My father turned 75 today.

Seventy-five.

I have been saying the number quietly to myself, almost as though I am trying to understand it. There is something about a milestone birthday that makes you stop. You look at a person and, for a moment, you see more than the person standing in front of you.

You see the years:

• The little boy he once was.

• The young man.

• The father.

• The mistakes and the victories.

• The things no one saw.

• The life that happened in between.

And today, I have been thinking about mine. About my father. About the things he taught me.

Some lessons came through words. Others came through watching him. He taught me the finer things of life, how to appreciate quality, how to notice the details, how to carry yourself, how certain things should be done, and how to recognise beauty and value.

At the time, I probably didn't understand that I was being taught. Children rarely do. We simply watch, absorb, and remember. And then one day, many years later, we find ourselves doing something the way our parents did it and realise that some part of them has been living quietly inside us all along.

Writing as a Way Back to Yourself

I have been writing letters to my father for some time now. When I wrote the first one, I didn't know what would happen to me. I only knew that there were words inside me that wanted somewhere to go.

So I wrote. Then I wrote again.

And something unexpected began to happen: my heart became lighter. Not dramatically, not overnight, just a little lighter each time. As though something I had been carrying for years had finally found a place to rest.

There is a strange thing about putting memories into words. Sometimes you discover that you weren't only writing about the other person. You were writing your way back to yourself—meeting the younger version of you who had questions, the daughter who remembered, wondered, loved, and sometimes didn't understand.

And somewhere in the writing, you begin to see things differently. Not necessarily because the past has changed - it hasn't - but because you have.

The Complexity of Fathers

Today, on his 75th birthday, I find myself looking at my father with a different kind of tenderness. Not the tenderness that pretends everything was perfect (life is never that simple), but the tenderness that comes when you have lived long enough to understand that people are more complicated than the roles we give them.

Fathers are human beings before they become fathers. They have their own histories, wounds, dreams, limitations, and ways of loving. Growing older teaches us to hold all of those things at once: the beautiful, the complicated, the unfinished, the things we understand, and the things we may never fully understand.

Seventy-Five Years of Preparation

There is something else that has stayed with me today. In the Bible, Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran in response to God's call. Seventy-five - not twenty-five, not thirty-five. He was already an old man by the standards of his time, yet his story was not closing. A new chapter was beginning. A journey was opening. A promise was unfolding.

I know Scripture does not assign a special prophetic meaning to the number 75 itself, but I love the picture. Because perhaps we sometimes think of birthdays like this as a counting down—seventy-five years have passed.

What if we also looked at it as seventy-five years of preparation?

Seventy-five years of gathering wisdom. Seventy-five years of becoming. Seventy-five years of stories, and lessons that can now become legacy.

A Daughter's Prayer

So, Dad, as you enter your 75th year, this is my prayer for you:

• May God give you strength for the years ahead, preserve your health, and give you peace.

• May the wisdom you have gathered become a blessing to your children and to generations you may never even meet.

• May you enjoy the fruit of the years you have invested, with more laughter around your table and moments that make you pause and say, God has been good.

• May you have the grace to enjoy the simple things: a good meal, a familiar voice, a beautiful morning, a conversation that goes on longer than expected, and the comfort of knowing that you are loved.

• And may God surprise you with new beginnings.

Because 75 does not have to mean the end of the story. Abram's 75th year was the beginning of a journey of promise. So perhaps this birthday is not only about looking back; it is also about looking forward. There are still pages to write, prayers to pray, memories to make, things to teach, and blessings to receive.

After 75 years, one of the greatest gifts is simply this: to know that your life has left something behind in the people you raised.

Dad, I don't know if I have ever properly told you this: Thank you.

Thank you for the finer things you taught me. Thank you for the things I understood immediately and the things I only understood much later. Thank you for the parts of you that became part of me without either of us noticing.

And thank you for giving me the courage to write these letters. Because somewhere between the words, the memories, and the silence, something inside me has changed. My heart is lighter.

And today, I am grateful.

Happy 75th birthday, Dad. May this year be gentle with you, rich with grace, filled with the quiet joys that matter most, and may the God who has carried you through seventy-five years carry you into every year still ahead.

With love,

Your daughter. 🤍

Some letters are written to be delivered.

Others are written because the heart needs somewhere to put what it has been carrying.

This one is both.

We Rise Together 🤍

I thought getting the edited manuscript back would feel purely like a milestone. And it is. But opening those pages opened a door I wasn't entirely ready to walk through.

The editor asked about the journey, the stretch from South Africa until I finally got home.

I remember fragments. Pieces that refuse to connect. A staircase I swept every morning. A window I stared out of. Hands that held me when I didn't have the strength to hold myself.

But the actual journey? The road? The crossing at the border?

I don't remember.

Because my mind fractured. It stepped entirely away, leaving my body to keep moving on autopilot.

Perhaps you know this kind of survival. We talk so much about what it means to live through a storm, but rarely about the price our minds pay to get us through it. Sometimes, the brain protects us by locking the doors and throwing away the key, leaving us to navigate the aftermath blind.

The people who travelled with me through those years are mostly gone now. My husband is late. My aunt is late. My uncle is still here, but carrying the weight of hypertension, and the memory of those years sits heavy on him. To ask him to go back to that time, to relive what none of us can fully name feels like asking too much.

And I realize I am not the only one protecting my peace.

My sister finds it hard to read these posts. She still carries the image of me when I was lost, and she simply can't revisit that version of her sister. We were both in that storm, but we experienced entirely different tempests - she watched me slip away while I was trapped inside the fog.

That is the hidden truth of writing about survival: we didn't walk through it alone, and we don't heal alone, either. Every family has these unwritten chapters. Every shared history holds a suitcase of heavy things that everyone agreed never to open, not out of secrecy, but out of survival.

