Forgiving Ourselves

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Forgiving others is hard.
But forgiving ourselves might be harder.

There are mistakes I replay more often than the wrongs done to me. Words I wish I could take back. Choices I made out of fear, exhaustion, or survival. Moments where I know I could have done better — or at least I wish I had known how.

I am often gentler with everyone else than I am with myself.

I tell others that healing isn’t linear, that growth takes time, that doing the best you can with what you had still counts. And yet, when I look inward, I measure myself by a harsher standard. I expect wisdom I didn’t yet have. Strength I was still growing into. Courage I was still learning to trust.

There are also the lies I’ve told — not always to hurt anyone, but to survive. Lies meant to keep the peace. Lies meant to avoid questions I wasn’t ready to answer. Lies told because the truth felt too dangerous, too heavy, or too exposing. I carry guilt over those too, even when I know they came from fear rather than malice.

And then there is the guilt I carry around relying on self-harm — the shame of needing something that wasn’t healthy, the anger at myself for turning to it, the quiet belief that I should have been stronger, more faithful, more in control. I judge myself for coping the only way I knew how at the time, forgetting that coping is often about survival, not choice.

Sometimes my self-criticism sounds holy — disguised as accountability or humility — but it isn’t. It’s punishment. And it keeps me stuck.

Forgiving myself means naming the truth without cruelty.
It means saying: Yes, I failed. Yes, I was weak. Yes, I didn’t always choose well.
And then adding the words I so often forget: And I was human.

God already knows my mistakes. None of them surprised Him.
He saw the fear beneath them. The wounds behind them. The immaturity, the overwhelm, the unmet needs. He saw the version of me who was still learning how to live without bracing for impact.

Self-forgiveness doesn’t erase responsibility.
It releases shame.

It allows me to grow without constantly bleeding from the past. It lets me carry lessons instead of chains. It reminds me that repentance is not meant to imprison us — it’s meant to free us.

I am still in the first stages of self-forgiveness, and I’m not even sure how to start. That feels important to admit. I’ve spent so long believing forgiveness had to look a certain way — decisive, clean, confident — that standing here unsure feels like failure. But maybe it isn’t.

Maybe there is no single way to begin.

Some days, self-forgiveness looks like nothing more than not piling on. Not replaying the same mistake one more time before bed. Not using my past as proof that I am unworthy of rest or joy. Some days, it’s simply saying, “I don’t know how to forgive myself yet, but I’m willing to learn.”

I’m beginning to understand that self-forgiveness isn’t a switch you flip; it’s a posture you slowly practice. It starts with curiosity instead of condemnation. With asking why instead of declaring what’s wrong with me. With allowing space for the truth that I did the best I could with what I had — even when that best still fell short.

I think the beginning might be this: stopping the demand that I arrive healed before I’m allowed grace.

I am learning that forgiving myself doesn’t mean I approve of everything I’ve done. It means I trust that God’s grace is bigger than my worst moments, and that He is not asking me to keep paying for sins He has already forgiven.

Sometimes the hardest part of faith isn’t believing God forgives us —
it’s believing we’re allowed to stop condemning ourselves.

So I’m starting small.
I’m starting where I am.
I’m starting by letting God sit with me in the discomfort instead of waiting until I’ve fixed myself.

Forgiving myself is not a single decision.
It’s a daily choice to speak to my own soul the way God does — with truth, mercy, and patience.

And maybe that, too, is holy work.

The Honor of Being There at the End

When a very close friend of mine recently lost her father, I watched her step into that sacred, disorienting space between grief and responsibility, planning a funeral, making decisions through tears, trying to steady herself while her world tilted. As she prepared for his final arrangements, something in me stirred. Her loss brought back the memories I keep tucked away, memories of the people whose final breaths I have witnessed, the rooms I have sat in, the silence I’ve felt settle after life slips quietly out of the body.

Watching her navigate those first days of grief made me look back on all the endings I’ve lived through…
All the hands I’ve sat beside.
All the breaths I’ve watched slow.
All the holy silences I’ve felt fill a room after a life comes to its close.

It made me realize that death has woven itself through my life in ways I never sought, never expected, and never fully understood — but ways that shaped me deeply.

I was fourteen years old when I sat beside my grandfather as he took his final breath. At that age, death was still a distant idea — something whispered about, something adults shielded children from, something that lived more in stories than in reality. I didn’t understand what it meant to be present in someone’s last moments. I didn’t recognize the sacredness of it, the heaviness, or the quiet honor that comes with being trusted to stand at the border between here and whatever comes next.

