If I no longer feel like their mom, then who am I?

Because motherhood was never just one part of your life.

It was woven into everything.

It shaped how you spent your days, what kept you awake at night, what you prayed about, and the future you pictured when you closed your eyes. You knew their favorite foods, the stories behind their scars, and the meaning of every expression on their face. You were the one they needed. The one they called. The one who knew how to make things better.

And whether you realized it or not, pieces of your identity became wrapped around that role.

Then the relationship changed.

The calls stopped. The messages went unanswered. The milestones you assumed you would be part of began happening somewhere beyond your reach.

And it did not feel as though you had only lost a relationship.

It felt as though you had lost your place in their life. Your place in the family. The future you thought you would share.

Some days, it can even feel as though the word *mom* was taken from you too.

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You may still be their mother, but you no longer get to experience motherhood in the ways that once made the title feel real. You cannot check in. You cannot show up. You may not know if they are hurting, celebrating, struggling, or doing just fine without you.

That kind of distance can make you feel erased.

But friend, estrangement does not mean you stopped being a mother.

And your child’s current ability—or inability—to have a relationship with you does not get to decide whether you are worthy of love.

I know that is easier to write than it is to believe on the days the phone stays silent.

Because when the person who once called you Mom no longer calls at all, it is hard not to let the silence speak for them.

It begins telling you that you failed.

That you were never enough.

That if your own child can live without you, maybe you were not as important as you thought you were.

But silence can be loud and still be wrong.

This is where I have had to return to what was true before I ever held the title of mom:

I belonged to God first.

Isaiah 43:1 says, “I have summoned you by name; you are mine.”

Before anyone called you Mom, He called you by name.

Before little hands reached for you, He was already holding you.

Before you poured yourself into raising your child, before you made mistakes, before the relationship broke, you were already chosen, known, and deeply loved by Him.

And you still are.

That truth does not make the loss hurt less. It does not fill the empty chair or make the phone ring.

It gives the hurt somewhere solid to land.

Your child’s feelings and perspective matter. There may be things you need to grieve, examine, take responsibility for, or apologize for. Healing may require you to hear things that are difficult and sit with parts of the story that look different through their eyes.

But humility is not the same thing as agreeing that you are worthless.

Taking responsibility for what is yours does not mean making everything your fault.

You can regret things and still be redeemable.

You can have made mistakes and still be loved.

You can be misunderstood and still be fully known.

You can be cut off and still belong.

Estrangement changed your relationship.

It changed the future you pictured.

It may have changed the way you experience motherhood.

But it did not change your identity.

So today, before you measure your worth by the message that never came, the milestone you were not invited into, or the relationship you cannot repair alone, be still long enough to hear God call you by name again.

Not failure.

Not rejected.

Not forgotten.

Mine.

A prayer to repeat

Lord, this distance has made me feel erased. When the silence tells me I am unwanted, remind me that I am still Yours. Help me humbly face what is mine to grieve, learn from, or take responsibility for without turning my mistakes into my identity. Separate my worth from the condition of this relationship and root me in what You say about me. When I struggle to believe I am still chosen, known, and loved, help me hear You call me by name again. Amen.

One question to sit with

What have I allowed this estrangement to say about me that God has never said?

If this season has left you wondering who you are outside of this relationship,

Finding Hope in the Heartbreak will gently walk with you for 30 days as you rebuild your identity in Christ—without rushing your grief or pretending the pain is not real.

https://findinghopeintheheartbreak.netlify.app/

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The organization we work for asked if he wanted to join a team helping a local ministry feed refugees in the middle of conflict. He said yes.

Someone asked me, while he was gone, how I wasn’t falling apart.

Honestly? I think God used that trip to teach me one of the biggest les…

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That question sat with me for a long time before I had an answer. And on September 1st, I’m opening up a free 30-day prayer challenge to help you sit with it too.

Not rush past it.

Not perform your way through it.

Actually let God answer it in you.

Here’s how it works:

Starting September 1st, I’ll post daily in my Instagram broadcast channel - one verse, a short prompt, and a prayer written just for you. It’s free. It’s daily. And it’s built to hold you, even on the days you can barely hold yourself.

👉 Join the free channel here: [LINK]

Now - if you want to go deeper than a verse a day, that’s what

Finding Hope in the Heartbreak was built for.

It’s a full prayer workbook and 30-day journal, and it pairs day-for-day with the channel - so wherever you are on Day 1, your workbook is right there with you.

It’s not a how-to-reconcile book. No scripts, no perfect text to send. It’s journaling prompts, scripture, and the honest stuff I’ve walked through myself, giving you the space to write your way from shame and isolation back to the Lord.

