How will we make it through this? The valleys we walk may bear different names, but at the beginning of the trailhead we all have a choice to make.
I once chose with clenched fists, fueled by grief, driven by fear… maybe you have been there too. But hear me now, not from the mountaintop, but from the shadowed lowlands, where echoes of pain still linger—choose the better way.
To those who call Jesus Lord: we proclaim a Kingdom not built by hands, not tied to decades past or decades to come. No power of earth can shake what is secure in Him. This is not a call to passivity— but perhaps an invitation: learn the stillness of the soul.
Not silence for silence’s sake, but a reorienting, a returning to the Way that is higher, slower, deeper. God has been faithful—not because all is mended, not because we have been spared, but because He never left.
Each day aches like fire, and still, Jesus is good.
Each prayer rises desperate, and still, Jesus is near.
His nearness is not held hostage to the outcomes I crave. Call me foolish, if you must. I am learning to care less for opinions, and more for people, because Jesus is shaping my heart for a Kingdom not made of noise.
God’s goodness is not measured by the speed of escape from sorrow. Whether I have months or years this I know:
Jesus is here. He is good. And gently He whispers: “Be still, and know that I am God.
So in your valley will you stop, just for a moment? Turn from the scroll, the post, the panic, and let your soul lean toward Him. Even here, where fear stirs, where anger brews, there is joy. Because love remains, and He is near.
Even now, I can say with trembling lips: It is well with my soul. He is God. And He is good.
Not long ago a friend posted something with this quote: “You can’t’ protect your child from their testimony.” Boy did that hit me like a ton of bricks.
As parents, we often carry a silent hope that our children’s lives will be smooth, their paths straight, and their hearts unbroken. We pray for their protection, guidance, and joy. But buried in that desire—however noble—is often the unspoken wish that they never have to walk through darkness. We long to shield them from pain, from failure, from regret. And yet, we forget: testimony is not born in safety. It’s born in the fire.
That line echoes like truth wrapped in heartbreak. Because if you’ve parented long enough, you know: you can’t control the path your child walks. You can guide, you can pray, you can love—but you cannot write their story for them. And sometimes, their testimony includes things you never would have chosen. The very moments you feared—addiction, rebellion, heartbreak, wandering far from faith—may become the places where Jesus meets them most deeply. How easily I forget that this is exactly where Jesus met me in my own life; why would he not do the same for my children?
And that’s where surrender comes in. Real surrender. Not the kind that says, “Lord, keep them safe and comfortable,” but the kind that says, “Lord, whatever it takes.”
Because if their knees hitting the floor is what it takes for them to run to Him, then let it be.
This doesn’t mean we stop parenting or stop praying. It means we stop trying to be their Savior. We trust the One who made them, who knows their every thought, who sees the beginning and the end. We release them into the hands of a God who loves them far more than we do.
It’s not easy to watch your child walk through fire. It’s not easy to hear pieces of their story that break your heart. But it’s necessary sometimes. For them to know grace, they may have to meet the edge of their own strength. For them to recognize light, they may have to sit in some darkness. And for them to know the realness of God, they may have to discover how empty everything else truly is.
So to the parent who is watching a child wander, who is grieving the turns their life has taken, who is praying with trembling hands: take heart. Their story isn’t over. And God’s mercy runs deeper than any pit they may fall into.
Your child’s testimony may not look like the one you hoped for. But it might just be the one that leads them home.
Let go. Trust God. And remember: even the prodigal was still a son.
Tonight, I was caught in the quiet pull of old photographs, each one a window to a world that felt softer, lighter. I lingered in the hush of memory—bare feet on sun-warmed pavement, sticky fingers clutching melting popsicles, laughter rising like fireflies into a dusk that never hurried. The days before my family knew the heavy grief of suffering through the progression of a fatal illness.
Grief has a way of sharpening our memories. It turns the past into a soft-lit place where pain had not yet knocked at the door. And tonight, I felt that ache—the ache of before.
But as I sat there, surrounded by memories frozen in time, the Lord gently reminded me: He was with us then, and He is with us now.
Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” While everything around me has changed, He has not. The God who gave us the joy of long summer days and laughter echoing down the hallway is the same God holding us steady in the storm of uncertainty. He does not abandon us in our sorrow; He walks with us through it.
And so, while my heart longs for what once was, I’m learning to give thanks for the beauty that still is. Even in the midst of heartache, there are glimpses of grace—quiet moments of strength I know I didn’t conjure on my own. There’s peace that surpasses understanding, not because life is easy, but because Jesus is near.
