There was a time when they were the new couple. The friendly girl, not afraid to take on a bleak prognosis, and her wingman, always at her side helping her along.
Then things started to change. The wingman was often tied up elsewhere, and eventually wasn’t available to purse the same life she did, so she continued showing up on her own, often with a kid or two in tow. And then that dwindled too, the kids stopped wanting to get up on Sunday mornings, pushing back against beliefs they once embraced.
The girl continued to push herself to be there, sometimes through difficult obstacles. A wheelchair ramp that often did not work. A car door that jammed half the time. But instead of resolution, she had to soldier on in the best way she could, piecing things together to work so she could still show up.
Being in that place made her come alive, surrounded by likeminded friends journeying together. Eventually though, even that got too hard in a body that was fighting against her in every way.
She hoped that the community she worked hard to build around her would continue to surround her in this new season and new capacity, but things grew quiet.
When she tried to use her gifts in the ways she still could, she was nothing more than an inconvenience. Where her phone used to light up if she left a vacancy in the front row, it now sat gray and silent, as if the empty space had simply backfilled in her absence.
The walls of her room that used to echo with presence and laughter now felt more like walls of a prison, as visits became fewer and further between. Still she clung to the hope that her heart and her home would be full as she journeyed toward Home. Then came the realization that this road was going to end just as lonely as it had begun.
But that wasn’t the whole truth—just the part she could see.
Because somewhere along the way, she had quietly started measuring love by footsteps and phone calls… by who showed up and who didn’t. And while those absences were real and painful, they were never the full accounting of her life.
What she couldn’t always feel—but had not lost—was presence.
Not the loud, bustling kind that fills a room on a Sunday morning. Not the kind that depends on functioning ramps or willing friends. But the steady, unrelenting presence of a God who does not require her to “get there” in order to be near.
In the stillness of that room, where the walls sometimes felt too close and the silence too loud, there was Another who had never once failed to enter in.
The One who saw every effort it took just to show up.The One who noticed when no one else did. The One who did not measure her faith by attendance, but by endurance.
And maybe—though it took time to admit—her life was not a story of abandonment, but of being held in ways she didn’t expect.
Because the truth is, community can falter. People can disappoint. Even the most well-meaning hearts can drift when life gets busy or uncomfortable or unfamiliar.
But God does not drift.
He sits beside hospital beds and wheelchairs.
He remains when invitations stop coming.
He speaks in quiet when the noise of life fades.
And He does not wait at the finish line—He walks every inch of the road. So while it may have looked like her story was ending the way it began, heaven would tell it differently. It would say she was never unseen.
Never unsupported. Never alone.
It would say that every hard step she took toward Him that felt unseen mattered more than a hundred easy ones taken in comfort.
And it would remind her—gently, faithfully—that “home” was never something she had to gather people to reach. It was always where He was. And He had been there all along.
Choosing Hope 