All I knew was that my grandfather — the man whose hands smelled like soil and whose laugh could shake the dust off the rafters — suddenly grew still. The room shifted. It wasn’t empty; it was full of a silence that felt almost holy. I didn’t understand it then, but with time, I’ve learned to recognize that feeling.

It is the moment heaven brushes against earth.

That was my first time witnessing death, but it would not be my last. Life, in its unpredictable way, would bring me again and again to the bedside of the dying. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t plan for it, and certainly didn’t expect it — but somehow, I always ended up being the one who stayed when others stepped away.

Before my mother’s death, before the long nights and the complicated grief, there was my father — a relationship woven with its own shadows and contradictions.

In the five years before he died, my father had changed. In 2000, he went blind, and something in him softened in the years that followed. The anger that once lived so close to the surface began to fade. The sharp edges of his temper mellowed. It was as if losing his sight forced him to see life differently — to slow down, to let go of some of the bitterness he carried, to reach for gentleness in ways he never had before. He wasn’t the same man I had grown up afraid of. Blindness reshaped him into someone more patient, more reflective, more human.

And then, in 2014, he died suddenly — a massive heart attack that shattered every illusion of time, preparation, or warning. There were no final hours, no whispered goodbyes, no hand to hold or chair to sit beside. One moment he was alive; the next he was gone. The shock was absolute.

Both my brother and I insisted on seeing his body, not out of morbid curiosity, but because we needed proof — something physical, something undeniable-to make the news real. Grief can make the mind argue with reality, and standing beside him was the only way we could convince ourselves that this was truly happening.

The impact of that moment lived in me long after the funeral ended. His death taught me how abrupt life can be, how fragile, how suddenly the world can tilt — and how sometimes it never tilts back.

A year later, my mother began her own slow decline, and the contrast between the two deaths weighed heavily on me. My father vanished in an instant. My mother faded over time. One death gave me no chance to say goodbye. The other gave me time I didn’t want, but couldn’t ignore.

Of all the losses I’ve lived through, none reshaped me more than the night my mother died.

For most of my life, I hated my mother. Not the kind of temporary teenage anger that fades with maturity, but a deep, bone-level hatred born from years of wounds carved into me long before I knew what the word “mother” was supposed to mean. She harmed me in ways that still echo through my adulthood. She fractured my childhood, twisted my sense of belonging, and reshaped how I understood love and safety.

That hatred became armor. It felt like protection. It felt like power — the only power I had left after surviving her. I convinced myself that hating her freed me from her.

But when she began dying, something unexpected stirred inside me — something quiet, instinctive, and impossible to name. She should not die alone.

Maybe my father’s sudden death had taught me that you don’t always get a chance to be there. Maybe I couldn’t bear the thought of another person leaving this world without anyone sitting witness. Or maybe, despite everything she had done, some small remnant of the child I once was still wanted to show up in the only way I knew how.

I didn’t go because she deserved it.
I didn’t go because forgiveness had suddenly bloomed in me.
I went because some stubborn part of my soul refused to let anyone cross that threshold alone.

At the same time, life was pulling me in another direction — one that had nothing to do with death and everything to do with protecting life. My youngest was very sick then, struggling with a lung infection that required breathing treatments every four hours, around the clock. We were exhausted. The days blurred together in alarms, nebulizers, worry, and very little sleep. I had left my mother’s side to go home, help give the next treatment, and rest for just a moment.

But I couldn’t stay away.

Something inside me — stronger than exhaustion, stronger than fear, stronger than the years of distance between us — pulled me back. I felt it like a tug in my chest, a knowing heavier than logic. I remember standing at home after the breathing treatment, watching my son finally drift into a fragile sleep, and realizing I needed to return to her bedside.

It didn’t make sense.
It didn’t feel comfortable.
But it felt necessary.

There is a strange kind of clarity that comes when you sit beside someone who once broke you. The anger didn’t magically disappear. The hurt didn’t resolve itself in some storybook ending. But in those final hours, the woman in that bed was no longer the force that had shaped my pain. She was just a human being — fragile, failing, and facing the same silence we will all one day face.

I could not bring myself to touch her, so I just sat next to her bedside — close enough to witness her final breaths, but not close enough to bridge the years of distance that lay between us.

I didn’t hold her hand.
I didn’t whisper forgiveness.
I didn’t pretend the past hadn’t happened.

I simply stayed.

And staying changed me.

Watching my mother die forced me to confront a truth I had avoided for years: hatred is not freedom. It binds you as tightly as love does. Sitting with her — without touching her, without offering a comfort I didn’t have — loosened a chain I had been dragging for most of my life. It didn’t break. It didn’t vanish. But it shifted, just enough for me to breathe differently.