Some stories are not meant to be unpacked together. Some journeys are so painful that even the survivors cannot bear to look back.

I may never get the missing parts of that time. The fog does not always lift. Sometimes it just leaves permanent gaps—spaces where a memory should be, but isn't.

I am learning to make peace with that, not just for myself, but for them. Not every question will be answered. Not every gap will be filled. And the people who could have helped me remember are either gone or need their own protection from the past.

This is the hidden cost of writing from a fractured mind. We carry the story, but the people who loved us carry the shadows of it.

I don't have a tidy ending for this. Just the raw truth that some stories are held only in the body, not in the mind. And if you, too, are holding a piece of a story that your loved ones can't bear to touch, know this: your silence is not a failure. It is an act of grace.

A Note for Your Reflection

• Look at the people who walked through your hardest seasons. What unsaid burdens might they still be carrying, and how can you extend grace to their silence as well as your own.

• Is there a part of your story where you realize your family didn't just witness your pain—they absorbed a piece of it, too?

Note: This piece was shaped and finalized with the assistance of Gemini, but every memory, scar, and truth in these words belongs entirely to me.

I have sat in grief for weeks and could not quite understand what was happening to me.

Until this morning.

I had travelled to South Africa - the place where I gave birth to my daughter. The place where my mind stepped away, leaving my body behind. The place where, for a time, I forgot her face.

And while I was there, I met a little boy.

About eleven months old.

He was being cared for in my brother’s house, and I heard bits of his story through the quiet conversations around me. His mother had made choices that had brought her into a difficult situation, and now, from what I understood, her parents were struggling to give her another chance.

I looked at that little boy,, and something in me broke open.

I knew that story.

Maybe not his exact story.

But I knew what it was to be young, to make mistakes, to need someone to look at you and say, You can still come home.

So I stood there and prayed that his family would give his mother another chance.

Babies are a trigger for me.

I love them deeply.

But sometimes they carry the weight of memories I have spent years learning how to hold.

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Then I lost my cousin.

He had fought mental illness for years.

And now he is gone.

I found myself in bed for days.

I wasn’t only grieving him.

I was grieving parts of myself too.

The years I lost.

The moments I cannot get back.

The woman I might have become if some things had never happened.

I found myself asking a question I have asked before:

Had I not lost those years, where would I be now?

I don’t have an answer.

Perhaps I never will.

But this morning, I remembered surrender.

Not the kind where you stop caring.

The kind where you finally stop trying to make the past give you back what it took.

So I told God:

My journey is not wasted.

Not one year.

Not one tear.

Not one scar.

Not even the years I wish I could have back.

The memoir is back from the editors. I have to go through it again. The final draft. One more time.

And honestly, some days the thought of opening those pages feels like opening rooms I have spent years learning how to leave.

So, God, give me the strength. Give me the courage to tell it truthfully. And in Your faithfulness, continue to carry me through.

Maybe that is what this season has been asking of me.

Not to forget.

Not to rush past grief.

But to surrender what I cannot change and trust You with what comes next.

If you are carrying a grief you cannot quite name, I want you to know that you are not alone.

Sometimes we grieve the people we lose.

Sometimes we grieve the years we lost along the way.

Sometimes we grieve the person we thought we would become.

All of it is real.

All of it is heavy.

And all of it can be held.

I am still here.

Still learning.

Still remembering.

Still rising.

We rise. Together.

I have been thinking about faith.

Not just the faith we confess with our lips, but the faith we inherit. The beliefs that shape our homes. The traditions that become part of our identity. The things we are taught to hold tightly because they represent who we are and where we come from.

And I have been thinking about how something so sacred, something meant to draw us closer to God, can sometimes become the very place where we struggle to understand the people we love.

Before I became the daughter whose faith looked different from yours, you were once the son whose faith looked different from those who raised you.

You knew what it felt like to stand on the outside. You knew what it meant to choose a path that others could not understand. You knew what it felt like when belonging became complicated because of belief.

Perhaps that is one of the mysteries of generations. Sometimes we experience something deeply painful, and yet when life presents a similar moment in a different form, we struggle to recognise it. Not because we are cruel. Not because we do not love. But because we are human.

We carry what we have been taught. We carry the fears we inherited. We carry the desire to protect what we believe is right.

Father, when my own journey of faith began to look different from what you knew, I know it may have been difficult to understand. Perhaps you wondered where this path would lead me. Perhaps you feared I was walking away from something important. Perhaps you were trying to protect me in the only way you knew how.

I have spent time trying to understand that.

I remember the season I was taken to our rural home.

My baby was small. There had been a drought. Water was already seasonal in that area. And people walked ten kilometres to the nearest water point.

I walked those ten kilometres. With a baby. With nothing but the weight of a disagreement I had not asked for.

I walked. I thought about you. I knew you knew where I was. I wondered if you knew how far I was walking. I wondered if you knew how hard it was to wash my baby's with water that had to be carried that distance. I wondered if you knew how heavy that walk felt.

I do not know the answer.

But I know this. I carried that walk with me. Not as bitterness. As understanding. As the moment I realised that faith had become the space between us.

And I realised something else too. I did not need you to understand every step of my journey before you loved me. I did not need you to have all the answers. I did not need you to see everything the way I saw it. I simply needed to know that I was still your daughter.

That my faith journey did not change my place in your heart. That the God I was discovering did not have to become the reason I lost my father.

Because before I was a Christian, I was your daughter. Before I understood doctrine, traditions, and differences, I knew the comfort of belonging to you.

I wonder sometimes if we realise how much children need to separate disagreement from rejection.

A child can choose differently and still need to know they are loved. A daughter can walk a different road and still need her father's hand. A son can ask different questions and still need his family.