We’re walking it in a rhythm I call F.L.O.W. - Fear to Faith, Let’s Pray, Open the Word, Walk in Faith. Not another thing to remember. Just a gentle nudge back to trust when your thoughts start spiraling.

There’s no casserole for this grief. No one shows up with a meal train when your child stops calling. But there’s this - 30 days, built by a mom who’s lived it.

👉 Grab the workbook here: [LINK]

You don’t need the workbook to join the channel - it’s free, and you’re welcome either way. But if you’re ready to do more than just survive this season, I’d love to have you do both.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Psalm 34:18

You’re not doing this alone anymore.

With you in the waiting,

Nicole 🤍

P.S. - The workbook is $9.97 through September 1st - after that, it goes back up.

If you’ve been thinking about it, this is the moment. [LINK]

Scriptures: Judges 6:11-16, 27, 34-40

Judges 6:11-16 (NLT)

Then the angel of the LORD came and sat beneath the great tree at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash of the clan of Abiezer. Gideon son of Joash was threshing wheat at the bottom of a winepress to hide the grain from the Midianites.

The angel of the LORD appeared to him and said, “…

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And in the middle of it, she said something…

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Here’s why that might be the best thing that ever happened to your faith.

You are a mother. You are also a child of God.

Maybe you grew up in the church and you’ve heard that second part a thousand times — so many times it stopped meaning anything. Or maybe you have church hurt, and somewhere along the way you started equating that hurt with God-hurt, so hearing “child of God” doesn’t feel encouraging. It feels like the opposite. That’s fair. Or maybe it’s simpler than either of those — you’ve just been so deep in motherhood for so long that you forgot you’re anything outside of it.

Here’s what I mean about failing the job. Your children have disregarded you. Shown you, through their actions, that the relationship isn’t worth the effort anymore. The grace has run dry. There are conditions on conversations now. There are walls disguised as boundaries. And underneath it, there’s a lie spinning that’s hard to name out loud — the job you valued most, the one God gave you, and you failed at it. You have been cut off, isolated, shunned.

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Of course I related it to estrangement.

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Because that’s exactly what it feels like, doesn’t it? There’s pain because things are out of alignment. They aren’t the way they’re supposed to be.

For my son, the chiropractor laid out a plan — laser treatment, a TENS unit, ointments, and adjustments over a few weeks. A clear path back to alignment.

It’s not that simple with relationships when you can only control your part, and so much of this is out of our hands. So what do we actually do with the part that is ours?

We realign. Not with them but with the One our worth comes from.

“The enemy wants you to stay stuck in the shadows of shame.” I say that all the time. And this week I was reading Psalm 91: 1

“Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty.”

I’ve read this chapter plenty of times - it’s a popular one, but it meant something different this time…

I spend all this time telling you not to give the enemy the satisfaction of keeping you stuck, small, hidden in the shadows of shame… and here God is describing a shadow of His own.

When I picture the shadow of shame, I see darkness. Staying inside because being around people feels like pressure - like everyone’s quietly wondering what you did wrong. I see us behind closed doors. Tucked away. Hidden.

But then I read verse 91: 4-

“He will cover you with his feathers. He will shelter you with his wings. His faithful promises are your armor and protection.”

And the whole picture changes.

Because I don’t see wings folded down over me, hiding me away. I see them spread wide - fully extended, at their whole span. I see Him standing tall, wings stretched out to their limit, daring the enemy to take a shot. And that full extension throws a shadow - a huge, wide-open shadow and that’s where I get to stand.

In broad daylight. Out in the open. I’m in His shadow, so I’m covered. I’m not shrinking into a corner. I’m standing tall too, right in the middle of it. Protected and visible. Proud. Confident. Bold. Why wouldn’t I be? Look at who’s covering me.

Two shadows. One keeps you small and hidden. The other is thrown wide open so you can stand tall right out in the light.

So when estrangement leaves you defeated, overwhelmed by all the emotions it drags in - stop and picture it. Whose shadow are you standing in right now? And then make the conscious choice to step into the Almighty’s.

And when you question who you are, now that motherhood looks nothing like you expected - you are His.

“The LORD says, ‘I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them.’” (Psalms 91: 14–15)

Standing with you between hope and heartbreak,
Nicole

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And in that tiredness, that weariness soak in this verse…

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am …

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So I want to offer a distinction that has helped me: there’s a difference between hope and expectation.

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When that role goes quiet, it c…

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If this isn’t for you today, that’s okay. But I don’t think you stumbled onto it by accident.

_____________________________________________________________________

Somewhere in the middle of losing access to my child, I stopped feeling only grief and started feeling defiant. And I think it’s the most spiritually awake I’ve been in years.