Her final breath did not redeem her.
But it released me.

And that is its own kind of mercy.

Then, in 2019, came the loss that felt different from all the others — the loss of the woman who had been the closest thing I ever had to a mother.

My grandmother’s decline began after a fall. A simple, everyday moment that changed everything. The fall led to tests. The tests led to answers none of us were ready for: cancer. At ninety-four, she was too tired and too wise for the brutality of chemotherapy. She chose peace, not battle. She chose comfort, not suffering. I honored her choice.

So she came home on hospice.

I wanted to be by her side every second. I didn’t want to leave her room, her house, or even the sound of her breathing. I wanted to return every ounce of gentleness she had poured into me during my childhood — all the meals, all the quiet reassurances, all the love she gave without being asked.

But life wasn’t simple anymore.
I wasn’t just a granddaughter.
I was a mother — pulled between the woman who once protected me and the children I was now raising.

And those children loved her deeply, too.

She had been a big part of their lives — not just mine. She had held them, spoken to them, laughed with them, and prayed for them. She gave them the same steady, unconditional love she once gave me. What better way to honor that bond than by allowing them to be part of this process? To let them see that death, when met with love, is not something to hide from.

And they understood it in ways adults sometimes can’t.

My son — still so young, still full of softness and sincerity — would climb into bed beside her, curling against her as though his small warmth could somehow protect her. He would snuggle into her side and tell me, with a child’s pure faith, that he wanted to stay with Grandma until she went to heaven. He didn’t fear her frailty. He didn’t fear death. He saw only love.

My children gained so much from being around her in those final days. They learned compassion not from lessons, but from presence. They learned that goodbye is not something to run from, but something to honor. They learned that love doesn’t disappear when a body grows weak — it becomes more visible.

When her final moment came, I was there.

I sat beside her as she took her last breath, and once again I felt that holy silence settle into the room — the same sacred, unmistakable quiet I had felt with my grandfather so many years before. A peace that wrapped itself around us like a blanket.

After she passed, I helped dress her in clean clothes. It was the last act of care I could offer her — the last way to honor the woman who had clothed me in love my entire life. My hands shook, but my heart felt steady. Tenderness has its own strength.

I stayed with her until they came to collect her for cremation. I refused to let her be alone — not even for a moment. I stayed because she had stayed for me. I stayed because love deserved a witness. I stayed because letting her go was both the hardest and the holiest thing I have ever done.

Each death taught me something different.
Each goodbye carried its own truth.

Most people talk about death as if it is only darkness — fear and sorrow, and loss. But being there when someone leaves this world carries something else too, something quieter but far more powerful.

It is a privilege.
A duty.
A moment of profound meaning.

It is witnessing the final chapter of a life that mattered.
It is standing guard over the last breath someone will ever take.
It is offering presence when every other form of comfort has run out.

For me, death has become a teacher.
Not a cruel one — though grief can be cruel — but an honest one.

Death has taught me that love is not erased by pain.
Death has taught me that showing up is sometimes the most powerful thing we can do.
Death has taught me that even the most wounded hearts carry the capacity for mercy.
And death has taught me that being present — even silently, even with complicated feelings — is its own kind of grace.

I was fourteen when I first felt that thin, holy moment where life gives way to something beyond it. I didn’t understand it then. I barely understand it now. But I do know this:

Being there when someone leaves the world is an honor.
Even when the person hurt you.
Even when your heart is conflicted.
Even when the past sits between you like a wall.

Presence still matters.

And sometimes, being the one who stays is what finally allows you to let go.

All Saints and Sinners

All Saints and Sinners

I lift up my eyes to the hills—

where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord,

the Maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot slip—

he who watches over you will not slumber;

indeed, he who watches over Israel

will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord watches over you—

the Lord is your shade at your right hand;

the sun will not harm you by day,

nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all harm—

he will watch over your life;

the Lord will watch over your coming and going

both now and forevermore.

— Psalm 121

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There are nights I still wonder what heaven will feel like, not the clouds and the light, but the faces. The ones I long to see, and the ones I’m not sure I’m ready for.

We celebrated All Saints’ Sunday at church, and as I walked through the sanctuary and saw the line of photos, faces of those who now rest in the columbarium, my stomach turned. Each picture was meant to bring comfort, a reminder of eternal life and hope. But I found myself staring and wondering, will they be there too?

If heaven is perfect, what happens to the pain they caused?
If grace really means grace, does that mean they’re there too?