Faith is deeply personal. But so is love.

And perhaps one of the greatest expressions of love is making room for someone to walk their own journey while still reminding them: "You belong here."

Father, I do not write this to accuse you.

I write this because I understand something now. You were once a son trying to find your own way. And I became a daughter trying to find mine.

Two people. Two journeys. Two moments in history where faith became the space between us.

But perhaps grace can also become the bridge.

Because I have learned that honour does not require agreement. Love does not require sameness. And family does not have to be built on everyone believing exactly the same things.

Sometimes family is the place where we learn to say: "I may not understand everything about your journey, but I will not stop loving you."

Father, I hope you know this. Your daughter never stopped loving you. Not when my faith changed. Not when my path looked unfamiliar. Not when we struggled to understand each other.

I have always been your daughter. And you have always been my father.

With love,

Sharon 🤍

A note to my readers:

This letter is for the son or daughter who has been told their path or beliefs are wrong. Or the parent who does not understand their child's choices. Or the one still walking ten kilometres in silence, wondering if anyone sees them.

What takes a family apart can be anything - a disagreement on faith, a difference in direction, or the quiet distance of unsaid things. But love covers all things.

You are not alone, and grace can still bridge the distance.

If this letter speaks to your own journey, I would love to read your thoughts in the comments below.

We rise. Together. 🤍

I have been thinking about silence.

Not the kind that settles over a room at the end of the day.

The other kind.

The kind that settles over a life.

I have wondered if silence has a language of its own. If it speaks in pauses, in things left unsaid, in moments when words are needed but never arrive.

I became fluent in that language.

I remember a small suitcase.

It sat in the corner of my childhood bedroom, packed and ready. Inside were the few items I owned and a new wrap I had bought in secret hope, for the day I would finally be received as a wife.

It was the custom. The family was supposed to come. To formally bring me and my child to my husband's home. To complete what had been started.

I waited.

Each morning, I would look at that suitcase. Still there. Dust beginning to settle on its handle.

That suitcase became a silent verdict.

Not a word was spoken. But the message was clear: You are still waiting.

I did not belong at my parents' home. The bride price had been paid, and in our culture, I was no longer considered my parents' responsibility. Yet I had not been fully received where I had gone.

So I stood between two homes, belonging completely to neither.

I carried three children. I carried questions. I carried hope that tomorrow would be different from yesterday. And I carried a heart that kept looking for its father.

Not because I needed you to solve everything.

Not because I expected you to fight every battle for me.

I simply wanted to know that I still had somewhere to stand.

When I was told to leave, I listened for your voice. When uncertainty stretched from weeks into months, and months into years, I listened for your voice. When the suitcase stayed in the corner, untouched, I listened for your voice.

I waited.

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Sometimes we imagine silence is empty. It isn't. Silence fills itself with questions.

Did I matter? Did you know how afraid I was? Did you think I was stronger than I felt? Or were you carrying your own burdens, unable to find the words I so desperately needed to hear?

These are questions I have carried for years. Not to accuse you. But because daughters ask them when they are trying to understand the fathers they love.

What I wanted was surprisingly small. I wanted you to say, "You are still my daughter." I wanted to know that even if the ground beneath me shifted, there was one place where I still belonged.

The years passed. Eventually, I was acknowledged. Eventually, some things found their place.

But waiting changes a person. Uncertainty changes a person. Living without clear lines changes a person. It teaches you to become your own refuge. It teaches you to keep walking even when you are unsure where the road leads. It teaches you that survival has its own language too.

Father, I have often wondered whether you knew the weight your silence carried. Perhaps you believed you were respecting boundaries. Perhaps you thought speaking would make things harder. Perhaps you simply did not know what to say.

I may never know.

What I do know is this: Silence speaks.

Sometimes it protects. Sometimes it wounds. Sometimes it leaves children searching for meaning in places where only a parent's voice could have brought peace.

I have spent many years making peace with the language of silence. Not by pretending it never existed. But by refusing to let it become the only language I speak.

So today, I choose another language.

The language of grace.

The language of truth.

The language of love.

Because despite everything, you are still my father. And I am still your daughter.

With love,

Sharon 🤍

A note to my readers:

Silence is a heavy thing to carry, and an even harder thing to articulate. If you’ve ever found yourself waiting in a room with your own version of that suitcase, I hope this letter reminds you that your voice matters, and that grace is a language we can all learn to speak.

If this resonates with your own journey, I would be honoured to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Letters to My Father is a series about complicated love, generational stories, faith, silence, healing, and grace.

These are not attempts to rewrite my father's life or judge his choices. They are reflections from a daughter learning to honour the truth of her own journey while holding space for compassion.

Mine is a complicated love, but it is love nonetheless. These letters are written with honesty, dignity, and love.

A beginning, not with blame, but with honesty.

Dear Father,

I have decided to write to you.

Not because I have run out of things to say, but because there are things I have carried for years that deserve a place to rest.

This will not be a story about blame. It will not be a story about keeping score. It will not be a story about rewriting who you are.

It will be a story about us.

Mine is a complicated love, but it is love nonetheless. I want to say that clearly because people often struggle to understand that two truths can exist at the same time:

I can love you deeply and still carry the weight of certain silences.

I can honour you and still grieve what was missing.

I can be grateful for the life you gave me and honest about the ways our story shaped me.

You are my father. Nothing changes that. No memory, no distance, and no unanswered question can shift that foundation. I love you.

Relearning the Human Behind the Parent

What I am learning, however, is how to make peace with the story we inherited. As children, we think our parents arrive in the world fully formed, carrying answers to questions we have not yet learned to ask.

As adults, we realize they are simply people.

People shaped by their own stories. People carrying burdens we may never fully understand. People doing the best they know how, even when that "best" leaves wounds behind.