Estrangement isn’t just a family wound. It is spiritual warfare. And the moment I saw that, I stopped grieving like a victim and started standing like a soldier.

Jesus said it Himself:

“The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.” — John 10:10 (NLT)

Read that again, because both are true at the same time.

One plan is to rescue you, to set you apart, to set you free.

The other is to confuse you, to shame you, to destroy you.

Estrangement didn’t invent that war - it just walked you straight into the middle of it.

And the enemy is not subtle about which plan he’s running. He would love for you to stay in anger. He would love for bitterness to grow - to fester - to seep into and skew every single part of your life. He would love nothing more than to grow it so large, so heavy, that reconciliation becomes nearly impossible. Not because a door closed, but because your heart hardened behind it.

That’s not paranoia; that’s strategy. Paul names it outright when he tells us to stand against “the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). Schemes. Plans. Plural. He has more than one, and division is his favorite, because a house split against itself does his work for him.

I don’t know why estrangement walked into your story. I don’t know whose voice said what, who turned, who left, who stopped answering. But I know the enemy sees division and hurt and anger, and he leans in. He capitalizes. So whether spiritual warfare started your estrangement or not - I believe it is in it now.

Which is exactly why, when I say “Use this season. Don’t let it use you,” what I really mean is this: don’t let him have it. Don’t hand him the win.

And I’ll be honest with you - refusing to hand him that win has become the thing that gets me out of bed. I’m a little defiant by nature. Some days my entire motivation is simply refusing to give the enemy the satisfaction. I want him irritated. I want him furious that I am not consumed by sorrow, that I am not face-down in defeat, that I will not believe - not for one second - that his schemes get the final word.

Because this is personal now. I can see his fingerprints all over our estrangement, and honestly? It makes me angry.

Paul says “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12).

My child was never my enemy. The hurt is real, the distance is real but the actual war was never between me and my kid. It’s against the powers that profit from keeping us apart. So when the enemy reaches in and takes my child, he hasn’t captured the prize. He’s just shown his hand. The battlefield was never my child or our relationship. It was the spiritual forces betting I’d quit.

I have watched the Lord’s provision over my child with my own eyes, over and over again. I know Jesus is not finished.

And I know the enemy has miscalculated. He thought silence would starve my faith - instead it set me on fire for the Lord.

He came for my family.

If he thinks I’m going to lie down - be consumed - live in sorrow - grow roots in anger and bitterness - he is wrong.

He didn’t just fail to break me; he lit a fire in me. A fire to chase the Lord for myself. And then the Lord took it even further than I ever planned, because now I’m standing here handing other moms a torch and saying: Stand. And fight. He picked the wrong moms.

There are a lot of voices speaking on estrangement right now and they’ll teach you when to reach out, what to say, how to say it. They’ll teach you to settle your nervous system and you should. Do those things. Do all of them.

Scripture actually backs that up: Paul lists the whole armor - the belt, the breastplate, the shield, the helmet, the sword and then names the goal, that “having done all, to stand” (Ephesians 6:13). Having done all. You do the work, you make the wise calls, you regulate, you reach out, you repair what’s yours to repair and you “pray at all times in the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:18). Do the practical things. But do them while you seek the Lord.

Because if this wasn’t spiritual warfare before, it is now.

And if you believe that, like I do, my challenge to you is… what are you going to do about it?

Paul keeps answering with the same word, over and over: stand. Stand against the schemes. Withstand the evil day. And “having done all,” he says, “to stand” (Ephesians 6:13).

When you’ve done everything you know to do - stand.

When the silence is loud and the waiting is long - stand.

When the enemy circles back to whisper that it’s hopeless - plant your feet and stand.

And you do not stand alone. This is the promise the enemy is desperate for you to forget:

“The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” — Exodus 14:14

To be still, isn’t defeat - it’s confidence. It means you can stop bracing for the worst, because the outcome is already settled and the One fighting for you has never lost. Not once.

So I’m not still because I’ve been beaten. I’m still because I’m trusting the Lord to do what He said He would do.

Let the enemy watch us pray when we want to panic, and worship through the weeping.

He came for our children… for our families..

He picked the wrong mothers.

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Sometimes I feel like my life is a circus and everyone has a ticket for the show.

Things happen in our family that just aren’t happening to other people. And the truth is, a lot of them happen because we’ve positioned ourselves to say yes when the Lord asks us to step out in faith. So they don’t always make sense from the outside. They don’t fit inside the parameters of “normal” that keep people comfortable.

And okay let’s be real..sometimes the chaos is just me. I am type B and somehow nearly everyone in my life is type A. So my mishaps land as comedy. The running joke. The entertainment.

