him over and over to erase the same sin. The cross was once for all. “For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).

Think about this: if even the most hardened sinner—a murderer, an oppressor, someone who has shattered lives—comes to God in true repentance, agonizing over what they’ve done and crying out for mercy, the blood of Jesus covers them completely. They may feel guilty again as memory rises, but God does not keep forgiving the same sin again and again. He already said: It is finished (John 19:30).

We see this at the cross itself. Jesus was crucified between two criminals. One mocked Him, but the other repented, confessing: “We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:41–43).

One desperate prayer. One broken confession. And Jesus’ response was immediate: forgiven.

That is the unfathomable grace of God. Our forgiveness may come in waves. His forgiveness comes in one flood. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

So today, if you are struggling to forgive someone again and again, remember: that’s the human journey. That’s what it means to walk in grace. But when it comes to your own sin—when it comes to standing before God—you don’t have to question or repeat or beg. You don’t have to live in endless guilt. His forgiveness is once, for always, and for all.

Because of the cross. Because of Jesus. Because of grace.

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America: One Nation Under God

Today I was listening to a song called The Church, and the theme is unity in God. My heart is heavy with everything happening in our world — the violence, the wars, the division, the loss of innocent lives. It feels like the left points at the right, the right points at the left, and we’re all forgetting this truth: a house divided cannot stand (Matthew 12:25). 

If we want to be strong as a nation, as communities, as churches, even in our own family units, we must be unified. When we meet hate with hate, love will never win, and the greatest call on our life is to love God and love each other (Matthew 22:36-40).

Unity doesn’t mean we will always agree. It means we choose to see each other first as people–people with stories, families, hurts, and hopes. It means choosing love over hate, respect over contempt, and remembering that what binds us together is always greater than what tries to tear us apart. Maybe then unity won’t feel so far off. Love has to begin there.

🙏 Prayer
Our Father in heaven, holy is Your name. Today we ask for renewed hope and healing in You. Give us eyes to see one another not as labels or sides, but as people — fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, friends — all made in Your image. Bring unity to our nation, to our politics, to our churches, and to our families. Amen.

What “Sinner” Actually Meant

This morning I was reading a daily devotion. It went like this:

Jesus came to save sinners. Christ didn’t just come as a cleaning product for my conscience or to be my cosmic life coach; he came to save me, a sinner.
Jesus, “King eternal,” thank you that you came to save me, a sinner. I choose to rest in the reality of your mercy and love today.

For some reason, I cringed at the sight of sinner being used three times in five sentences.
I know that I am not morally perfect, so ergo, I am in all senses of the word, a sinner. Did I not feel like being called one today? I felt defensive, like I’m sick and tired of being called by a negative name carrying a negative connotation about an imperfect, morally flawed, needs-to-do-better person. Because Jesus saved me. I might have been a sinner, but now I’m saved. I am redeemed, and if Jesus is going to look upon me and see someone whole and beautiful and pure, then that’s how I’m going to see me.

If Jesus says I’m no longer condemned, and a sinner is, then I’m not a sinner — in the sense of what sinner means nowadays.

So I went looking for what the word actually meant before it picked up all that weight.
In Greek, the word translated “sinner” is hamartōlos, from hamartanein — an archery term. It means to miss the mark. An arrow that flew wide of the target had “sinned” in the most literal sense possible. Not evil. Not disgusting. Just off-course. The Hebrew word carries the same idea — chata shows up elsewhere in the Old Testament describing slingers so accurate they could hit a target the width of a hair and never miss. The vocabulary of sin, in its original home, is target vocabulary. It’s about direction, not depravity.

That changes something for me. Somewhere between an archery range and a modern devotional, sinner stopped meaning “one who’s off-target” and started meaning “one who is fundamentally, shamefully bad.” One is a diagnosis. The other is a verdict. And I think what I was cringing at wasn’t the theology — it was the verdict.

Because here’s the thing: I can hold both. I can say, honestly, that on my own I miss the mark constantly. I aim for patience and land on irritation. I aim for love and land on self-protection. That’s just true, and naming it isn’t self-hatred — it’s accuracy. But I don’t have to hear “sinner” as “worthless” or “disgusting” or “not enough.” I can hear it the way the original word meant it: someone who was off course, and has been found, and carried back.

So maybe I don’t need a new word after all. Maybe I just need the old meaning back. Not sinner as a cage I live in, but sinner as the truest thing that was ever true about me before I was caught up in something bigger than my aim. Missed the mark — and mercy came looking anyway.

That’s a gospel I can rest in today.

Held: What Grief Taught Me About Staying

Grief doesn’t RSVP. It just shows up, uninvited, dressed as something ordinary — like a late period, or an anniversary you don’t want to remember.  This week, that’s exactly what happened. A post about trauma, grief and healing.

This week, my period was a couple of days late.

And just for a moment, I wondered: could I be pregnant?

I have PCOS. I couldn’t get pregnant naturally with either of my two children — both pregnancies took help to happen. So I’m fairly confident that I cannot get pregnant.

But this month, three years ago, I heard and saw the heartbeat of a baby I would lose a week later.

I’m still not sure why grief moves the way it does — why it comes in waves instead of a straight line — but this year, that particular wave has been front and center. Hard and heavy to carry.

So when my period was late, I let myself wonder: ‘could it be that the same month I miscarried three years ago is the month I get pregnant, miraculously?’

It was a short, sweet thought — long enough to get excited over for half a day, short-lived enough that I never let myself start making plans.

Then my period came. And I cried. I cried a lot.

What that late period made me realize is that I hadn’t just been thinking about a third child — I’d been telling my husband, consistently, un-waveringly, that I wanted one.

The Conversation I didn’t Remember Having

My husband has a vasectomy scheduled next month. I asked him — when did we agree to this?

Six months ago, he said. Six months ago, I told him I was done having kids. I said I was too old, that the first two years are too taxing, that I’d be open to adopting but was okay not having any more biological children.

I don’t remember saying that. I don’t remember that conversation at all. But six months later, here I am — imagining a baby of my own, and everything that comes with it: the age, the exhaustion, the whole package, and I want it, and I know that I would never look back 10 years from now and wish I had never had another child.

He, on the other hand, hasn’t wavered. He’s happy with our two boys. He thinks it’s perfect. He doesn’t want more, and he’s keeping his appointment. The door is closed — a hard no on any more biological children.

I asked if he was still open to adoption — if we could at least start taking steps while our kids are still young. He said no. If he has to decide right now, the answer is no. Maybe that changes someday. But right now, he’s good at two, and the answer is no.

I didn’t realize that’s where he was. And honestly, I’m not mad about it, and I’m not surprised. Fatherhood has been a hard road for him — harder than either of us expected. That’s tender information to put into words, but it matters here: roughly one in five fathers experience depression in the years surrounding their children’s early lives, and he was one of them. Not because he regrets his sons — never that — but because it’s been a genuinely hard journey, for him and for our marriage. A journey I’m not sure I’ve fully processed or healed from myself.

So his no doesn’t surprise me. But it still leaves the question: what do you do when you want four children and your husband wants two?

I’m happy to surrender it to the Lord. I wasn’t created to be a mother — I was created to be known by God, loved and pursued by Him. My purpose is in Him, for Him, with Him. And yet He entrusted me with two beautiful boys, and I’ve pursued motherhood with everything I have. I’ve gone down to twenty hours a week at work. I’ve rocked my children to sleep every night. I can say, honestly, that I’ve been present and engaged and grateful for every stage of their lives — while still making room for my marriage, my own healing, and my faith.

The Layers

My husband and I did foster care for seven years in Reno. There were two children I wholeheartedly wanted to adopt, but neither ever came up for adoption. There was one more — a boy we took in for respite care, meant to move into a home with adoption potential, which we were. His case moved through three different caseworkers in four months. The new one didn’t know we were a respite family with *potential* for adoption, not a confirmed yes. When she found out, she was upset he’d even been placed with us.

My husband was an immediate yes. I was surprised to find myself struggling with the bond — surprised, because I was the one who’d wanted to grow our family in the first place. It wasn’t as simple as bonded or not bonded. Partway through, my husband told me he didn’t want another biological child of our own — that one biological, one adopted, would be enough. We’d never talked about that before taking this placement, and it scared me, because I still wanted both.

Timing didn’t help. We were two years past the pandemic. A year since our church had closed its doors. We had no family nearby, and we were searching for a new church and a new community without much support in the meantime. My dog of thirteen years died. My husband’s grandfather died. Our closest friends moved to Hawaii. We felt like we were on an island.

Nine months into having this sweet boy, we decided to adopt him. We named him.