I have spent years trying to make sense of ours. I’ve come to understand that parenting does not come with a blueprint; we are all raised from someone's point of reference. Sometimes that reference point is beautiful. Sometimes it is broken. Most times, it is both.

Holding Truth and Grace

I have learned that love is not always loud. Sometimes it arrives disguised as duty. Sometimes it arrives hidden beneath conviction. Sometimes it arrives imperfectly. But love can still be there.

This is not me learning to love you. I already do.

This is me learning how to hold the fullness of our story without letting pain become its only language. I want these letters to become a place where truth and grace can sit beside each other. A place where a daughter can honour her father without pretending perfection. A place where complicated love is allowed to exist.

So this is where I begin.

Not with blame. Not with regret.

But with honesty. And with love.

Your daughter,

Sharon 🤍

Enjoyed this reflection? If this resonates with your own journey of healing or complex family dynamics, please consider subscribing to follow the rest of this series.

Next week: Letter Two - The Language of Silence

I am still learning how not to let these seasons of my past get to me.

Some days, I think I have put them away for good. The waiting. The uncertainty. The years I spent making myself smaller so life could feel manageable.

Then something shifts. A memory surfaces. A conversation catches me off guard. Someone else's story brushes against my own.

And suddenly, I am crying.

Not because I am trapped there again. Not because I want those years back. I cry because I remember. And remembering still has weight.

For a long time, I thought healing meant reaching a place where the memories would no longer affect me. As if one day I would wake up and they would simply be gone, folded neatly into a chapter called the past.

But that is not what happened. The memories stayed.

What changed was me.

The Weight of Others' Seasons

These days, when I cry, I am not crying for the woman I was. I am crying because I know there is someone else living that reality right now.

• The woman who wakes up carrying burdens she cannot explain.

• The person sitting at a table where they do not quite belong.

• The one who has become so used to surviving that they no longer remember what it feels like to rest.

• The one who is still waiting for life to turn around.

So I say a quiet prayer: This, too, shall come to pass.

Not as a desperate plea. As a truth I have lived. Because it did.

How Life Changes

It didn't happen all at once. Not with fireworks or a grand turning point.

Life changed in small ways. One decision. Then another. One act of courage. Then another. One day I looked up and realised I was no longer the woman I had once been.

I am 50 now, and I am still learning. Still remembering. Still healing.

I no longer believe there is a finish line where we suddenly become whole and untouched by our stories. Perhaps healing is something quieter than that.

• Perhaps it is learning to carry our memories without letting them carry us.

• Perhaps it is learning to sit with our tears without believing we are moving backwards.

• Perhaps it is understanding that some seasons revisit us, not to imprison us, but to remind us how far we have come.

A Note for the Hard Days

If you are in one of those seasons right now, I want you to hear this.

The pain is real. The waiting is hard. The loneliness can be overwhelming. But what is happening to you is not who you are.

One day, you will look back and realise that you survived a version of yourself you never thought would make it through. Not because you were fearless. Not because you always had hope. But because, somehow, you kept going.

And if today is one of those days when all you can do is keep going, let that be enough.

You are not forgotten.

You are not invisible.

You are not behind.

You are simply in a season. And seasons change. They always do.

We rise. Together. 🤍

Thank you for reading. If this piece resonated with you, consider subscribing to receive future essays directly in your inbox, or leave a comment sharing how you navigate your own shifting seasons.

It wasn’t a sticker on a shelf or a loud, dramatic auction. It was a quiet, cold transaction. Money was pressed into my hand—not as a gift, not as a blessing, but as a payment for my silence. For my erasure. It was an official receipt for my disappearance from a life I had briefly, desperately tried to belong to.

They don’t shout when they price you. They don’t even look you in the eye. They just hand you the notes, and the heavy, unwritten verdict says:

You are a complication. Take it. Go. Vanish.

I took the money. In that room, stripped of my standing and holding nothing but a single handbag, what else could I do? I needed to survive.

But while I took the currency, I eventually had to leave the lie behind.

The Ledgers of Tradition

That transaction is what culture does sometimes when you do not fit the story they have written for you. To understand the crushing weight of being priced, you have to understand what home and belonging mean to an African daughter.

Home is not just a building; it is your identity, your anchor, your protection. Your value is tightly woven into the family structure. There is a neatly scripted path of respect, ritual, and celebration that a woman is expected to walk. But when that script fractures, when you find yourself living in the terrifying wilderness of judgment, gossip, and rejection, society often defaults to transactional math to “solve” your presence.

When a system doesn’t know what to do with your pain or your predicament, it attempts to appraise you. It looks at your brokenness, your isolation, and your vulnerability, and it measures you by what you lack.

They try to reduce your dignity to a baseline fee—a severance package designed to keep their own lives comfortable and unbothered. They treat a human crisis as a ledger error to be quietly settled across a counter.

A Prayer Against Physics

For a long time, I lived under the weight of that transaction, moving through the world like a ghost in someone else’s story. I stayed in a self-imposed exile, trying to navigate the cruel geometry of empty rooms and the anatomy of a deeper hunger.

I fell into the trap that so many of us fall into: I kept waiting for the system that priced me to suddenly realize my worth. I kept waiting for the people who handed me the notes of erasure to rewrite the ending.

But waiting for a broken system or a chaotic situation to change is not like waiting for the rain. Rain has a season; it has a direction; it obeys the laws of nature.

Waiting for fundamental chaos to organically turn into order is like waiting for rain to fall upwards. It is a prayer against physics. A hope that defies the very nature of the thing you are hoping for.

The grace didn’t come from changing the people who appraised me. The grace came when I finally changed my own expectations. It arrived when I lowered my hands from an impossible sky and finally felt the solid, forgiving ground beneath my own feet.