This thought has unsettled me off and on for years. As I get older, I feel that I’m slowly getting closer to finding out the answer. I wanted heaven to be a place of safety, of peace, not a reunion with the people who broke me. I wanted the light to fall only on the faces that brought warmth, not on the ones that taught me fear.

But grace doesn’t ask for my permission.
It doesn’t stay inside the lines I draw to keep my heart safe.

And sometimes, in the quiet, another question rises — one that frightens me more than the rest:
What happens to me if I can’t forgive them?

It’s not something I ever want to do. Forgiveness feels impossible, almost like betrayal, as if forgiving them would mean saying it was somehow okay when it never was. But then I wonder, what does that mean for my salvation? What does it mean for my seat beside Jesus if my heart still trembles at the thought of mercy for them?

I’ve been told that forgiveness is required of me, that if I want to be forgiven, I must forgive.
But no one has ever talked about the fact that maybe God knows the difference between refusing to forgive and not being ready yet.

I am not sure where I am on that spectrum, but I have to believe He sees the struggle, the way I keep coming back to Him with the same ache, the same confusion, the same prayer that always begins with, “Lord, I don’t know how.”

And maybe forgiveness, in His eyes, isn’t a single moment or a sentence spoken out loud. Maybe it’s the long, trembling willingness to let Him keep softening what’s still too hard.

There are days I fear that my inability to forgive makes me unworthy of heaven, an unworthy child of God. My anger feels like it disqualifies me from grace, from forgiveness, from belonging. I still carry this quiet dread that when the gates open, I might find myself standing outside, still tangled in the pain I could never release.

But then I try to remember: grace was never something I could earn. It was given before I even knew how to ask for it. Still, the doubts linger, not in my mind so much as in my soul. I still question my ability to reach heaven, to be welcomed into that perfect love when so much of me still aches with what was never made right.

Yet even in those moments of doubt, I think God holds me closer, not farther away. Maybe He knows that faith isn’t always confident; sometimes it’s trembling and unsure, whispered through tears. Maybe He sees that I’m still trying, still coming back, still letting Him find me in the middle of the struggle.

Sometimes I imagine walking into that light and seeing their faces, not the versions that hurt me, but the ones God meant them to be before everything went wrong. I wonder if they’ll recognize me, or if I’ll even need words to understand. Maybe forgiveness will finally make sense in that moment — not as something I had to work toward, but as something that simply is.

Heaven, I think, will be the first place where forgiveness feels easy — not because the wounds didn’t matter, but because they’ve been healed by something stronger than pain. Because the only scars in heaven are on Jesus, not me.

Here on earth, forgiveness still feels like holding fire. It burns even when I mean it. But in heaven, I think the flames will finally go out.

Maybe that’s what perfect peace really is, not pretending it didn’t happen, but knowing that somehow, God made it right.

Maybe heaven isn’t about having perfectly forgiven everyone, but about finally being free from the need to keep trying. Maybe God will finish the forgiveness in me that I couldn’t finish myself.

And when that day comes, when all that’s left is light and love, maybe I’ll finally understand what it means that mercy triumphs over judgment, even mine.

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Reflection

Forgiveness isn’t a door I open once. It’s a road I keep walking, slow, uneven, sacred.
And maybe heaven is where that road finally ends, where the burden of trying is lifted, and all that’s left is love.

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Prayer

Lord, You know how deep the wounds go,
and how hard it is to let go of what was never made right.
You see the struggle inside me — the ache, the fear, the longing to believe You’ll make it new.

Teach me to trust Your mercy more than my pain.
Hold me when forgiveness feels too heavy to carry.

If they are in Your kingdom, let me be glad they made it home.
And if I see them there, let me see them through Your eyes —
redeemed, restored, forgiven.

Heal what they broke in me, and finish what I could not.
So that when I reach heaven’s shore,
there will be no more fear in my remembering —
only grace.

Amen. 

Poor Michael: When There Are No Answers

Since he was born, Michael has been a challenge for me — not in love, but in understanding and advocating for him. Loving him has always been effortless; it’s the kind of love that’s written into my bones. But understanding what’s going on inside him, finding the words to make others see what I see — that has been the lifelong part of mothering him that stretches me in ways I never expected.

For over a year now, he’s had this relentless pain in his right jaw and ear. It comes and goes, but lately it’s been stronger, sharper, impossible to ignore. We’ve been to the dentist and the doctor more times than I can count. Each visit brings hope and then the familiar ache of disappointment. They’ve found things — a broken tooth below the gum line on the left side, an infection in his left ear — all things that should explain pain, but none of them do. Because his pain is on the right.