In February, his case moved toward full adoption, and his caseworker came to our house. We thought she was coming to tell us it was happening. Instead, she told us — I remember the words exactly — *”Well, you’re not going to get him.”* She was frustrated that it had taken me nine months to pray, process, and form a real bond, even though she’d been the one who told us we could name him, even though she’d been excited right alongside us. Months later, it was no. She said a Christian family had already been found, and they’d be moving him out of our home.

The next four months, we helped transition him to that family. My heart has never fully recovered. I still feel like I have a third child — one I lost to miscarriage, and one I lost to an angry caseworker, and I get to love him only from a distance now.

I’ll admit, with some shame, that I didn’t move through that loss well. At times I struggled not to resent the very child who’d brought so much pain into our marriage and our life. Logically, I know it wasn’t him — it was a broken system and a hard season in our marriage, and none of it was his fault. But that’s still where it landed, for a while.

So I’ve had one child die. One child traumatically taken from our home, and now a husband telling me there’s no room for a third — biological or adopted. It feels very real that this part of my story is unfinished. Unprocessed. Left in a battered state.

Childhood Trauma

In somatic experiencing therapy, we do parts work — the idea that a part of you can carry a trauma from a specific age, frozen there, still needing a voice and a protection it never got at the time.

I had what most people would call a fairly rough upbringing. When I was three, my parents divorced, and I was moved an hour away to live with my grandparents. My grandmother was cold, mean, and an alcoholic. My grandfather was safe and kind — so, of course, he died when I was five. I’d needed him, and then he was gone. My mom moved my sister and me into her new boyfriend’s home. I was five years old.

At thirteen, my mom went through a second divorce. Around the same time, my sixteen-year-old cousin died unexpectedly in a car crash. A month later, a family friend and neighbor I rode horses with died young from cystic fibrosis. I was starting my freshman year of high school in the middle of all of it.

That’s when I started using drugs and alcohol to cope. I had no safe or healthy adult around to say no or step in. If anything, it was the opposite — addiction and dysfunction ran in my family, and it felt normal. From thirteen to seventeen, I drank, used, and got arrested more times than I can count. I hurt myself physically. I did things that, looking back, weren’t really about fun — they were about pushing myself as close to the edge as I could get, like: I climbed a rock quarry wall at night, drunk, after my friends begged me not to — because I could have died if I fell, and some part of me didn’t seem to mind that. I tried to run away at sixteen, headed toward Montana. At twenty-one, I hitchhiked between Montana and Wyoming. I rode motorcycles with no helmet. There are more stories like these than I can list — not just chasing adrenaline, but, I think, some part of me looking for a way out, or a way to feel something, or maybe just a way to make the pain visible.

I think I was doing all of it to cope. Or maybe to heal, in the only language I had at the time. I’m still not entirely sure.

The Healing

What I can identify now is the *feeling* — that overwhelming flood of grief with nowhere to land — and it surfaced again this week. The anniversary of my miscarriage. Two days late on my period, hoping for a moment I might be pregnant. My husband telling me our family is done growing. All of it stacked up, and that old, familiar pull rose with it: the urge to do something dangerous just to find relief.

But at this age, in this stage of healing, I can do something different. I can sit with the feeling instead of running from it. I can sit with the memory of that girl who used to hurt herself, and I can speak to her directly:

Held: Re-parenting my Younger Self

*I see you. I feel you. You’re not alone anymore. I’m here this time, and I’m not going to hurt you, and I’m not going to let you hurt yourself. I’m a safe adult now — safe and whole enough to hold this. You don’t need an unhealthy outlet to survive this. I can take the grief. I know you were too small to carry it, and it had nowhere to go, and there was no adult big enough to hold it for you. But there is now. I know you’ve never had a reason to trust adults, but you can trust me. I will stand in the gap for you. I will fight to protect you and give you a voice. I’m not going anywhere. I will sit in this grief with you — the kind that drags up everything scary from our past — and I will help you get through it without self-harm, without chasing the edge. You are safe. You are loved. You are worthy of love. You are worthy.*

And as the adult I am now, I don’t have to do this alone. I have a therapist who helps hold that tension with me. And I have a God who is big enough to stand in the gap with both of us.

Unfinished

I don’t know yet what happens with the third child I still want, or the fourth I’ve quietly started imagining. I don’t know if that story gets a resolution I’ll like. But I do know this: the version of me who used to run toward danger to feel something is not the version of me sitting here today. She’s still with me — she’ll always be part of my story — but she’s not driving anymore. I am. And I’m not going to let her carry this alone this time.

If you’re in a season where old grief keeps surfacing in new shapes — a late period, a hard conversation, an anniversary you didn’t even mark on the calendar until your body remembered for you — I want you to hear this: you don’t have to outrun it, and you don’t have to numb it. You’re allowed to sit down in the middle of it, name what it’s really about, and let a safe person — human or divine — hold it with you. That’s not weakness. That’s how the parts of us that never got protected finally get to rest.

You are safe. You are loved. You are worthy. God bless and take care my friend

Scales Falling: An Overdue Confession

This post is my confession of ingratitude, and the stranger who broke it open

Tonight a headline stopped me mid-scroll: a 36-year-old woman had undergone a quadruple organ transplant — liver, kidney, and two lings. She’s my age. Actually, she’s a little younger than me.

A Question:

Have you ever been so overwhelmed by trauma, or death, or grief, that your whole world shrank down to the size of a pinhead? No perspective left. No room to dream, or even want to. Just the next breath, and the one after it.

I’ve been there. I’ve been so buried in grief that I wondered if death might be kinder than living. I’ve been so wrecked by what someone did to me that I caught myself wishing they would simply die, rather than face the long, hard work of making it right. I’m not proud of either thought. But I’ve had them — and if you’re honest with yourself, you might recognize a version of your own.

That’s the pinhead. That’s how small the world gets when survival is the only thing left on the agenda.

Now imagine being 36 and that is your entire world. Not “will I get the promotion.” Not “do we want kids, and how many.” Just: will my body accept these organs? Will I wake up tomorrow? That’s the whole horizon. I read her headline and tried, for one second, to actually stand where she’s standing — and it undid me.

Because here’s where I actually was tonight.

I was tired in that specific way — hormones doing their own thing, a full workday behind me, a two-year-old and a five-year-old ahead of me, individual therapy trying to untangle myself and marriage counseling trying to untangle us, and my husband’s job ending in a few months, so he’s been swinging between okay and not okay, and landing on not okay more nights than not.

Even inside all of that, I could still see it clearly: we are, by almost any measure, absurdly fortunate. Healthy — both of us. Our boys, healthy. A home with room to spare, a yard, a school district people move across town to get into. We are richer than the overwhelming majority of humans who have ever lived. And somehow, we can be in the bottom percentile for actually feeling grateful about any of it.

We sponsor a little boy in Mexico through Compassion International. His father died. His mother is raising eight children alone — no formal education, no husband, a church that helps when it can. Tonight, my husband and I were debating whether to buy a hot tub, a new TV or put the money toward a cabin up north.

We fight, too. But if I’m honest about what we fight over, it’s almost embarrassing. Whether the griddle goes in the cabinet or the drawer. The tone I use when I ask him to treat his health with the same strategy he brings to his fantasy football lineup. Small things. Survivable things — the kind you only get to fight about when survival itself was never actually in question.

Tonight, specifically, went like this.

Josh wasn’t home yet. I was showering with our two-year-old, our nightly routine, and when I stepped out to towel him off, I let him toddle into his room alone for maybe thirty seconds while I grabbed clothes. Thirty seconds was enough. He’d pooped, stepped in it, and — toddler curiosity being what it is — tracked it through his bedroom, down the hallway, and into his brother’s room for good measure.

I was on my knees getting poop off a squirming, giggling baby and out of the carpet fibers when I heard the front door open. Josh, home from a long day, walking into a house that smelled like a diaper explosion, clearly hoping for nothing more than dinner, a change of clothes, and twenty quiet minutes. I watched his face register, in real time, that quiet wasn’t on tonight’s menu.

I went downstairs for the vacuum. That’s when I found what the dog had left for us too.

So there we were — poop upstairs, poop downstairs, two exhausted adults, and a house that needed vacuuming, disinfecting, mopping, and putting back together before either of us could even think about bedtime.

Eventually, order restored, I sat down to rock our two-year-old to sleep, like I do every night. My phone was open to the news, half-scrolling, half-decompressing. And that’s when I saw it: 36-year-old woman undergoes quadruple organ transplant.

I don’t know how long I sat there. I just know that I paused — the kind of pause where the room goes quiet even though nothing around you has changed — and then I started crying. Not the polite kind. Hysterical, can’t-catch-your-breath crying, while my son slept warm and heavy in my arms.