You Are Not for Sale

Here is what the wilderness taught me: God does not price His children. He does not issue receipts for our dignity. He does not ask us to disappear so the structures of tradition can remain comfortable.

The price tag they put on me was never a reflection of my true value. It was a reflection of their fear, their exhaustion, and their failure to see that divine grace does not operate on a transactional ledger.

If you have ever been told, directly or through a devastating silence, that your presence is a problem to be bought out or severed—hear me:

That price tag is a lie.

You are not for sale. You have never been for sale. Your worth was settled on a cross long before anyone tried to value you across a counter.

The scars from those transactions may be real, but they are no longer open wounds. They are a map showing exactly how far we have walked. The breaking we fear will destroy us can instead clear the ground for a new foundation—one built not on survival, but on rest.

We rise. Together. 🤍

I write these truths for anyone who has ever had to pack a bag with shaking hands, or felt an eviction notice pinned to their soul. Grace Beyond Scars was born from the raw reality of survival, written to remind us that brokenness can become the very soil for blessing.

If you are searching for a community that values truth over pretense, and grace over transactional demands, pull up a chair. You are welcome here. Subscribe to stay close to the journey.

This is not a donation request. This is a testimony.

Have you ever sat in a place where you only have your last meal, and you’re asked to share?

I keep going back to that question. Because that’s exactly where I am right now.

I was given a seed for my memoir, Grace Beyond Scars, before it was even published. Then I received another seed, specifically for its editing and publishing.

And I gave that second seed away. Every single cent. To warm people who are cold this winter.

No regrets. Because I know the God I serve.

The first winter I remember cold

It was the winter after I was told to leave my mother’s house. Before I had any children. I was alone, unclaimed, belonging nowhere. No handbag could hold enough warmth. No thin mattress could keep out the draft.

That cold taught me something: I never want another person to feel that way.

The winters after his death

Then came the years after my husband died. I had one blanket. That was it.

I would wear tracksuits and tights, layer upon layer, just to feel something other than numb. I would boil water, pour it into empty Coca‑Cola bottles, and tuck them under my clothes. The heat never lasted. But for a few minutes, I could breathe.

That was my winter. For too long.

The people who carried me

My husband’s sister. Her husband. Other family members. Friends.

They gave when they had their own needs. They prayed when they were utterly exhausted. They opened up spaces they could have rented out for income and gave them to me instead. They put my children’s school fees ahead of their own comfort. They sacrificed what they could have invested elsewhere, just so we could survive.

I know their names. I see their faces. And I still don’t fully understand how they gave so much.

But they gave anyway.

Now, I get to be that for someone else.

The seed I sowed

This hoodie campaign is not a side project. It is the first fruit of my memoir.

Before the book is edited. Before it is published. Before the world reads it, I wanted to sow a seed of thanksgiving for every hand that covered me when I was cold.

So I took the money meant for editing and publishing, and I gave it away.

1875 hoodies to go 175 already out the door.

Each hoodie is a prayer. Each bundle is a thank you to the people who wrapped warmth around me when I had nothing. I never want to see someone shiver with one blanket, wearing tracksuits under a cracked window, clutching a Coke bottle of hot water that will go cold in an hour.

Not if I can help it.

No regrets

Some people think I’m crazy. “You should have used that money for your book. You should have waited. You should have taken care of yourself first.”

Maybe. But I serve a God who multiplied a widow’s last meal. Who took a handbag and a broken heart and turned it into a movement. Who asked me, “What’s in your hand?” and when I gave Him my nothing, He gave me something I never expected.

So no. No regrets.

The editing will happen another way. The book will come. The launch will be beautiful.

But first, someone needs to be warm.

This is my five loaves and two fish

I don’t know where the money for the remaining 1875 hoodies will come from. I don’t know how the memoir will get edited or published now. I don’t know when I will get my next seed.

But I know the One who asked for my last meal. And I know He has never once looked at my lack and walked away.

So here I am. Empty hands. Borrowed phone. 28 cents. And a God who multiplies what little I give.

If you have ever been the one with one blanket and a Coke bottle of hot water or the one who gave your last meal, you understand.

This is not a donation request. This is a testimony.

We rise. Together. 🤍

Before the manuscript, the editors, or this Substack, there was just a handbag.

I was 21 years old when my mother told me to leave. I walked out into the world with nothing but that bag, the clothes on my back, and absolutely no certainty that I would ever find my footing again.

That was the actual beginning of Grace Beyond Scars, though I had no idea back then.

“What is in your hand?”

Recently, under the heavy weight of trying to build this movement, I broke down. I cried out to God in prayer, completely overwhelmed by the gap between the vision He gave me and the reality of my circumstances. How do I have this massive burden for people, but absolutely no resources to do anything about it?

In the quiet of that broken moment, I felt Him ask me the exact same question He once asked Moses:

“What is in your hand?”

I looked at my life. I looked around my space. No money, no platform, no influential connections. Materially, I had absolutely nothing.

Except my story.

The trauma, the survival, the grace that kept me breathing when I should have broken, that was the only thing occupying my space.

So, I decided to lay it down. My five loaves and two fish. I put it into His hands and trusted Him to do the multiplying.

A Note on Remembrance

As I was scrolling this morning, I caught an article by that felt like a confirmation of that exact prayer: So I quote,

“Remember the prayers He answered. Remember the doors He opened. Remember the strength He gave us when we thought we had none left. Remember the ways He carried us through what should have broken us.”

Materially, I had nothing. But I had my story. My five loaves and two fish. 🤍

It made me stop and realize that if I am going to trust Him with what’s in my hand today, I have to remember the receipts of what He’s already carried me through.