It makes no sense, and yet it’s real.
He can’t sleep without pain medication. He can’t focus without wincing. Watching him live like this, round-the-clock meds just to make the day bearable, tears something inside me that words can’t touch.

This coming week, we’ll see several more doctors — more specialists, more scans, more questions. I pray every night that one of them will finally see what’s wrong, that someone will listen deeply enough to understand what I’ve been trying to explain for months: that his pain is real, that he’s not exaggerating, that something unseen is happening beneath the surface.

And under all of that hope, there’s guilt.
That quiet, unrelenting guilt that mothers carry — the belief that we should have known sooner, done more, seen something differently. It sits in my chest like a stone, whispering that maybe his pain is my failure.

I know, in my head, that isn’t true. But in my heart, it feels like it. Because no matter how many appointments I make, or how many prayers I whisper, I still go to bed each night with the sound of his pain echoing in my mind — and the helplessness of not being able to fix it.

Still, I keep showing up. I keep hoping. I keep believing that answers will come, and that healing — in some form — will find him. And until it does, I’ll keep doing what mothers do when love has no cure: staying near, holding steady, and letting him know that he’s never alone in the ache.

Is It Still Worth Asking for Help???

I used to believe I had forfeited the right to ask for help. Over the years, I pushed so many people away that—even when I was surrounded by adults and colleagues and students—the loneliness still hummed beneath everything like a low, unending note. It felt like living inside a vast void of empty space with no air to breathe: strong on the outside, but gasping silently on the inside.

All the while, I was searching, even if I didn’t say it out loud—looking for someone, maybe a mother figure, maybe some other shape of love I never had as a child. In that vast, airless space, I could feel something missing, some mysterious thing I knew I needed but had never received. What’s even harder is that, now in my mid-forties, it’s still missing. And at last, I’ve had to face the truth that no one is coming to rescue me—no one can give me that lost piece. The thing I’ve been reaching for all my life may never arrive in the form I imagined.

So now I find myself at a crossroads. I can stay in that vast, airless space, still waiting for something that may never come—holding my breath for a rescue that isn’t on its way. Or I can step out of the waiting, even if I never fully know what I’ve been missing.

I reached a point where even that choice felt impossible. I had finally hit the place where there was no hope left in me. It started quietly, not with a dramatic collapse but with a slow hollowing out. The day that sealed it for me was when I watched one of my own students be sent back to the very home I knew was unsafe—sent back to an abuser because the system said it had to be that way. Standing there, knowing what that child was going back to, knowing that the bed they were returning to was not a bed of safety but of harm, broke something inside me.

When she realized she was going to have to go with her mother, her whole body slumped. Her head dropped, chin to chest, and she stared only at our feet. No eye contact. No words. Just nods and tears trembling in her eyes. My heart ripped open. I, too, was searching the faces of the other adults, silently pleading for someone to stop this from happening. But no one moved. We had no choice; there was a court order.

In that moment, I felt the last fragile thread of hope snap. All the old memories came flooding back—my own childhood, my own nights of being sent back, my own silent prayers that someone would see. Watching that student, I felt like I was looking at myself. And I thought: if no one could save me then, and no one can save them now, what is the point of any of this?

I went home that day empty—my void somehow more hollow than before, the weight of it pressing into the corners of the dark. It felt heavier than my own body, as if even the air had turned to stone. I reached for the only escape I knew, the one my mind whispered when the pain became too much to bear. For a fleeting moment, there was quiet—then the familiar wash of guilt, the shame that followed like a shadow, and the blaming of myself, the world, everything. Because blame, at least, was easier than the ache.

For a long time, I believed the lie that because I didn’t ask for help then, I couldn’t ask for it now—that the window had closed. That if I reached out, I’d be seen as weak or a burden. That the pain I carried would always be mine alone to soothe, even if the only way I knew to soothe it was self-harm.

But here is the truth I am learning, even now, even as I am trying to convince myself in this very moment to believe it—yes, it is never too late:

You can still ask. Even if you never asked before. Even if you burned bridges or hid your pain.

You are not disqualified. Need does not expire. Hurt does not make you unworthy of care.

Small asks count. You don’t have to start with the biggest, scariest thing. Sometimes it’s as small as, “Can you sit with me for a minute?” or “I’m having a hard time right now.”

Reaching out does not erase the pain or the history, but it puts a crack of light in the wall you’ve built. It’s how you slowly stop being alone inside your own life.

If you are reading this and you have felt like I have—pushed people away, convinced yourself no one would care, turned to self-harm as the only relief—I want you to hear this from someone still learning it:

It’s not too late to ask for help.

You are still worth the asking.