I thanked God for my health. For the outrageous miracle of my two boys. For a family that is, in every way that matters, whole. I thanked Him that my worst marital fights are about a griddle instead of a divorce lawyer, that I married a man who is loyal and kind and chases God even when he’s exhausted. I thanked Him — and I mean this honestly, because I don’t always mean it — for my PCOS. I’ve shouted at Him about that one. Begged for a healing I haven’t gotten, and wondered more than once why He won’t just fix it. Tonight, I thanked Him for it anyway.

Then I kept going. I prayed for every person fighting for their life somewhere tonight. Every mother and father begging God to let their child see morning. Every kid who doesn’t get to just be a kid because they’re stuck in a hospital bed — or worse, because the medicine that could save them exists, and they simply can’t reach it. I thought of a family in our church who buried their two-year-old this year, and I held my own healthy, breathing son a little tighter.

I gave thanks for all of it. And then I apologized — to God, mostly, but I think also to myself — for the ingratitude that’s been my default setting for far too long.

“Scales falling from my eyes” feels dramatic to write down. It’s still the only phrase that fits. I know the story of the Israelites, fed by manna every single morning in the wilderness, who still, somehow, found reasons to complain. I’ve read Paul, writing from a prison cell, telling the church to rejoice always, to give thanks in every circumstance — each one. I know Jesus told us not to worry, not to be anxious about our lives. I know the Bible calls us to be cheerful givers, to not grow weary in doing good.

I’ve known all of that. I could have quoted it to you last week. I just haven’t been living like I believed it.

If any of this sounds familiar — if you’ve been quietly practicing ingratitude….

If you have the life you prayed for, or the life you’d Miss if you didn’t have it, but don’t acknowledge the gift it is….

If you’re like me, then maybe we can start practicing something new together.

Gratitude Practice

1. **Write down three things you’re grateful for, every day.** I started this a few months ago. It’s still the simplest, most effective thing on this list.

2. **Put the reminder where your hands already go.** I wrote “discipline yourself to practice gratitude” on my fridge, where I’ll see it every time I fill my water bottle. Small and dumb and it works.

3. **Give God your mornings, even the ones you don’t feel like it.** Mine look different every day — sometimes Scripture, sometimes worship music, sometimes yoga and quiet. The form changes. The goal doesn’t: give thanks before the day gets its hands on you. My first hour waking goes to God.

4. **When frustration hits, pause for ten seconds and name one true thing that’s still good.** After tonight, I’m allowed to say this with some authority. Not to pretend the mess isn’t there — just to keep the mess from being the only thing you can see.

5. **Make gratitude and contentment a family rhythm, not just a private one.** At dinner or bedtime, go around and each say one thing you’re grateful for. My five-year-old does this easily. Even a one-word answer from my two-year-old counts. Gratitude taught early becomes reflex instead of effort.

6. **Turn the repetitive, unglamorous parts of your day into breath prayers.** Rocking a kid to sleep. Folding laundry. Washing dishes. Inhale: *thank you.* Exhale: a name, or a need. It costs nothing extra, and it’s mindfulness and prayer at the same time, tucked into the cracks of an ordinary day.

That last one is where I’ll leave you, because it’s exactly where I was standing when all of this started — rocking my son to sleep, breathing in and out, grateful, finally and actually grateful, for absolutely all of it.

Short Prose: A Moment in Time

I look back on this photo taken in Kauai, Hawaii.

I was 2 weeks post-miscarriage; and lost in spirit, trying to grieve the loss of my baby, even though work and the world said there was no time.

I wrote a short piece to share, 2 years after the fact.

The Prose

What an absolutely beautiful photo.
There is something about this photo, this moment, that feels so sacred.
A mother grieving the absence of her baby while making space for the one she has.
A golden sunrise.
Waves crashing on the shore, slow, steady, predictable. A soothing sound wrapped in a safe feeling. (Once, she carried the baby the same way — wrapped safe inside her.)
Now she is caught between sand and sky.
With the world–just for a moment — not asking her to choose between mourning and morning.

The sun simply rises, the way it always has, indifferent and holy, and lets her stand in both.

Whole and healing.

The Body Keeps the Score–and It Also Keeps the Fear

Recovery isn’t just about fixing the injury. It’s about teaching the body that the danger has passed.

My physical therapist told me about a patient he had. The man had a knee injury — imaging confirmed it, black and white, undeniable. They did the surgery. He did the rehab, months of it. And then, afterward, they imaged the knee again. It was clean. Nothing wrong with it at all.

But the patient’s knee still hurt.

My physical therapist explained that this isn’t rare. Sometimes the body keeps signaling pain long after the tissue has healed, because the nervous system hasn’t yet learned that it’s safe. Said another way, the alarm system doesn’t reset just because the danger is gone. It needs new experience, over and over, before it will believe the threat has passed.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that knee.

Because I know what it’s like to hurt with nothing left to point to. To have people look at the “imaging” of my life and say — she’s fine now, that was a long time ago — and still feel the ache. To wonder if the pain is even allowed to be real when there’s no fresh wound to show for it.

So this is me asking the question out loud: am I still allowed to hurt?

The Adolescent Places in my Life Where the Pain Started

I was three when my parents divorced. My stuff got packed, and I moved an hour away from my dad into a home with my grandparents.

(Researchers have started calling divorce what it often is for a child: an Adverse Childhood Experience, the same category used for abuse and neglect, because a child’s still-developing brain doesn’t yet have the tools to process something that upends their whole sense of home. Studies have found that kids don’t just struggle after a divorce — many are already showing more anxiety and behavioral strain even before the split happens, simply from living inside the tension. So divorce is not good for children, especially if there is a way around it.)

Two years of living with grandma and Grandpa, my grandpa died. He was my safe place (from grandma), my friend, and father figure. I did not have a firm grip on what death meant, but I absolutely understood the loss.

(Attachment researchers describe it plainly: when a child’s attachment figure disappears, the nervous system reacts with real alarm and real grief, whether or not the adults around them are talking about it. And often, they aren’t. A child’s grief tends to get quietly absorbed into the background of adult mourning — everyone assumes she’s too young to really understand, so no one explains, and no one checks. The loss doesn’t get smaller because it goes unspoken. It just goes underground.)

After my grandpa’s loss, my belongings were packed again, and I was moved into the house of my mom’s boyfriend. I was almost 6 with a new house, a new configuration of “family,” at an age where kids are still trying to figure out who’s safe and who’s permanent.

When It Kept Coming

Things held together, mostly, until I was 13. Then my sixteen-year-old cousin died suddenly in a car accident, and in the same season, my mom divorced my step dad, and my things got packed up again as my sister and I moved out of his house.

At fifteen I started dating an eighteen-year-old in a relationship that was wrong and unhealthy, abusive on different levels. I got my first underage drinking ticket that year too. At sixteen, I got a DUI, ran away from home, and was picked up in South Dakota, arrested on five separate charges. At seventeen, another underage drinking ticket. Until I was twenty-one, I kept finding my way into relationships that hurt me.

None of that happened in a vacuum. There was death stacked on death, divorce stacked on divorce, and almost no stable adult presence to help a kid make sense of any of it. There were also adults who should have been safe and weren’t — a friend’s dad who asked me to “snuggle” and keep it secret, a family friend who forced a kiss on me.

(When a child grows up around instability and unsafe adults, with no consistent person to bring the pain to, that pain doesn’t disappear. It just looks for somewhere to land — and when it can’t find a healthy place, it often lands in the very things that hurt more: alcohol, drugs, bad relationships, and chaos that at least felt familiar.)

And then there’s the sentence I don’t know how to make smaller: I survived something no woman should have to.

The Adult Places of my Life the Pain Hurt Most

In 2023, I had a miscarriage. I saw her heart beat, and a week later, she was no more.

Around that same time, we were wrestling with whether to adopt the foster child in our home. It took me eight months of prayer and back-and-forth to say yes. Three months to choose his name. And four months after that, our caseworker told us we’d taken too long — she was moving him to another family.

My husband sank into depression. Our community moved away. We stopped going to church. We were, in every sense, on an island.

The pain had nowhere to go. It just sat there, unlanded. And I made horrible decisions. What came out of me in the season was quite unfathomable.

My husband carries his own struggle with anxiety and control, and somewhere along the way I learned to manage that by managing everything — working full time, taking on more than my share, quietly trying to keep the world calm enough that he wouldn’t be overwhelmed. That’s its own kind of exhausting. Carrying yourself and trying to carry the emotional temperature of someone else. (Which is a trauma response that I need to work on.)

I go to therapy. I am trying to heal. And it still hurts. It all still hurts.