• I remember the nights I couldn’t cry. I thought I was broken beyond repair, but I realize now that the numbness wasn’t weakness. It was protection. My heart had lowered its own volume so I could survive the shock.

• I remember the thin mattress on the floor. The soft thud it made when I laid it down was my only welcome. It felt like it was telling me: You can sleep here, but you don’t belong.

• I remember the physical hunger. Drinking black tea and pretending it was dinner. Stretching a single slice of bread across an entire hour, teaching my body how to sleep empty.

• I remember the fog. There were seasons where the trauma was so heavy my mind just stepped away to let my body keep moving on autopilot. I even remember moments of trying to picture my daughter’s face and hitting a blank wall.

• I remember the grave. Standing there with literally one blanket to my name because everything else went with him.

• And I remember the exhale. That specific morning, two years later, when I woke up and realized I wasn’t bracing myself for a blow. My shoulders dropped for the first time in an eternity.

These aren’t just painful memories anymore. They are the literal bricks of my testimony. Every closed door and every long night proved that God was there, even when I couldn’t trace Him.

Where the Manuscript Sits Now

Right now, the completed manuscript is with the editors. I’m waiting on the launch of this multiplication, but if I’m being completely honest, my current reality doesn’t look very multiplied yet.

My bank account reads 28 cents. I am typing this on a borrowed phone. I am still very much in a waiting season.

But I am holding onto the One who asked the question. The same God who gave me the vision for Grace Beyond Scars is the provider of the resources to see it through. He held me on that thin mattress, He held me through the fog, and He is holding me right now.

To My New Readers

If you are just joining me on this journey, welcome. Grace Beyond Scars isn’t a project written by someone who has it all figured out from a place of comfort. It’s being built by a woman who had nothing, but chose to give the only thing she had left.

I don’t know the exact launch date yet. I don’t know how the 28 cents shifts, or how long this borrowed phone will last. But I do know that the God who multiplies the small things in our hands hasn’t changed.

I trust Him to come through.

We rise. Together. 🤍

I knew how it felt to fail to feed your own child.

That’s not something you forget. That’s something that lives in your chest. The sound of a pot that won’t fill. The math that never works. The way you learn to cook samp a hundred different ways because it’s all you have and you need your babies to swallow something.

So when I thought about going back home that third time? I couldn’t move.

It wasn’t just fear of the unknown. It was fear of what I already knew.

The first time I tried to go solo, I was paid to leave. And I failed dismally on my own. The second time, I went to my parents’ home, thinking that would be safer. It wasn’t easy either. By the time the third chance came, I had run out of roads. Every path I knew how to take had already led to empty cupboards and a child looking at a plate of samp.

People talk about fear like it’s a feeling. It’s not. It’s a memory. A very specific memory of what happened last time you tried to leave.

So I stayed. Not because I didn’t want to go. But because I was terrified of standing in that kitchen again with nothing to give.

The Middle Is Ugly. That’s Where God Is.

Here’s what I need you to know:

Fear doesn’t leave because you pray hard enough. Fear leaves when you realize the thing you’re afraid of has already happened to you and you’re still here. You survived the empty cupboards. You survived the samp. You survived the shame of asking for help. You survived failing on your own. You survived your parents’ house not being easy.

God didn't show up when I got brave. He showed up in the middle of my shaking knees, while I was still calculating how to stretch nothing into something. He met me in the ugly math of survival.

That's grace. Not rescue from the storm. A hand in the middle of it.

To the One Still Counting Samp Recipes

I don't know what's keeping you stuck. Maybe it's money. Maybe it's fear of failing your children again. Maybe it's the voice in your head that says you already tried and you couldn't do it.

Each time I thought of leaving, I would see empty cupboards and packets of samp. A memory of my child looking at that plate with samp again.

I never left. But I asked for help. I didn't let fear keep me in silence anymore.

That's all I know.

The picture is 23 year old me.

Not sad.

Not angry.

Waiting.

I was at my mother’s house, but I didn’t belong there.

To them, I was already someone’s wife. A daughter no longer.

The bride price had been paid, so by tradition, I was a wife.

But no one came to get me and my child.

Months passed, into years.

Not a daughter.

Not a wife in her husband’s home.

Not a guest.

Not a ghost either.

Just a 23-year-old woman, mother, wife by ritual… and unclaimed in practice.

That face is steady. But there is no ease in the eyes.

Always watching.

Listening.

Trying to catch a signal.

Trying to understand how to stand in a place that had no name for me.

It was the “not yet.”

A threshold I stood on longer than I knew

The Becoming

I am 50 now.

Twenty-seven years later.

The handbag is gone.

The thin mattress is a memory.

The fog lifted.

The grave is behind me.

And somewhere along the way,

I stopped waiting…

and began building

The Birth of Grace Beyond Scars

Grace Beyond Scars was not born from arrival.

It was born in that doorway.

It is a letter written from the threshold

to anyone still standing there.

For the woman at someone else’s table, eating what is given.

For the man who stands at the edge of every room, waiting to be called.

For anyone suspended between what was… and what could be.

The Turning Point

The claiming never came from them.

So I learned to claim myself.

Not by cutting anyone off,

but by finally speaking.

By staying.

By building anyway

What Waiting Taught Me

It took years of watching doors remain closed to understand this:

Belonging is not a door someone else opens.

It is a table you build

with whatever you have.

Borrowed tools.

Borrowed strength.

Borrowed courage.

And the people who stay.

You keep the ones who stay.

And you build anyway.

If You Are Still There

You don’t have to wait 27 years.

But if you are waiting today!

You are not a ghost.

You were never forgotten.

You were just never named.

So name yourself.

Pull your chair closer.

There is space here.