It will feel awkward. It will feel vulnerable. It will feel like stepping off a cliff. But the people who care about you cannot reach for a hand they don’t know is there. Let them know.

I’m still practicing this. I still have days when the urge wins. But each time I choose to speak instead of hide, to reach instead of retreat, I make a new path—for myself and for my students. A path that says, Even if you’ve been silent for years, you can still ask. And someone will still come.

When Healing and Faith Collide

 

Both of my parents died a year apart — my dad on May 2, 2014, one day after his sixty-fifth birthday, and my mom on May 12, 2015, just after turning sixty-six. I sometimes think of those dates not just as the days they left this world, but as the days my world shifted forever.

When my mother took her final breath, I sat there watching — a rush of conflicting emotions flooding through me. Fear. Relief. Sorrow. Longing. It felt like the air in the room changed shape, like something heavy had finally been lifted, and yet something sacred had been lost at the same time.

Her death was a strange turning point. For so long I had carried fear — fear that she would hurt me again, fear that I would never be free of her shadow, fear that my body would always flinch at the sound of her voice. And then, suddenly, that fear was gone. I slept better. I could breathe again. My dreams quieted; my nights weren’t battles anymore.

I went almost ten years without nightmares, without having to push away the ghosts of my past. But this year, for reasons I can’t quite name, the darkness stirred again. Some say it’s because of a student whose story mirrors mine. Others call it part of healing — old wounds surfacing so they can finally close. Maybe it’s both.

Maybe it’s my student. Maybe it’s that my own children are reaching the ages when I first learned to be afraid. Maybe it’s realizing that I still long for something I will never have — a mother. A safe relationship. The kind of love I am trying so hard to give to my children, without having had an example to follow.

Whatever the reason, it’s like the past has knocked again — gently this time, but insistently. The fear is softer, but the ache is deeper. I see now that even when the nightmares fade, the story isn’t over. Healing keeps unfolding, layer by layer, often in the middle of ordinary life.

And in those moments, my faith is the only thing that holds steady — reminding me that grace does not depend on how healed I feel, but on the One who promises to make all things new, even the memories that still sting.

But what’s hardest this time is that I find myself questioning everything I once felt sure of — my faith, my understanding of who God is, what He wants, and even what the church on earth is meant to be.

For so long, the rope of grace held me — thin at times, but unbreakable. It pulled me through sleepless nights and silent prayers, through the fear that my past would swallow me whole. But lately, that rope feels like it’s unraveling. Each question I ask seems to loosen another thread.

And I don’t know what it will mean if I try to repair it. Will it still hold me the same way? Will I recognize the God I meet on the other side of doubt? Or will He be someone new — someone I have to learn to trust all over again?

People have asked me over the years, “How can you believe there is a God?” I never really understood that question until recently.

Of all the places I thought I would feel unwelcome, I never imagined it would be the church. For most of my life, church was where I clung to hope — where hymns steadied my breath and communion reminded me that I belonged to something bigger, something merciful. But now, I can’t even bring myself to walk through the doors.

I know in my mind that the pastor doesn’t make the church. But what do you do when the council and the congregation go along with whatever he says simply because he is the pastor? When leadership mistakes authority for truth, and silence for faithfulness?

It’s a strange kind of heartbreak — to lose your safe place inside the house of God. To feel the warmth of community fade into something colder. I sit with my Bible sometimes and wonder: Is God disappointed in me for stepping back? Or is He sitting beside me, whispering, “Rest for a while, My child”?

Because the God I once knew — the One who sat with me in the dark, who saw the scars and still called me beloved — He doesn’t seem to live in that building anymore. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe He’s been outside the whole time, waiting for me to stop confusing the structure with His Spirit.

I don’t know how people with mental health struggles or trauma don’t have faith issues, too. How could they not? When your story is filled with betrayal, abandonment, or pain, it seeps into how you see God — whether you mean for it to or not.

For me, the wounds of the past didn’t just damage my sense of safety; they damaged my ability to believe that love could stay. And if love couldn’t stay, how could God?

Over the years, I’ve seen what people — and whole congregations — do to those who struggle deeply with mental health. And most of it is negative. They say they’ll pray for you, but they also step back. They whisper, diagnose, or quietly decide you’re “too much.” They think a professional needs to deal with it, as if the presence of pain makes a person unfit for the community.

But faith isn’t supposed to be sanitized. The church was never meant to be a waiting room for the already healed. It’s supposed to be a refuge for the broken. And yet, so often, those who are hurting most are pushed toward the margins — the very people Jesus always drew close.