Now What?

So how do you repent for the sins of your past, or make peace with the pain that was done to you, when neither one undoes what happened?

I don’t think it’s by earning your way back. I think it’s by believing this:

“He heals those who are brokenhearted and takes care of their wounds, binding them up one by one.” Psalm 147:3.

Psalm 34:18 says “He stays near to those whose spirit is crushed.”

God is near and working to heal you – As you are–  Mid-ache, mid-question, mid-not-knowing-if-anyone-believes-you.

God can part the sea and raise the dead. New testament has story after story of Jesus healing every single person who came to Him. So I know the One who can heal anyone who comes to Him, the One who is close to the broken hearted, can heal my hurt.

He can heal my hurt.

He can heal your hurt.

Bring it to Him. He may heal immediately, or it may take time. He may send you to a physical therapist who shares a story about a knee injury that helps heal your own story.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I don’t have a tidy ending, because I’m not at one. But here’s what I know:

Pain doesn’t require a clean scan to be real. My physical therapist’s patient didn’t need anyone’s permission to keep hurting — his body simply hadn’t learned safety yet.

Mine hasn’t fully either. Grief that goes unspoken when you’re five doesn’t evaporate because you’re thirty now. Trauma that never had a healthy place to land doesn’t quietly file itself away just because life looks more stable on the outside.

So if you’re reading this and some of it sounds like your own life — the moves, the losses, the relationships that hurt, the pain with nowhere to go — I want you to hear this: **you don’t have to prove the injury to be allowed to still feel it.** And you’re not disqualified from grace because you can point to the exact moments you made it worse.

The pain is real. I believe you. And there’s no condemnation waiting for you here — only an invitation to keep bringing it to the God who comforts, so that one day, comforted, you might comfort someone else who’s still asking if anyone believes them.

—

*Sources on childhood divorce, grief, and attachment: Amato, P. R. (2000). “The consequences of divorce for adults and children.” Journal of Marriage and Family; research from the National Survey of Children’s Health on Adverse Childhood Experiences; attachment theory research building on John Bowlby’s work on loss and grief in children.*

Penance and Performance: Finding the God Who Already Found Me

My first memory of God was at my private Catholic school, the “Crucifixion.”

Kitty-corner to the school sat the church, and we had Mass before school most days, plus church again on Sundays.

I remember sitting in the creaky, smelly pews, and being taught by an old, fire-and-brimstone priest.

I remember wanting God. Wanting his approval, his permission, his love and acceptance — and that’s exactly what the church wanted me to want.

The way I was told to get it was by being good: not having sex with myself, praying the rosary, going to confession, memorizing the seven sacraments, not asking questions, and believing.

But it felt like the more I tried to earn God by being good, the more I realized I wasn’t good.

I remember being genuinely sad that the one person I most wanted to satisfy was someone my performance could never satisfy.

So I tried harder. I prayed the rosary. I went to confession and recited my penance: ten Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, three Glory Be’s. I went to church with grandma on Sundays even though she smoked on the drive there, windows up, and it smelled awful. I really tried to know God with the tools/ways the church was equipping me with.

Running From God (Who I Still Wanted)
Eventually the relationship felt too hard to attain, and none of my friends were trying to attain it either. I still wanted God, but he felt impossibly far away — so I gave up for a while.

Instead, I partied. By seventeen I had a Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) and three underage drinking offenses, plus probation, no driver’s license, and court-ordered counseling — and probably a depression nobody around me knew how to name. I tried to be mad at God, but I realized he was still the one person I wanted.

A Different Kind of Church
I graduated high school at the age of seventeen and moved an hour away for college. I started dating a Protestant and went to his church, and it was nothing like the Catholic church I’d grown up in. People seemed genuinely happy or alive during the service. No pews, no kneel-sit-stand, no claustrophobic confession boxes. And for the first time, someone simply told me to read the Bible.

So I bought one and read it.

The Old Testament was scary and confusing (at first). The New Testament started changing my life. But like most good things, it didn’t last — I broke up with my boyfriend, moved to Colorado to play cowgirl as a wrangler in the Estes Park mountains, and lost touch with all of it.

The Gap Was Already Filled
I came back to Minnesota for my junior year of college, and a friend wouldn’t stop telling me to go back to church. I decided to try one more time, and found a community of people genuinely pursuing the Lord — zealous, not always practical, but genuine.
And the God who had seemed so far away turned out to be near.

I was 21 years old when I found out: the gap I spent years trying to close with performance, confession, and good behavior — Jesus had already filled it.

When I was younger, I thought the goal was reaching God.

The real message was that God had already reached me.

“He reached down from on high and took hold of me…” — Psalm 18:16
“Because of his great love for us… by grace you have been saved.” — Ephesians 2:4–5

Living It Out, Imperfectly
I was baptized as an adult. I read my Bible daily, journaled quiet thoughts and lessons, and stayed close to a community of genuine believers.  I try to stay connected to him throughout the day through prayer, gratitude, and worship — not because he needs it, but because I do.

When my focus is on him — his mercy, his justice, his love, his work, his world — my own circumstances stop feeling as big as fear and stress and culture insist they are.

I still get tired, sick, busy, distracted, and I lose sight of him. But I return exhausted and still accepted, hearing the same promise:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28
“Whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” — John 6:37

An Honest Doubt
If I’m honest, sometimes I think Christians can be the worst.

What Jesus went through is brutal, and none of it makes tidy sense.

Some days it would be so much easier not to believe.

But I come back to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a real person who lived two thousand years ago. That much isn’t seriously disputed by historians, religious or secular. He was crucified, and he claimed to be the Son of God, saying:


“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” — John 3:16–18

What’s harder to dismiss is what came next. His closest friends left behind letters claiming they saw him resurrected.

Paul — who also claimed to see the risen Jesus — was beaten and imprisoned for that claim and never recanted it, proclaiming to the end that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

People can be wrong. People can lie, but it is harder to explain why they would suffer and die that much for something they knew was false–Jesus or the disciples.

Why I Still Believe
At the core of it all, if we get nothing else right, Jesus’ greatest hope for us was simple: love others.

I know the church gets this wrong, often. I know love looks different to everyone. I know Christians’ portrayal of Christ is always evolving, healing, imperfect. My hope isn’t that everyone agrees with me — it’s that everyone would pursue God for themselves, and decide for themselves what they believe about who Jesus claimed to be.

If church or Christians has hurt you, I understand. I have been hurt by both too.  just ask you not to let that be the final word on who God is.

Because God is simple and beautiful and madly, passionately in love with you. And Jesus said it himself: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Without him, I was working myself to death trying to be good enough. With him, grace paid my debt and finished what my performance never could. So hurry — pursue him. He’s been waiting.

Adenoids, Applesauce, and the Illusion of Control: Our Surgery Week

If you’re reading this, your child might be about to have his adenoids out or maybe another surgery, and you’re probably researching everything the way I did.

I want to share exactly what we fed our son before and after surgery, the little things that made it easier on him, and the part nobody tells you about — the stress that shows up in your house and your marriage in the days before. I hope it helps you feel a little more prepared, and a little less alone.

How We Got Here
It started with snoring. I brought it up with our pediatrician, who suggested allergy medicine every night along with a saline rinse to see if that helped. Some nights it did, but most nights he still snored like a freight train. Then it became more than snoring — two- to four-week-long green runny noses, one sickness after another. I wasn’t sure anymore what was “normal.”

Our first ENT looked through a scope and said his adenoids were blocking about 90% of his airway, likely wrecking his sleep quality and making it especially hard to breathe when he was sick. He recommended an adenoidectomy, but we wanted to try the conservative route first — Flonase, allergy meds, waiting to see if he’d “grow into” them. A full year later, nothing had changed, so we sought a second opinion.
This time we saw a pediatric ENT, who looked at an x-ray instead of a scope and gave us a different number: 75–90% blockage. In her opinion, he would never grow into adenoids that size. He also happened to have strep throat at that visit with hugely swollen tonsils, so a tonsillectomy was on the table too. We ultimately moved forward with just the adenoidectomy.

One thing I’d tell any mom weighing a first opinion against a second: it’s worth it. Going to a true pediatric ENT and pediatric anesthesiologist, at a hospital built entirely around kids, made all the difference for our family.

The Night Before: Loading Up
Surgery was scheduled for 10:40 a.m., and he had to stop eating solids at 1:00 a.m. — so the evening before was our last real chance to fill him up.
Dinner (around 6:00 p.m.): lightly breaded, Just Bare, chicken nuggets from Costco, broccoli, and macaroni and cheese.
A second round (closer to 8:00 p.m.), his last solid food: a homemade chocolate chip oatmeal muffin with grass-fed Kerrygold butter, and a slice of pizza.
After that, only clear liquids were allowed — apple juice, Pedialyte, and water — up until 8:30 a.m. The moment he woke up around 7:00 a.m., we started pushing fluids hard, hydrating him as much as we could before the cutoff.