We Rise Together 🤍

Grace is not the door that opens.
It is the knocking when every cell says run.
It is the borrowed mattress, the thin floor,
the ceiling that never learned your name.

Grace is not the healing.
It is the fog you cannot name,
the daughter you hold and do not know,
the silence that swallows your prayers
and gives nothing back.

Grace is not the rising.
It is the getting up with 28 cents
and a cracked phone and a manuscript
no one has asked for.

Grace is the exhale that comes years later.
The shoulders you didn’t know were braced,
the breath you forgot you were holding.
Grace is the table you build
when no one pulled out a chair.

Grace is the woman who opens the door
when she had every reason to keep it closed.
Grace is the name you give yourself
when no one else will name you.

Shingai.
Persevere.

Grace is the hand in yours
when the machine stops helping.
It is the anchor left behind,
people who stay when staying costs.

Grace is not what happens when the pain ends.
Grace is what happens in the pain.
The noticing.
The staying.
The refusing to disappear.

Grace is the testimony you never wanted,
now carrying someone else through their fog.
They write to you:

“Not one tear wasted.”

And you finally believe it.

That is grace beyond scars.
Not the absence of wound.
The presence of purpose.

We rise. Together.

She was placed in my arms. My daughter. Small and warm. Smelling of milk and sleep.

The room was quiet. Someone was smiling.

But I was not in the room.

I looked down at her face. And I did not know her.

Not the way I had imagined. There was no rush of love. No sudden knowing.

Just a long, empty hallway between my chest and hers.

I held her close so no one would notice.

I learned to arrange my face into something that looked like tenderness. I learned to say the right words.

Overjoyed. So blessed. She is everything.

Inside, I was a ghost in my own life.

The breaking did not announce itself. No crash. No tearful collapse.

It was quieter than that. A slow unraveling of a thread I did not even know was loose.

I would stand at the window and watch the sun move across the floor. Hours would pass. 

I would not remember what I had been thinking.

They say the mind protects you from what you cannot carry.

Maybe that is true.

Maybe my mind placed itself somewhere I could not reach.

I moved through those days like a woman in a dream.

Present. But not there.

If you have ever held someone you love and felt nothing.

If you have ever looked in the mirror and not recognized the woman staring back.

If you have ever wondered if you were disappearing without anyone noticing.

You are not broken.

You are not alone.

And the silence is not the end of your story.

It is just the place where the story begins to turn.

We rise. Together. 🤍

I have $0.28 in my account.

A borrowed phone with a cracked screen.

A manuscript sitting with editors I cannot afford to pay.

I washed dishes with borrowed car soap today because it was what I had. I don't own a car. Never have.

This is where I am.

Not the middle of a comeback story. Not the bottom before the rise. Just… here. Washing. Waiting. Writing on a broken phone.

Grace Beyond Scars was never meant to be a platform for someone who had already arrived.

It is for someone still figuring it out. Still believing. Still showing up when there is nothing to show yet.

That someone is me.

I don't know when the manuscript will publish. I don't know when 28 cents becomes more. I don't know how long this borrowed phone will last.

But I know this:

I am not waiting until I am fixed to write.

I am not waiting until I am funded to speak. I am not waiting until I am healed to say healing is messy, slow, and looks like borrowed car soap on borrowed dishes on a Monday.

Grace Beyond Scars is not a destination.

It is the dirty dishes, the cracked screen, the 28 cents, and the decision to keep going anyway.

Pull up a chair. Even if you don't own it.

We are figuring this out together.

🤍

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There is a quiet shame in quitting.

Not the shame of failure. The shame of admitting that the life everyone else seems to accept is not enough for you.

I know that shame.

I moved through jobs like seasons I couldn't stay in. Administration. Project management. Marketing executive. Even financial advisor.

Each time, I told myself: Maybe this is it. Maybe this is where I'll finally feel settled. Each time, I found myself restless. Intolerant. Asking a question I couldn't shake:

Is this it?

For years, I thought something was wrong with me.

I watched others climb ladders, collect titles, seem content with work that didn't light them up. They weren't quitting. They weren't asking is this it?

So I told myself: You're undisciplined. You're lazy. You're a quitter.

But then I found myself looking at the lives of people in disadvantaged communities.

Women who couldn't feed their children. Young people with fire in their chests and nowhere to put it. Families just getting by, not knowing if they could ever rise above their circumstances.

My heart broke for them. But my hands were tied. I couldn't give money. I couldn't offer resources. All I could do was pray.

And in that place of helplessness, I felt God ask me a question:

What do you have in your hand?

I looked.

No money. No platform. No resources.

Just my story. The exile. The hunger. The fog. The rising. The years of carrying it alone, never speaking it out loud.

That's when I realized: my story was the resource. My voice was the tool. My willingness to be vulnerable was the offering.

That's how Grace Beyond Scars was born.

At first, I didn't want to tell it the way I told it. I wanted to hold back. Protect the people involved. Keep myself safe.

Then an author named Tsitsi Nomsa Ngwenya said to me: Just lay it all out there. Don't hold back.

So I did. I spoke to the people closest to me first. Told them I was going to write. By grace, they supported me.

And I laid it all out. Vulnerable. Messy. Honest.

It's my five loaves and two fish. I've given it to God to multiply.

This is the work I want to do.

Not for a title. Not for a paycheck. To give hope to the hopeless. To give someone a chance at a decent life. To touch hearts and bring a difference.

That's work I love doing.

If you're still searching for the work that makes you come alive, here are three questions to carry with you:

1. What did you love doing before someone told you it wasn't practical?

2. If money wasn't a factor, how would you spend your days?

3. What problem in the world makes you so angry or so sad that you can't stop thinking about it?

Save this. Sit with it. Let the answers come slowly.

I don't have a perfect ending for this. I'm still figuring it out too.