People talk about faith and therapy like they’re two different roads — one for the soul, one for the mind. But I don’t think they can be separated. When trauma fractures you, it doesn’t ask which part it’s allowed to break. Healing has to touch all of it — the brain that replays the memories, the heart that still flinches, and the spirit that keeps asking why.

I think repairing faith and repairing mental health are part of the same process — the slow work of learning to trust again. Trusting your thoughts. Trusting love. Trusting that maybe, just maybe, God was not the one who hurt you, but the One who wept with you when it happened.

But even knowing that, I struggle with both my faith and my mental health alone — and quietly.

It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. It’s that most people don’t know what to do with that kind of honesty. The church doesn’t always have space for complicated believers — the ones who still show up but sit in the back, unsure if they belong. And the world doesn’t always understand how faith can still matter after everything. So I stay somewhere in between, whispering prayers I’m not sure I believe, asking for peace from a God I’m still learning to trust.

Some days, that feels like failure. Other days, it feels like faith in its truest form — not polished or certain, but persevering. Maybe that’s what grace really looks like: not the absence of struggle, but the courage to keep holding both doubt and hope in the same trembling hands.

I’m still questioning what to do — whether to stay in this church that feels so empty or to look for another one, a place where I can breathe again. I wonder if anyone would even notice if I left. That thought alone hurts more than I want to admit.

This struggle has brought me back to that old familiar place — a sense of loss and emptiness. The kind I thought I’d already healed from. It’s strange how the same emotions resurface, wearing different clothes. The loneliness of my childhood is now dressed up as spiritual displacement.

But maybe this, too, is part of the journey — the stripping away of what was comfortable so something truer can grow. Maybe God is not confined to the sanctuary I’m scared to enter. Maybe He’s in the quiet space of my questioning, sitting beside me as I wrestle with the emptiness, whispering, “You are not lost, even when you don’t know where you belong.”

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A Prayer for When Faith Feels Fragile

Lord,
You who have seen every loss, every fear, every question that hides beneath my quiet—
hold me here, in this in-between.

When belief feels like sand slipping through my fingers,
Teach me to rest in the truth that You still hold me.
When Your church feels like a place I no longer fit,
remind me that Your presence cannot be contained by walls.

You know the parts of me that ache for answers
and the parts that only want peace.
Help me to stop pretending I’m okay,
and instead, let me be honest in Your light.

If my faith must be rebuilt,
let it be on the foundation of Your mercy,
not fear, not shame — but grace that does not give up on me.

Sit with me in the silence,
and let that be enough for now.
Amen.

When Trauma Doesn’t End

Understanding PTSD, Complex PTSD, and Prolonged Childhood Trauma

“The body keeps the score: the memory of trauma is stored not as history, but as experience.”
— Bessel van der Kolk

There are stories that end in a single moment — a car crash, a natural disaster, a violent encounter that tears through an otherwise steady life. And then there are stories that don’t end — the ones that stretch across years, shaping how we think, feel, and see ourselves. When trauma doesn’t end, it becomes the air we breathe, the silence between our words, the tension that lives in our shoulders. It’s not a single event to recover from, but a lifelong pattern the body learns to survive.

For a long time, I didn’t have the words for what I carried. I thought “PTSD” belonged to soldiers or survivors of one-time tragedies. But what happens when the war is in your own home? When the threat is daily, and the enemy is someone you’re supposed to love? That’s where Complex PTSD — and the concept of prolonged childhood trauma — begins to make sense.

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

PTSD develops after a single traumatic event — something so shocking or terrifying that the mind and body can’t fully process it. A car accident. A fire. An assault. A single night that divides life into before and after.

People with PTSD often experience:

• Intrusive memories or flashbacks — reliving the event as if it’s happening again.

• Avoidance — steering clear of reminders, people, or places connected to the trauma.

• Hyperarousal — always on alert, jumpy, unable to relax.

• Negative changes in thoughts and mood — guilt, fear, anger, or feeling detached from others.

PTSD says: Something happened to me, and I can’t make it stop replaying.

And yet, when trauma happens again and again — especially in childhood — the story changes. The body stops reacting to one event and instead adapts to a constant state of danger. It’s not about a single wound anymore. It’s about a system built on survival.

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Complex PTSD (C-PTSD)

Complex PTSD develops from chronic, repeated trauma — usually interpersonal and occurring over months or years. Unlike standard PTSD, it doesn’t stem from one event but from many. Often, these experiences involve captivity — emotional, physical, or psychological — where escape wasn’t possible.

For many, that captivity was a childhood home.

C-PTSD carries the core symptoms of PTSD, but adds layers:

• Difficulty regulating emotions — intense anger, shame, or sadness that feels impossible to control.