The Drive There
On the way to the hospital, I asked Claude to write a seven-minute, kid-friendly story for a five-year-old explaining exactly what his morning would look like — the gown he’d change into, the mask that would go over his face. The story turned the gown into something like a superhero outfit and the mask into an astronaut helmet that would help him breathe as he drifted off. It gave him language for what he was scared of, and it gave us a way to talk him through it without making it scarier than it needed to be.
Once we got there, the children’s hospital experience was everything I didn’t know to hope for. He got a gift bag with bubbles, stickers, a coloring book, and Wiki Stix to keep his hands busy. They let him pick a scent for his anesthesia mask and decorate it himself. We’d packed our own bag of markers, a coloring book, and his Yoto player for the waiting room, but honestly, the hospital gave us so much to do we barely opened it.

Right After Surgery: First Bites
Surgery takes everything out of a kid. We went straight home for the longest nap of his life. When he woke up, his throat was sore but he was hungry — and we were ready.

First food: homemade applesauce, made the night before so it would be ready to eat. I bought a 3 lb bag of Fuji apples and a 2 lb bag of Gala apples, left the peels on, and let my five-year-old help me rough-chop them. Everything went into the crockpot on low for 6 hours with a splash of apple juice, lemon juice and cinnamon — nothing else needed. We blended it smooth for him post-surgery.

Also that day: a banana, easy and gentle on his throat.
Dinner: Goodles brand macaroni and cheese, which went down easily. I like Goodles because the noodles themselves are made with wheat flour, chickpea protein, wheat protein, and nutrients from broccoli, spinach, kale, pumpkin, and sweet potato. My one gripe is the 590 mg of sodium in the cheese packet, so I only use half of it and make up the creaminess with extra butter and a splash of milk.

After the noodles settled: a smoothie — spinach, spring mix, banana, a little avocado, a splash of apple juice, yogurt, frozen berries, oat milk, and vanilla bean whey protein.

A little treat for comfort and calories: a homemade chocolate chip banana muffin with Kerrygold butter.

Overnight Care
We woke him at 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. to keep his pain medicine on schedule so he wouldn’t fall behind on it. Each time, we also walked him to the bathroom (all that hydrating had to go somewhere), gave him his meds, and got him a little water for his throat. We kept the humidifier running all night so the air — and his throat — stayed moist.

Day One: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Breakfast: fluffy scrambled eggs, with some applesauce and smoothie alongside.
Lunch: we tried a cheese quesadilla with cucumbers and taco meat, but his throat wasn’t ready for it yet. We pivoted to the baked sweet potato we’d made the night before, warmed up with butter, honey, and cinnamon — a soft, sweet treat that went down much easier.
Dinner that second night: homemade pancakes, with butter and avocado for a savory option and berries for something sweet, so he could choose whatever sounded good.

What We Kept Stocked the Whole Time
Once he was home, we made sure these were always within reach: yogurt, overnight oats, Pedialyte, apple juice, and Mr. Freeze-style ice pops in two versions — a Pedialyte version and a 100% superfruit version — so he always had a cool, soothing option whether he needed hydration or just wanted a treat.

The Care Package Waiting for Him
When he was ready to be up and about, we had a little surprise waiting: markers, Play-Doh, kinetic sand, a new puzzle, a new game, and handwritten cards from Mom, Dad, friends, and family telling him how brave he was and wishing him a speedy recovery. Small things, but they gave him something to look forward to besides soup and rest.

The Part Nobody Warns You About
Here’s what I didn’t expect: about four days before surgery, I felt completely discombobulated. Underneath everything was fear and stress, and it came out as productivity. I cleaned the house top to bottom. I vacuumed my son’s window screens, lifted up beds and rugs to chase down every allergen in his room. I baked bread, rolls, muffins, apple crisp, applesauce. Everything felt out of control, so I controlled the only things I could — a clean house, a full freezer, a tidy room.

My husband and I fought, especially the day of. We were both raw and oversensitive, hyper-focused on each other’s tone instead of the real thing underneath it: we were both terrified, and there was nothing either of us could do about it. I wasn’t expecting a marital fight on top of the stress, on top of doing too much around the house, on top of trying to be super mom and super employee and homemaker and handyman, all at once.

That night we watched Kung Fu Panda, and the turtle’s line landed differently than it ever had before — “quit, don’t quit; noodles, don’t noodles.” You can have the illusion of control, but it’s just that, an illusion. The truest thing any of us can do is surrender each decision as it comes. I even thought of Shifu, who says he can control where the peach tree is planted, and how much fruit falls from it — and that’s about where my control actually ended too. I could decide where the bread got made and how clean the house got. But that wasn’t really the fear. The fear was the question underneath all of it: what if my son goes under and doesn’t wake up. So I cleaned, and I fought with my husband, and I stayed busy, because staying busy was the only lever I had left to pull.

If you’re a mom heading into this — whether it’s adenoids, tonsils, or something far more serious — I don’t think there’s any getting around that undercurrent of fear. But maybe naming it helps. Maybe knowing another mom scrubbed her son’s window screens and snapped at her husband over nothing helps too. You’re not failing at this. You’re scared, and you’re doing the only thing you know how to do with that fear, which is to love your kid as hard and as well as you possibly can.

God, please help this silly woman to daily surrender in humility and gratitude. Out of Your abundance, out of Your riches, out of Your storehouse, out of Your wealth, please bless us and grant strength to our inner being — strength of the Holy Spirit to surrender control and know that each day is a gift, and each day You are in control. Let that bring us peace. Amen.

If You’re Preparing for This Too
A few things I’d pass on to any mom in this exact spot:
Get a second opinion if something feels off — an x-ray told us something the scope didn’t.

Make the applesauce the night before. Future-you post-surgery will be so glad it’s ready.

Stock the freezer and pantry ahead of time: yogurt, overnight oats, Pedialyte, apple juice, freeze pops in both an electrolyte and a fruit version.

A homemade story about what the day will look like — even one read aloud in the car — can do more for a scared kid than almost anything else.

And be gentle with yourself and your spouse in the days before. The fighting, the deep clean, the baking spree — it’s not really about the house.

Name the fear out loud if you can, before it comes out sideways.

Sending you and your little one so much strength. You’re going to get through this, and you’re going to feed him so well on the other side of it.

“I’m Scared”

A reflection on Somatic Experience (SE) therapy, the body’s memory, and the three-year-old who never got to be a child

—

I heard her say it, “I am scared,” and it sounded funny because I was not scared in that moment, but she was. The 3-year-old version of me was scared.

I was sitting in a Somatic Experiencing therapy session — a modality that works at the intersection of body awareness and relational healing — talking through something that happened on a walk with my husband and kids.

It was an ordinary Sunday. He started to get stressed about something. Something small, probably. And I felt myself shift into a familiar mode: watching him, reading him, moving carefully, trying to soften the air around him before things escalated.

My therapist asked, “What will happen when you don’t manage your husband’s mood?”

And that’s when I heard a far away voice say it. The voice was mine. The words came from somewhere deep and old and true.

“I’m scared.”

—

The Girl With the Gold Hair and Green Eyes

She was three years old.

Long gold and blonde hair. Green, hazel eyes. The kind of beautiful, open face that should have been met with gentleness, with protection, with the unhurried safety of being small and loved.

When her parents divorced, she was uprooted from everything she knew — her home, her neighborhood, her dad — and moved an hour away, into her grandmother’s house. For two years, from age three to five, that house was her world.

Her grandmother was not warm. That word — *warm* — doesn’t even apply, because warmth implies something capable of heat. Her grandmother was hollowed out. A ghost wearing a human shape. There was no tenderness there, no softness, no sense that a small child’s inner life mattered or even existed. She spanked. She ignored. She controlled through force and neglect and the particular cruelty of someone who has long since stopped caring what their coldness does to others.

The little girl’s version of playing at Grandma’s house was sitting at the kitchen table rolling cigarettes. Her grandmother blew smoke in her face as she gave her  watered down Brandy in small Dixie cups.

She and her sister got ignored or got consequences. She watched her sister get her mouth washed out with soap, screaming and crying, for nothing — because Grandma was extra drunk that night and needed somewhere to put it.

There was no dad in that house. Grandpa was at work. Mom was at work or at the bar or somewhere with some man.

There was no one.

She was three years old, and there was no one.

—

The Body Keeps the Score

Somatic Experiencing, and therapies rooted in it, are built on a foundational truth: the body does not forget.