These old pictures remind me not just of the sweetness of the past but also of God’s faithfulness throughout the years. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I know the One who holds tomorrow—and He is good.
So I’ll hold onto that. I’ll grieve, I’ll remember, and I’ll trust. Because our story isn’t just framed in photographs—it’s being written by a God who redeems, restores, and never lets go.
I remember being in church the first Mother’s Day after burying my daughter and not being able to contain my sobs as the pastor shared a special tribute to mothers, and I didn’t feel like celebrating at all because I had stood at the edge of eternity and watched a piece of my motherhood be torn from my arms in an instant.
I remember the Mother’s Day after my first miscarriage and how I grieved over having been thrilled to add another arrow to our quiver, only to watch that dream bleed out through the cracks in my heart.
I remember the Mother’s Days during our seasons of infertility, and how I fought to not entertain bitterness toward the expecting mamas in my life because I was crippled by the thought of never being able to expand our family.
I remember the Mother’s Day following our season of foster care, and how I had seen our story being very different from the reality we were living.
I remember Mother’s Day as a child and how the only thing on my mind was the special craft I’d made for my mom, or the flowers I’d picked her, and how this day of celebration felt a whole lot less complicated and emotional back then.
This Mother’s Day I remember that there are those of you all around me that are living out various versions of broken stories that have wounded your dreams and experiences of motherhood, and I see you standing there. I see how this day of celebration comes with so many convoluted emotions; deep grief and heartfelt thankfulness and hopeful expectation. I know that some of you are holding your breath waiting to turn the calendar page to Monday, and that’s ok.
I know today may be especially hard, and I just want you to know that you’re not alone. I pray that God gives you comfort, peace, and strength as you carry both extravagant love and crushing sorrow in your heart. Your pain matters, and so does your story. Allow Him to use these painful and uncertain days to strengthen your trust in Him, to surrender your need for control, and to open your hands wide to the good-hard story that He is writing through you. I promise you it’s worth it.
When you’re first diagnosed with a terminal illness, there’s often a flood of support—texts, calls, check-ins, care packages. People cry with you. They tell you they’re here for anything. They swear they won’t disappear.
Time moves on. So do they. There are seasons to our lives, and some people who may have been able to be more present in the beginning do not have the time and flexibility in this next season they are in. Perhaps others who weren’t available initially are now able to be more present as they enter a slower season of life.
What no one tells you is that terminal illness is not a straight descent. It’s a long, unpredictable goodbye filled with plateaus and crashes, slight recoveries and devastating setbacks. It’s not dramatic enough to be a crisis every day, and not gentle enough to be forgotten. It exists in this in-between space that makes people uncomfortable—too serious to ignore, too exhausting to engage with endlessly.
And in that in-between, some people begin to vanish.
Some friends disappear because they don’t know what to say. Others because they think you’ve stabilized and assume you’re doing better. Some perhaps can’t add anything else to their plates. Life, after all, goes on for them: promotions, vacations, weddings, baby showers. They’re not bad people—they’re just busy, or scared, or shy, or not able to confront your pain when they have the luxury of avoidance.
You sit in your room watching the seasons change. Spring arrives with its blossoms and pollen, and you wonder why it feels so far away. Summer blazes through with parties and long days, and you’re still in bed, waiting for a reply. Autumn colors the trees as your medications increase. Winter comes, and it’s the coldest one yet—not because of the weather, but because no one showed up for the last holiday. Or your procedure. Or just to sit with you.
Illness is isolating. Terminal illness is devastatingly lonely.
There are moments when you ask yourself if you’ve done something wrong. Were you not a good enough friend? Did you ask for too much? But deep down, you know this isn’t about blame. It’s about the raw truth that few people are prepared to walk with you through a slow, uncertain ending. <== Read that sentence again.
Still, not everyone leaves. There are those rare few who show up without needing to be asked. They don’t bring solutions—they bring presence. They don’t always know what to say, but they sit beside you anyway. Sometimes they bring coffee. Sometimes they just bring quiet. And their presence, however brief, becomes a form of medicine.
If you’re in this season of illness and loneliness, know this: you are not invisible. Your pain is real. Your courage, even when it looks like just getting through another hour, matters. You deserve community, not because you are dying, but because you are still here to be a part of it.
To those watching from the sidelines—don’t disappear. Show up. Even imperfectly. Especially imperfectly. You don’t need the right words. You just need to be willing to stand beside someone in their most human, most difficult season.