• Deep-seated shame or guilt — the belief that you are defective, unworthy, or to blame.

• Distorted self-perception — seeing yourself as broken or powerless.

• Relationship struggles — a push-pull between craving connection and fearing it.

• Chronic hypervigilance or dissociation — living either in fight-or-flight or completely shut down.

Complex PTSD says: Something happened to me — not once, but over and over — and my whole sense of self was shaped around surviving it.

For survivors of prolonged childhood abuse, neglect, or emotional manipulation, C-PTSD often feels like an invisible script written long before adulthood began. You learn to anticipate pain, silence emotions, and scan for danger before joy. Even when life becomes safe, your body doesn’t always believe it.

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Prolonged Childhood Trauma

This is where language fails us a little. “Prolonged childhood trauma” isn’t always an official diagnosis — it’s a lived reality. It describes what happens when trauma isn’t a single event or even a defined period, but the atmosphere of growing up.

Maybe it was never safe to rest. Maybe you learned early that crying was punished, not comforted. Maybe the adults who were supposed to protect you were the ones you feared most. Or maybe no one was ever there at all.

This kind of trauma shapes development itself — the wiring of the brain, the ability to trust, the way love feels in the body. It can blur the line between danger and normalcy so deeply that chaos becomes comfort, and peace feels foreign.

It’s not just what happened; it’s what never happened.
No safety. No validation. No repair.

For those of us who lived it, the damage wasn’t only in the moments of pain — it was in the years of not being believed, not being seen, not being soothed.

I used to think “survival” meant I had made it out. But survival, for a child, doesn’t always mean safety — it often just means adaptation. I learned to make myself small. To anticipate moods. To read the air before I spoke. That kind of vigilance becomes muscle memory — it becomes identity.

There were years when I thought I was “too sensitive,” when really I was just still on guard. Loud noises made my heart race. Silence made me anxious. I didn’t know what peace felt like, so when I finally found it, part of me didn’t trust it.

That’s the hardest part about prolonged trauma: it doesn’t just teach you fear; it rewrites your definition of love, safety, and self-worth.

When people say, “You had a hard childhood,” I sometimes want to tell them — it wasn’t just hard. It was endless. There wasn’t a finish line or a single moment to point to. It was the air I breathed, the walls I grew inside.

And yet, naming it — calling it prolonged childhood trauma — gave me something I never had before: a framework that said, “You weren’t crazy. You were conditioned to survive.”

Understanding that truth has been one of the first real doors to freedom.

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How They Intertwine

You might think of these forms of trauma as existing on a spectrum.

Type of Trauma	Nature of the Experience	Primary Wound	Common Result
PTSD	A single, identifiable traumatic event	The memory of the event	Fear, avoidance, flashbacks
Complex PTSD	Repeated, prolonged trauma (often relational)	Loss of safety and trust	Shame, emotional dysregulation, fractured identity
Prolonged Childhood Trauma	Continuous trauma or neglect during development	Altered sense of self and world	Lifelong patterns of hypervigilance, attachment wounds, identity confusion

When trauma is ongoing, the nervous system stops distinguishing “crisis” from “normal.” We stop reacting to danger and start living in it. That’s why healing isn’t about forgetting or “moving on.” It’s about teaching the body and mind what safety actually feels like — maybe for the first time.

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Living with the Aftermath

Even in safety, our bodies remember. The sudden noise that startles others mildly might send a survivor into panic. A tone of voice can feel like a threat. A child’s tears can awaken memories of our own helplessness.

Many of us grow up believing something is wrong with us — that we’re “too sensitive,” “too emotional,” or “too much.” But what we’re really experiencing are echoes of a body that has done everything it could to survive.

For trauma survivors, triggers aren’t weakness — they’re reminders of what the body never got to finish feeling.

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Hope and Healing

Healing from prolonged trauma takes time — and it’s not linear. Therapy, community, faith, and safe relationships slowly begin to teach the nervous system that it no longer has to fight or flee.

I used to think healing meant forgetting what happened. Now I know it means remembering without reliving. It means recognizing that I am no longer the child who had to brace for every sound.

Every deep breath, every boundary, every moment of rest is a quiet rebellion against the past.

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Reflection: The Body Remembers, but So Does Grace

Trauma may live in the body, but grace does too. It meets us in the tension, in the panic, in the shame — whispering that we are not beyond repair. Naming the kind of trauma we carry isn’t about labeling our pain; it’s about understanding it, so we can finally stop blaming ourselves for surviving.

The body remembers, but so does grace.

And sometimes, that’s where the healing begins.