When we experience something threatening, especially as children who are entirely dependent on the adults around them, the nervous system encodes that experience. It doesn’t just file it away as a memory. It *becomes* part of the body’s operating system. A pattern. A reflex. A way of reading rooms and faces and tones of voice that runs faster than thought.

For years, I lived inside that encoding without knowing it.

When my husband’s voice would tighten on a walk — when his mood would shift — something in me would activate before my conscious mind had time to catch up. I would start managing. Softening. Smoothing. Fixing.

I thought I was being a good wife. A thoughtful partner.

I was being a three-year-old trying to survive.

—

“How Old Is Ghost Mode?”

My therapist asked me: *How old is ghost mode?

She was referring to the state I sometimes slip into when I absorb a cruel comment, critique or hurt, and instead of speaking up, I go flat. I disappear. I can suddenly go under the surface and become very still and very far away.  I can make myself very small and very quiet.

I started to answer. And then my whole body began to shake. Tears, violent and beyond my control, because the body knows things the mind is still working out.

Ghost mode is 33 years old and is present and ready to disappear in a moment’s notice.

She is:
Scared of unregulated moods. Scared of unpredictable adults. Scared of what happens when someone bigger than you loses control of themselves and you are the nearest, softest thing.

In Somatic Experiencing therapy, we don’t just *talk* about these moments. We locate them. We feel where they live in the body — the tightening in the chest, the held breath, the reflexive shrinking. And we bring the adult self into relationship with that child: gently, without forcing, letting her know that the emergency is over. That she is not three anymore. That she does not have to be the one who fixes it.

—

What My Mother Gave Me

My mother was not in that grandmother’s house. She was elsewhere — always elsewhere.

She prioritized her addiction. Her comfort. Her men, her relationships, her own survival. I was second to all of it, and I learned that early and thoroughly.

I can’t remember her taking me to the park. She didn’t come to my softball games, my gymnastics meets. But I saw her at the bar. I watched her screaming fights with men.  I watched her drunk. I watched her make out with a stranger. I watched her move through life in chaos, like a chaotic weather system, and I learned to read the sky.

She spoke poorly about my dad in front of me. She minimized my pain when I brought it to her. She taught me, without ever saying the words, that my inner life was an inconvenience.

What she gave me, without meaning to, was hypervigilance. A nervous system trained to detect emotional weather from a hundred yards away and begin managing it immediately. She gave me the belief, bone deep, that love is conditional on how well I manage other people’s moods.

—

Coming Back for Her

There is a girl with long gold-blonde hair and green eyes, and she is three years old, and she has been waiting a very long time for someone to come back for her.

That is the work.

Not fixing or performing or managing my way into safety. But returning to that little girl with the truth she never got to hear: *You were not too much. You were not the problem. You deserved protection. You deserved a safe, healthy adult to talk to, and you didn’t get it, and that was never your fault.*

My hope is, the next time I notice myself shifting on a family walk — reading my husband, bracing, managing — I am able, for the first time, to pause. To feel the fear underneath the behavior. To say, internally, *I see you. I know why you’re scared. But this is not Grandma’s house. This is not 1992. You are safe.*

The body doesn’t believe that right away. It takes time. It takes repetition. It takes a lot of shaking and a lot of tears and a lot of gentle, patient return.

But she’s worth it.

That little girl — gold hair, green eyes, rolling cigarettes because that was all she had — she is worth every bit of it.
And so are you
—

*If this resonated with you, you may be navigating your own early relational trauma. Somatic Experiencing therapy, and Internal Family Systems are all modalities that work with the body’s stored experiences and the younger parts of us that are still waiting to feel safe. You don’t have to keep managing alone.*

It’s Not About the Helicopters

For the weary woman who is tired of holding the line alone

—

There were helicopter seeds all over my driveway.

You know the ones — the little maple pods that spin down in the fall and pile up along the edges of everything. My mom commented on them. Not a big thing. Just a sharp little observation, the way she does, that landed like a verdict.

So I cleaned the driveway.

I got out the blower and I cleared every last one. I worked until it was done, and then I stood back and looked at it and felt — nothing. Because my husband didn’t notice. And the next time my mom came over, she didn’t say *oh, it looks great.* She found something else.

And I crumbled.

Not because of the helicopters. The helicopters were never the point. The crumbling was about something so much older and so much deeper than a dirty driveway — and it took me a long time to understand what I was actually doing out there with that leaf blower.

I was trying to earn something I should have been given for free a long time ago.

—

The Weight We Carry

If you’re reading this, I think I might know you a little.

You’re the one who wakes up first. You make the breakfasts, pack the snacks, remember the t-ball shirt — and when you forget the t-ball shirt, you carry the shame of it for days. You work and you cook and you schedule the doctor appointments and you buy the Tylenol before it runs out and you plan the birthday gifts and you strip the beds and you show up at every game and you hold the emotional temperature of your entire household in your hands like something fragile.

You do all of this, and sometimes — if you’re honest — you do it waiting. Waiting to be seen. Waiting for someone to notice. Waiting for the moment when all the effort finally adds up to someone holding you and saying *I see you. You’re doing a good job. You can rest now.*

And the holding doesn’t come. Or it comes inconsistently. Or the person who was supposed to hold you never really learned how.

So you go back out and blow the helicopters off the driveway.

I know this pattern because I live it. And I’ve been learning — slowly, painfully, with a good therapist and a lot of honest prayer — where it actually comes from.

—

The Little Girl Reading the Room

Children who grow up in unpredictable homes develop a particular skill. When you don’t know what version of a parent is coming through the door — the present one, the checked-out one, the critical one, the one who’s been drinking — you learn to read the room before you walk into it.

You track moods. You anticipate. You notice the subtle shift in tone that means danger is coming. You become extraordinarily attuned to other people, because your emotional safety depends on it.

I grew up with parents who loved me — I believe that genuinely — but whose love was limited by their own wounds. Addiction. Absence. A grandmother who raised me while my mom worked and drank and wasn’t there. A dad an hour away. Nobody showing up for my games. Nobody entering my world.

I learned young: someone has to hold things together. And that someone is going to be me.

That little girl — the one reading the room, holding everything, making herself indispensable so maybe someone would finally stay — she grew up. She bought a house and had babies and built a beautiful life. But she’s still out there some mornings, blowing helicopters off the driveway, waiting for someone to notice.

If you recognize her, she might be living in you too.

—

What I Thought I Was Doing (And What I Was Actually Doing)

Here’s the thing about performing for love: it doesn’t work, and somewhere underneath all the effort, you already know it doesn’t work. But the fear of stopping is bigger than the exhaustion of continuing.

Because if you stop — if you let the driveway stay messy and the dinner be simple and the to-do list wait — and nobody holds you anyway, then you have to face the most terrifying possibility: that it was never about your performance. That the people who were supposed to love you freely just… couldn’t. That you could have rested all along and it wouldn’t have changed anything.

That’s a grief that goes bone-deep.

I’ve been learning to call what I carry by its real name. Not laziness. Not weakness. Not spiritual failure.

Grief. For the mother who critiques instead of encourages. For the father who takes his grandson fishing and then gets drunk and becomes a nuisance. For the husband I chose so carefully, so intentionally — *he was supposed to be different* — who still sometimes chooses his comfort over my need to be seen.

And beneath all of it, grief for a little girl who deserved so much more than she got.

—

What the Sermon on the Mount Actually Says to Tired Women

I’ve been reading Matthew 5 and 6 — the Sermon on the Mount — and I kept getting snagged on Jesus’s words:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

That’s Matthew 11, just a few chapters later. And I think it belongs right here, in the middle of the beatitudes and the salt and light and all of it, because here’s what I kept missing:

**Jesus does not say: perform for me and I will evaluate whether you’ve earned it.**

He says *come.* As you are. Weary. Burdened. Helicopters still on the driveway.

The beatitudes — *blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek* — these are not a checklist of things to achieve. They’re a description of people who have stopped pretending. People who know they don’t have it all together. People who are grieving honestly. People who have strength and choose not to weaponize it.

Jesus looks at those people and says: *you. You’re the ones I’m talking to.*

Not the people who have it figured out. Not the people with the clean driveways and the perfect systems. The weary ones. The honest ones. The ones who are tired of performing and just want to be held.

**That’s the invitation. And it’s not something you earn.**

—

On Forgiveness and Healing (They’re Not the Same Thing)

The church sometimes collapses forgiveness and healing into one thing, and that collapse does a lot of damage to women like us.

Forgiveness is something you can decide. It’s a release. A choice not to keep pursuing the debt. You can forgive your mother for the criticism, your father for the drinking, your husband for the passivity.