Because in the end, what heals us most is not the cure, but the connection.
I learned an important lesson yesterday. Well, probably not just yesterday. I have a feeling I’ve been shown this before, it’s just that I need lots and lots of reminding.
My Little was really struggling. You know how someone steals one of your dollars and you decide to burn the other $99? Yeah. My little was having one of those days, and it wasn’t pretty. I had made several attempts to offer helpful input, which was just met with more frustration. And then I hit the parenting connection jackpot.
I was making dinner, and trying to do it in a hurry. Well actually, it was dinner time, but I was making breakfast because I failed to plan ahead. I had exhausted the week’s meal plan already and needed groceries and didn’t have time to thaw anything out, so breakfast for dinner was the last ditch attempt to act like I had it all together. Fortunately it is well received around here.
Within about 5 minutes I had efficiently gotten tortillas into the oven to warm, sausage rewarming in the skillet, diced potatoes in another skillet, had the cheese laid out, and all that was left was to wash and crack the eggs and get them into the third waiting skillet. I estimated I would have everything hot and put together within 15 minutes, perfect. Then my struggling Little walked through and the frustration and sadness was palpable, y’all.
One of my earlier suggestions had been to check out our emotion wheel and do the corresponding activity. I probably use this more than who I got it for, and I’ve found it helpful. The activity suggested was to hold ice cubes, which sounded intriguing to me, but was met with much resistance.
As I started counting out the eggs and grabbed a pump of soap to start washing them, an idea occurred to me. Washing the eggs would involve hands in cold water; maybe that would have the same helpful effect at derailing the struggle train. So I offered the task up, and it was accepted.
I could see that this activity had helped just a bit, so I started thinking of how I could keep us moving in this direction. I looked at the pile of eggs to be cracked, and my rational type A personality went to war with my empathetic emotional side. I could get the eggs cracked in less than 2 minutes with no bits of shell and no mess, keeping dinner on track with my projected time estimate. Or I could offer it up to my Little in hopes that it would help blow away the fog of frustration and sadness that was tinting the day. The type A in me sighed as I opened my hands to giving up control.
“Hey, would you please crack these eggs for me? It would be really helpful.”
I got a hint of an exasperated eye roll, but then sleeves were rolled up and small hands reached for the first egg, still glistening with the last coat of cold water. One by one the eggs connected with the counter, shells cracked, yolks plopped into the glass pitcher. 8 eggs, several shell splinters, and two hands covered in gummy slime later, there was a smile.
“Thanks for letting me do that, Mom. That was fun!” And then a few minutes later from the other room… “Mom, I just love you so much.”
I was still picking bits of shell out of the eggs and cleaning yolk off the side of the pitcher. And the faucet. And the sink. And the counter. My heart swelled and twisted at the same time as I realized that making him feel seen and needed and valuable was exactly what he needed, and my own need for control and perfection almost got in the way. I tucked these feelings in my heart, hoping to remember them for next time.
Friends, the messes are worth it. People are messy. My messiness may look different than yours, but we all have a deep need to be seen and valued beyond the messes that we make, and accepted anyway. It was a humbling lesson that I’m sure I will need reminding of again, so that’s why I’m sharing it. We all need the reminder sometimes that letting go of our own hangups may be just the thing needed to make the confidence of someone else soar.
PS~ add “crack some eggs” to the wheel under Anger —> Annoyed. 😉
I met Sandy when we both signed up for the Women’s Bible Study at University Baptist Church. We ended up in the same small group that met to discuss what we had read and watched. Being an introvert, and still fairly new to UBC, I gave myself over to the very extroverted woman who had an answer for each of the questions, and I did a lot of “soaking in” during that time.
By September 14, 2022, Sandy and I somehow talked enough to become Facebook friends, and from there she discovered that I was collecting nail polish to paint nails for women experiencing homelessness in town.
Sandy wanted to help, and generously donated to my small little mission.
From there my busted up short term memory doesn’t quite fill in all the blanks correctly, but I do know that Sandy started showing up for me again and again. In ways others hadn’t, and in quantities others wouldn’t.
There was nothing that she would not do for me; sit and patiently teach me all of the wise bits about marriage she has learned over the years, vacuum and mop my floors, pray and read scripture over me from a hospital bed, let me vent about a horrible day that didn’t really stack up to her hard day. Remind me in kindness when I need to reframe my thinking, or go back and ask someone’s forgiveness, and hours and hours of holding my hand and praying over me.