But I know this: the work that makes you come alive is not the work that pays the most. It's the work you would do anyway. The work that feels like breathing. The work that connects you to something bigger than yourself.

For me, that work is writing. For you, it might be something else.

But the restlessness? That's not a flaw. That's a compass.

Follow it.

We rise. Together. 🤍

Subscribe to receive more letters on healing, purpose, and finding work that makes you come alive.

What the graveside taught me about claiming yourself.

You've been standing at a graveside too.

Maybe not a real one. Maybe a relationship that died. A dream you buried. A version of yourself you had to lay down because it wasn't safe to be her anymore.

And when you walked away, you realized something: you didn't know who you were without what you lost.

That's where I was seven years ago.

On April 2nd, I stood at a graveside with nothing but the clothes on my back. The man I loved, the father of my children, the one whose presence and absence shaped so much of my life was being buried.

When they lowered him into the ground, I was left with one blanket. The rest went with him.

It wasn't just loss. It was revelation.

How much of myself had I given away? How little of me was left when he was gone?

For years, my identity had been tied to him. To what he gave. To what he withheld. To the spaces I was allowed into, and the ones I was quietly shut out of.

When he died, I realized I didn't know who I was anymore.

Most people believe belonging is something you receive.

A gift given by families, partners, communities. That if you wait long enough, prove yourself enough, shrink small enough, someone will finally say, "You belong here."

I believed that too. For years.

But the graveside taught me something different.

Belonging is not a gift you receive. It is a table you build.

Not because people won't welcome you. But because waiting to be welcomed will leave you standing in a cemetery wondering who you are.

So I began again. Slowly. Painfully.

I stopped waiting to be chosen. I started choosing myself.

I stopped asking, “Do I belong here?”, I started asking, “What am I building for myself?”

I stopped waiting for a seat. I started building tables.

Today, I stand, not because someone claimed me, but because I finally learned to claim myself.

And now, I build. So that someone else doesn't have to stand where I stood, wondering if they exist outside of someone else's life.

If you're standing at your own graveside today. If you've lost someone or something that once defined you, here are three questions to carry with you:

1. What part of me did I give away that I can now reclaim?

2. If I stopped waiting to be chosen, what would I build for myself?

3. What would it look like to claim myself today - not tomorrow, not when I'm ready?

Save this. Screenshot it. Send it to someone who needs it.

Seven years later, I am still rising.

And you can too.

We rise. Together. 🤍

Subscribe to receive more letters on healing, belonging, and the slow work of becoming.

Not to this moment. Not to this voice. Not to a place where I could sit down and write and actually mean it.

So if you're reading this welcome.

My name is Sharon. I'm a mother. A writer. Someone who has had to start over more than once.

This space, Grace Beyond Scars, was not born from having answers. It was born from nights that didn't end. From seasons where I didn't recognize myself. From moments where survival was the only thing I could manage.

I know what it feels like to lose yourself. To carry grief like a second skin. To sit in a room full of people and feel completely alone.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't the only one.

So I started writing.

Not for applause but because I had to.

For the woman who can't find her voice.

For the child who doesn't know why home feels so heavy.

For the youth with fire in their chest but no one to fan the flame.

The ones going through it. The ones too weak to speak for themselves.

I want to change lives for the better. Not someday. Now.

I'm sitting here writing this and actually tearing up. Because the day I get to make a difference in someone's life, truly make a difference, I will know I have fulfilled my purpose.

Not fame. Not money. Not a book on a shelf.

Just one person breathing easier because I spoke.

I write about healing. Faith when it feels like God went silent. Identity when life has broken you open. Belonging when you've been told you don't fit.

But mostly, I write for the ones still in it. The ones without language for what they're carrying. The ones holding it together on the outside while falling apart on the inside.

If that's you, you're not in the wrong place.

I don't have quick answers. I won't tell you to stay positive.

What I have is honesty. Words that don't run from the hard parts. A belief that healing is not a moment. It's a million small breaths you almost didn't notice.

Grace Beyond Scars is a book. A memoir. A way of saying: you are not disqualified by what you've been through. You are not too late. You are not too broken.

You are becoming.

If you stay, you'll receive my writing in your inbox. No algorithms. No noise. Just a letter when I have something real to say.

If you're not ready, that's okay too. Read what you need. Take what helps.

Thank you for being here.

You're not lost. You're on the road. And if you're here, we're walking it together.

We rise. Together. 🤍

That’s where I’m writing from today.

I sit here thinking: I’m a child of God. And I’m not going to beg for bread. Because He provides.

I used to beg. Depend on my partner. On friends. On anyone who could hear my cry. Even my boss.

I know that road.

The exhaustion of always asking.

The weight of always needing.

But something has shifted.

I will lift up my eyes to the hills—from whence comes my help. Ps 121

Not to the left.

Not to the right.

Not to people with their own struggles.

Not to hands that are already full.

Up. To the One who brought me here.

He didn’t bring me this far to leave me here.

I may not have much today. But I have Him. And I have a quiet knowing that He has a plan for me.

Not a plan that depends on my fridge being full.

Not a plan that waits until my tank is full.

A plan that started the day I had nothing but a handbag and a thin mattress.

And He’s still writing it.

I don’t know what you’re running out of today.

Money. Hope. Strength. Patience.

But the same God who met me on that thin mattress is watching your empty fridge too.

He’s not confused.

He’s not surprised.

He’s not packing up and leaving.

He’s providing.

Maybe not how you expected. But He is.

So today, I’m not begging.

I’m not panicking.

I’m not calling everyone I know.

I’m looking up.

My help comes from the Lord.

We rise. Together. 🤍

P.S: If this landed with you today, I’d love to hear how God has provided in your own hard seasons. You can leave a comment or simply reply.