Healing is different. Healing is something that happens to you over time, and it doesn’t run on a timeline you control.

You can forgive someone completely and still flinch when they walk in the room. You can release the debt and still feel your nervous system go sideways when she makes that particular face. That’s not unforgiveness. That’s your body remembering something it learned over a long time, in a home where you needed to stay alert just to stay safe.

The reason we get “whipped up” around the people who hurt us isn’t always because we haven’t forgiven them. Sometimes it’s just that our nervous system is still fighting a war that technically ended years ago. The work of healing — real healing, below the level of logic — is helping your body learn what your mind already knows.

That work is slow. It requires help. And you are not behind for still being in the middle of it.

—

The Thing You Didn’t Deserve and the Thing You’re Choosing

I want to say something plainly to the woman reading this who grew up the way I did:

**You were not too much. You were not the problem. You deserved more than you got.**

The hunger you feel — to be held, to be seen, to rest without earning it — that’s not weakness or neediness or spiritual immaturity. That’s just the honest ache of someone who was not given what every child deserves.

And here’s what I know: you are already breaking the cycle.

Your child went to t-ball in a regular shirt with his mom there, coaching, present, *at the game.* That’s the line held. That’s the pattern interrupted. That’s you giving your children, in their first five years of life, something you never fully had.

You don’t have to announce that. You don’t have to earn credit for it. It’s just true, quietly and powerfully, in the lives of the little people who will carry it forward.

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How to Stop Blowing the Helicopters

I’m still learning this. I’ll probably be learning it for a long time. But here’s what’s true so far:

**You don’t think your way out of this.** You already have the insight. What changes your nervous system is not more understanding — it’s new experience, repeated enough times that your body starts to believe it.

It looks like noticing the moment you reach for the metaphorical leaf blower. Not to stop yourself with willpower, but just to ask quietly: *am I doing this because it needs doing, or because I’m trying to earn something?*

It looks like practicing receiving small things without deflecting. Someone says something kind — instead of explaining it away, just say thank you and let it land. Sit with the discomfort of being seen without immediately minimizing it.

It looks like letting things be imperfect without rushing to fix them. Leaving the helicopters one more day. Not because the driveway matters, but because you need evidence that nothing terrible happens when you stop. That you are still here. That you are still loved. That the world holds.

It looks like telling your therapist the honest thing — not the summarized, composed version, but the real thing. *I clean the driveway to be held. I work myself to the bone waiting to be seen. A stranger hugged me last week and I’m still thinking about it because it’s the most held I’ve felt in a long time.*

Point your healing directly at the wound. That’s where the work is.

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Grace That Doesn’t Have to Be Earned

There’s a word for what we’re all looking for, underneath the leaf blowers and the to-do lists and the long days that start at 5:15am and don’t end until everyone is asleep.

The word is grace.

Unearned. Unjustified. Not because of what you did, but because of who you are.

The theological version and the human version are the same muscle. Learning to receive a hug without earning it, learning to sit in church without performing your worthiness, learning to let your husband see the real you without first justifying her existence — these are all the same practice. The capacity to receive what is freely given.

It gets built slowly. With a lot of failure and trying again. With therapy and prayer and honest conversation and the occasional stranger who just wraps you up in a hug because you looked like you needed one.

*Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.*

Not: earn it and I’ll consider it.

Not: clean the driveway and I’ll evaluate your worthiness.

Just come. You. As you are. Right now. Helicopters and all.

That’s the invitation. It has always been the invitation.

And you don’t have to do a single thing to deserve it.

—


This is the grace that meets you in the driveway. Not because you finished the list or held it together or showed up perfectly — but because you are His, and that was always enough. A relationship with Him costs you nothing, and covers everything. Grace, A salve for the places in your soul that are still raw, still healing, still learning to receive. Unearned. Undeserved. And endlessly, quietly yours.

—


*If this resonated with you, you are not alone. The ache of wanting to be loved without earning it is one of the most human things there is — and one of the most holy. I’m right here in it with you.*

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Making Childhood Great Again

Somewhere between the perfectly curated Instagram feeds, the screen-time debates, and the Amazon Prime boxes full of “educational” toys, we lost the plot.

We complicated something that, at its core, is beautifully simple, and it’s time to make simple great again.

At The Core

Kids need to **move, talk, play, read, sleep, and be loved.** That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Let’s Dig into the Science and End in Simple


The science helps us understand, so putting the phone down stops feeling like a sacrifice and starts feeling like the most obvious decision you’ve ever made.

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Ninja Moves

Picture this: a 5-year-old boy, barefoot in the backyard, doing what he calls “Ninja moves.” Spinning, jumping, rolling, kicking across his body, landing in what he’s decided is a very official fighting stance.

His mom watches and thinks: *Oh good, he’s burning off energy.*

Here’s what’s actually happening inside his skull at that exact moment:

His brain is **pumping a chemical called BDNF** — Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. Scientists have a nickname for it: *”Miracle-Gro for the brain.”* Every jump, every spin, every time he kicks his right leg across to his left side, he is literally growing new brain cells and wiring stronger connections between them.

He’s not just burning off energy.

**He’s doing homework.**

—

Movement Is the First Language of the Brain

Here’s what the research is telling us, in plain English:

The brain doesn’t distinguish between “learning time” and “play time” the way our school system does.

To a child’s developing brain, **movement IS learning.** Physical activity floods the brain with dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin — the exact same chemicals that focus medications try to artificially boost. The movement comes first, and the thinking follows.

Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard psychiatrist and author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, spent decades proving that schools that added physical activity saw test scores rise — not fall. Kids who move more, learn more.

But here’s the detail that most parents have never heard:

**Crossing the midline matters.**

When a child reaches their right hand to their left side — or kicks across their body, or does a cartwheel — they are physically building a bridge between the left and right hemispheres of their brain. That bridge is called the **corpus callosum**, and a thick, strong one is directly linked to reading ability, writing fluency, and problem-solving skills.

Those Ninja moves? Corpus callosum construction. No hard hat required.

—

The Brain Needs to Exhale, Too

Now before you sign your kid up for every sport, class, and structured activity on the planet — pause.

Because here’s the part that gets left out of most parenting conversations:

**Boredom is not the enemy. It’s the secret weapon.**

When the brain isn’t being stimulated, it activates what neuroscientists call the **Default Mode Network** — the part responsible for creativity, self-reflection, empathy, and imagination. You know what turns the DMN on?

Unstructured time. Staring at clouds. Making up stories with sticks in the backyard.

You know what shuts it off immediately?

A screen.

The research on this is consistent: children who have regular periods of unstructured, unstimulated downtime develop stronger creative thinking, better emotional regulation, and more resilient problem-solving abilities than children whose every moment is filled.

So yes — move, play, be active. And also: do nothing sometimes. Let them be bored. Watch what they create when they have no other choice.

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The 20-Minute Habit That Changes Everything

Here’s a number worth tattooing on your brain: **20.**

Twenty minutes of reading aloud to your child per day is one of the most researched, most replicated, most consistently proven investments you can make in their developing brain.

Let’s look at what that actually means over time:

A child read to for 20 minutes a day will be exposed to **1.8 million more words per year** than a child who isn’t. Before kindergarten even starts, that gap can be as wide as **32 million words** between kids. Thirty-two million.

Vocabulary size at age 5 is one of the strongest predictors of academic success all the way through high school graduation.

But here’s what the statistics miss: it’s not just the words. It’s the snuggling, the shared attention, the “what do you think happens next?” conversations. It’s the eye contact over the top of the book. It’s the way your voice sounds when you do a funny character voice and your kid absolutely loses it.

The book is the vehicle. The connection is the destination.

And “reading” doesn’t have to mean a quiet child sitting still. Read while they draw. Read while they build with blocks. Read while they do Ninja stretches on the floor. The brain can absorb language while the body is in motion — in fact, it often absorbs it better.

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Sleep: The Thing We’re All Getting Wrong

Let’s do a quick quiz.

How many hours of sleep does your 5-year-old actually need?

If you said 8 or 9, you’re not alone — and you’re also about 2 hours short.

Children ages 3–6 need **10 to 13 hours of sleep per night.** Not as a nice-to-have. As a biological requirement.

Here’s what happens during those hours that most parents don’t know:

1. The brain literally washes itself.  The glymphatic system — the brain’s cleaning crew — is only fully active during deep sleep. It flushes out metabolic waste products, including proteins linked to neurological disease. Sleep isn’t rest. Sleep is maintenance.

2. The day gets filed away. Everything your child learned — every Ninja move, every new word, every social interaction — gets consolidated into long-term memory during sleep. Cut sleep and you cut learning, even if they were perfectly attentive all day.