Sandy disciples many different women, and I was always aware how much that filled her plate, but it took me awhile to realize what she was doing was disciplining me too. Guiding me in love. Teaching me in wisdom. Loving me with grace.
For years I have prayed for Godly women in my life who will mentor and guide me, and I think I had all but given up on that ever happening by the time I met Sandy. Yet she walked right in and took the job. None of my mess mattered to her. My life expectancy didn’t matter to her. She was simply there for as many days as God would allow us to have together.
We have gotten to serve together, laugh together, pray together, and have hours upon hours of conversations about every topic under the sun, including the hardest ones that no one much wants to talk about. I can only pray that I will have the opportunity to be someone’s “Mama Sandy” some day, because what she has given me has been something I’ve needed more than half my life, and came at the most impeccable of times. As I tell Sandy, “Our hearts have been friends for a very long time.”
At the end of each year as I spend some time reflecting on the year before, inevitably a new word saturated in meaning is impressed upon my heart for the coming year. That word remains the theme of my photo album, and the compass to how I hope to lead my family to grow throughout the year.
This past year our word was Shalom. Many of you may already know that Shalom means peace. I was longing for peace at the beginning of this year, but it went even further to define our year as not just an absence of war, but an overall sense of fullness and completeness in mind, body, and estate. To make full restitution; RESTORE! This brought to mind one of my favorite verses, Joel 2:25. “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”
Every time I passed the 6 letters framed upon our front door I prayed for peace both within our home, and outside of its doors. I prayed that God’s peace would bring a sense of completeness to our home; to our relationships, our walks with God, and our friendships with others.
As 2024 drew to a close and I started seeking and praying for our word of this new year I began seeing it on repeat, the word chosen for this year. This year’s word is JOY. I anticipate we will be blessed with an abundance of joy, and we will also see it woven in and out of many of our daily experiences. Perhaps we will learn better how to give joy, and we will become accustomed to receiving joy even in circumstances we might not think to look!
As we wind down our time in Shalom, though still activity seeking where we can give and take peace, I excitedly welcome this 2025 season of all things Joy!
I hardly have any photos from Christmas this year. Christmas Eve I missed our candlelight service at church because I was too weak to sit up or stay awake.
Our candlelit tradition of “shepherds’ meal” on the night of Christmas Eve only kinda-sorta happened, because I wasn’t well enough to remember, or to get up and make different choices of soup and bread like I usually do. The night was rescued by a frozen tub of tomato soup found in the bottom of the freezer, and the calming glow of our advent candles. I lay in my hospital bed in the next room listening to the chatter, and chiming in silly questions like “what ever happened to the sheep after the shepherds left to see baby Jesus?”
Late on Christmas Eve I still hadn’t managed to wrap more than 4 gifts to tuck under the tree. Anyone who knows my personality knows that is the polar opposite of my checklists and neat packages tied with string weeks before December 25th. My husband and daughter came through by busting out all the wrapping (with the help of a healthy stack of gift bags) in the late hours as Christmas Eve melted into Christmas morning.
Christmas morning… well, really most of the whole day is a blur with more chunks missing than I’d like to admit.
What I /do/ know is all four of my babes were under one roof again.
My silly dream of a Hannah tree finally happened, in all her pink glittery glory.
Even through sickness and pain, the cozy warmth of a crackling fire still brought with it the memories of Christmases past, and the anticipation of more to come.
Zero kinds of Christmas cookies or fudge happened, but “Kitchen Trash” sure as heck still did.
I did not capture my traditional “photo every hour” series of Christmas Day, but I did manage to grab the still-frames of the most important moments of joy and togetherness.
And as the day wound down and the doubts crept in with the quiet, my wise sweet little sister typed out the balm that my soul so badly needed; I need to adjust my definition of the word tradition from “every,” and “have to,” to “some years,” and “like to.”
When I sifted through my unmet expectations I found that though I didn’t get the Christmas pickle unpacked this year, there was just as much joy and gratitude and wonder in the exchanging of the packages. And even though we weren’t able to visit the lights at the bell tower or drive the neighborhoods looking for the best displays, the twinkling in our own window was enough to cast that magical glow that makes you feel warm with anticipation.
This Christmas started out feeling like I dropped more balls than I caught, but as the day unfolded and the story of the Light coming into this dark world permeated each of our moments and traditions, all of it was suddenly more than enough. I was enough. Because He is more than enough.
Choosing Hope 