3. Growth hormone is released. The majority of a child’s physical growth hormone is released during deep sleep. When we say kids “grow while they sleep,” we mean it literally.

One hour less sleep per night shows measurable drops in IQ-level functioning in children. Not over months. In days.

A consistent bedtime routine — same time, same sequence, dark cool room — reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, and signals the brain that it’s safe to power down. That routine is doing neurological heavy lifting disguised as pajamas and a glass of water.

—

Pretend Play Is Serious Business

Here’s one that surprises almost every parent:

**Pretend play is one of the highest-leverage activities for brain development in early childhood.**

Not flashcards. Not educational apps. Not structured lessons.

Pretend. Play.

When your child plays “Ninja master training academy” (or whatever elaborate universe they’ve created), they are building something called **executive function** — the set of mental skills that includes planning, focus, impulse control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility.

Executive function, research shows, is a better predictor of long-term success than IQ. Better than grades. Better than test scores. In fact, a landmark study out of Penn State and Duke University followed children from age 5 to age 25 and found that social-emotional skills developed through play in kindergarten predicted everything from graduation rates to employment to likelihood of arrest.

Child-led, imaginative, unstructured play is doing all of this work quietly, invisibly, in the background — while your kid is just having the time of their life.

The problem? We’ve been scheduling it out of existence.

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The Conversation No One Is Having About Conversations

Here’s a finding from the University of Chicago that should change the way every parent communicates with their child:

It’s not how many words your child *hears* that predicts intelligence. It’s the number of **back-and-forth conversational turns.**

Not lecturing. Not narrating. Not educational podcasts in the car.

*Conversation.* Real, two-way, “what do YOU think?” conversation.

Every time your child says something and you genuinely respond, and they respond back, and you go back and forth — you are building **neural architecture.** The researchers who discovered this called it “serve and return” — like a tennis rally, except the prize is a more capable brain.

This means:
– Asking “why do you think the sky is blue?” beats telling them the answer.
– Saying “what was the best part of your day?” beats “how was school?”
– Following their conversational lead — even about Minecraft or Ninja warriors or why stink bugs exist — builds more intelligence than redirecting them to “educational” topics.

The most powerful educational tool in your child’s life is not an app, a program, or a curriculum.

**It’s your undivided attention during an ordinary conversation.**

—

Nature: The Free Prescription Nobody’s Filling

We have more research on the benefits of outdoor time for children than we know what to do with, and somehow the average American child now spends **less time outdoors than a maximum-security prison inmate.**

Read that sentence again.

Here’s what 20 minutes of nature does to a child’s brain and body:

– **Measurably reduces cortisol** (the stress and anxiety hormone)


– **Reduces ADHD symptoms** more effectively than medication in some studies (University of Illinois)


– **Regulates melatonin** through natural light exposure, improving sleep quality at night


– **Builds proprioception** — the brain’s sense of where the body is in space — through uneven terrain like grass, dirt, and rocks.

Proprioception directly feeds the neural wiring used for reading and math.


– Activates the **Default Mode Network** (see: creativity, above)


– **Reduces myopia** (nearsightedness) — outdoor light exposure is one of the most effective interventions against the childhood vision crisis currently sweeping the developed world

And here’s the kicker: none of this requires a national park, a hiking trail, or any planning. A backyard. A sidewalk. A patch of grass at the park.

Just outside. Just unstructured. Just go.

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The Phone in the Room Is Changing Your Child’s Brain

Let’s talk about what’s actually happening when you check your phone while your toddler is playing nearby.

Not when you’re on it for hours. When you **glance** at it.

A study published in *Child Development* found that parents’ phone use during free play — even brief, casual use — was associated with more negative child behavior, more bids for attention, and measurably higher stress responses in the children.

Another study found that the mere **presence of a smartphone on the table** — even face down, not being used — reduced the quality of conversation, the depth of connection, and the sense of closeness between people.

The phone doesn’t have to be in your hand to do damage. It just has to be *present.*

But the deepest impact comes from something most parenting books don’t talk about:

**The loss of eye contact.**

Eye contact between a parent and child isn’t just emotionally meaningful — it is neurologically essential. Mutual eye contact triggers simultaneous oxytocin release in both parent and child. It teaches infants and toddlers to read emotions, feel attuned, and understand that they are seen, safe, and connected.

Developmental psychologists call this **”attunement”** — and a child who experiences thousands of moments of it in their early years develops a more resilient nervous system, stronger emotional regulation, and healthier relationship patterns for life.

When we look at our phones, we look away from our children. And the brain is keeping score.

The famous **”Still Face Experiment”** — conducted by Dr. Ed Tronick at Harvard — showed that just 2 minutes of a mother being unresponsive caused visible distress in her infant. Heart rate changes. Desperate bids for reconnection. Eventual withdrawal.

Smartphones create a “still face” effect dozens of times a day.

This is not about guilt. Guilt is not productive, and no parent is or should be perfectly present every waking moment.

This is about information. And now you have it.

—

The Simple Blueprint (Printed and Posted on Your Fridge)

All the research, distilled into a single daily rhythm:

| Time of Day | What to Do | Why It Works |


|—|—|—|
| **Morning** | Protein breakfast + get outside in natural light | Fuels the brain, sets the body clock |
| **All Day** | 3 hours of active, physical play | BDNF, neural wiring, coordination, joy |
| **Daily** | 20 minutes reading together | Vocabulary, bonding, imagination |
| **Daily** | Unstructured pretend play | Executive function, creativity, resilience |
| **Daily** | Real back-and-forth conversation | IQ, language development, emotional attunement |
| **Afternoon** | Quiet/downtime — no screens | Brain consolidation, creativity, self-regulation |
| **Evening** | Outdoor time or nature | Cortisol reset, sensory development, sleep prep |
| **Night** | 10–13 hours of sleep, consistent routine | Memory, growth, brain maintenance |

Notice what’s not on the list:
– Educational apps
– Flashcard programs
– Structured enrichment classes (at this age)
– Screen time
– Scheduled “learning”

This is not because those things are all evil. It’s because **the research doesn’t support prioritizing them** over the basics — and the basics are being crowded out.

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What Finland Knows That We Keep Forgetting

You’ve probably heard about the Finnish education system — repeatedly ranked among the best in the world. Here’s what they actually do:

– Children don’t start formal academic school until **age 7**
– Before that: play, nature, social-emotional learning, and movement
– Recess is **mandated every hour** throughout the school day
– Homework in early grades is minimal to nonexistent
– Teachers are among the most respected professionals in society
– Standardized testing is rare

And the results? Finnish students consistently rank near the top globally in reading, math, and science.

They didn’t get there by starting earlier, pushing harder, or buying better apps.

They got there by **protecting childhood.**

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## This Is a Movement, Not Just a Blog Post

If you’ve made it this far, you already know this goes beyond your own family.

Look around. Really look.

Kids at restaurants on iPads. Toddlers handed phones to stop meltdowns. Playgrounds half-empty. Backyards unused. Parents and children sitting in the same room, in different worlds.

This is the most connected era in human history, and an entire generation of children is growing up profoundly disconnected — from nature, from boredom, from their own imaginations, and from the faces of the people who love them most.

We don’t need more apps. We don’t need more structure. We don’t need more enrichment programs or educational subscriptions or screen-time management software.

**We need to make childhood great again.**

We need to put the phone down. Open the back door. Read one more chapter. Sit on the floor and play. Cook dinner together and talk about nothing and everything. Let them be bored. Let them figure it out. Let them climb the tree that’s “too high” and feel the pride of making it.

We need to stop optimizing childhood and start *experiencing* it.

—

## Start Today. Right Now. Literally.

Put your phone down.

Go find your kid.

Ask them to show you their best Ninja move.

Watch their face when you actually watch them.

*That* is the research in action. *That* is the intervention. *That* is the thing that changes everything.

—

**Share this post** with every parent you know who is doing their best and just needs someone to hand them the permission slip.

The permission slip to slow down. Go outside. Read the book. Put the phone in a drawer.

**To make childhood great again** — not for some political purpose, not for some nostalgic fantasy, but because the science says so, the children need it, and deep down, every one of us already knows it.

—

*Sources and further reading: “Spark” by Dr. John Ratey | “The Whole-Brain Child” by Dr. Daniel Siegel | “The Anxious Generation” by Dr. Jonathan Haidt | University of Chicago “Conversational Turns” Research | Penn State/Duke Kindergarten Skills Study | University of Illinois ADHD & Nature Studies | Harvard “Still Face Experiment” — Dr. Ed Tronick | American Academy of Pediatrics Sleep Guidelines*

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