I’m usually pretty open about our life. But every now and then the circus feels like too much even for me and so I go quiet. I retreat. I pull it all in close and stop sharing with anyone.

If you’re walking through estrangement, you know this feeling in your bones.

It’s just too much to explain. It’s something most people can’t understand, so when you do manage to say it out loud, the shock on their face can make your pain feel like a spectacle. A storyline. Something to react to instead of someone to sit with.

So we retreat. We go quiet. We decide it’s safer to carry it alone.

But this week I was reminded of something I keep having to relearn: there is holy value in being seen. In sharing it all - not with everyone, but with the right ones.

I word-vomited my entire month to a friend.

I’d been holding so much of it close to my chest, trying to fake myself out - telling myself it wasn’t affecting me as much as it was. And then I hit a breaking point. And out it all came.

Before we hung up, she prayed for me. With me. And in the middle of that prayer she said something I had never heard before:

“Thoughts are like birds. We can’t keep them from flying around our heads but we can keep them from building a nest in our hair.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Maybe you can’t stop the thoughts from circling - the what-ifs, the grief, the replaying of conversations you can’t go back and fix. They’re going to fly. That part isn’t yours to control. But you don’t have to give them a place to settle. You don’t have to let them move in and stay.

And she didn’t just leave it in that one prayer. All week, every time something new pushed me back toward the edge, I’d text her. And she’d fire back two words:

NO NEST.

That’s it. And every single time, it disarmed me. It made me smile. It pulled me off the deck of the sinking ship I was so sure I was standing on and reminded me- that thought doesn’t get to stay.

That’s the gift hiding inside letting your pain be witnessed: people pray for you, and sometimes you hear something you’ve never heard before. Something that grounds you. Now every time a thought tries to build its nest, I picture my friend praying over me and I shoo it off.

I know sharing is risky. I do.

Not every friend will pray for you. Not every friend is a safe place. I’m not telling you to hand your heart to everyone.

But here’s the other side of that risk: if you never share, you never give the safe ones a chance to show you who they are. You never let them hand you the thing God may have put in their heart for you - the new perspective, the prayer, the bird-and-nest line you didn’t know you needed.

Ask the Lord for wisdom about when to open up, and to whom. He is faithful to answer that.

But maybe… What if He already has a word for you, and He’s just waiting for you to be ready to receive it?

I don’t know. Just a thought.

I needed the reminder this week. Maybe you do too.

Standing with you between hope and heartbreak-Nicole

“Thus far the Lord has helped us.” — 1 Samuel 7:12

Notice the language. Not “the Lord will help us” (though He will). Not “the Lord helped us once long ago” (though He has). Thus far. Up to this ver…

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There’s a season where you have to put hope on a shelf.

Where it gets too heavy to hold. Too painful to have. Where the most faithful thing you can do is set it down, walk away, and heal. I’m not going to rush you past that season because it’s real, and it’s holy, and sometimes it’s the only way through.

But seasons turn.

And I think some of you are standing in front of that shelf right now- hope sitting there, covered in dust and you feel it. That nudge. That quiet stirring that says it’s time. Not because you’ve forced it. Not because you’ve talked yourself into it. But because the Lord is calling you back into hope.

It’s time to hope again.

I know. I know how scary that is. Hope is vulnerable. Hope is opening yourself up to be hurt all over again. And it’s never just one door - it’s a house of mirrors. You crack one open and you can’t help but open another, and another. Door after door of possibilities. Of dreams. Of the things you ached for, and maybe still do.

That’s exactly why you set it down. Out of self-protection. And for a season, that was right.

But you weren’t meant to live behind that wall forever. Self-protection was a shelter for a season, it was never meant to be home. The fear is still real. And still, you can step toward hope anyway.

That’s where faith comes in. Faith is what steps in when hope is scary. It doesn’t erase the fear. But you step into that space with faithfulness and obedience, because the Lord is nudging you to pick it back up and take it with you.

This is not the same as last time.

You’ve grown. You’re stronger now. Your faith isn’t in the background anymore, it’s not the thing you pick up and put down when life gets hard. You’ve learned how to surrender. How to loosen your grip. How to live your faith instead of just holding it. You’ve learned to trust that the Lord’s plan is good, even when it doesn’t look like yours.

So when you’re ready to hope again, this time, you’re not reaching for it alone. It’s you and the Lord, in tandem, doing this together. You won’t carry hope by yourself.

It would be easier to leave it there. To stay protected. To do what feels safer. But when you choose obedience over comfort - when you step out in vulnerability instead of staying behind your walls - the Lord honors that. He meets you right there in it.

It’s time. And that place - right where your fear and your faith are standing toe to toe? That’s where He meets you. And there is no more powerful place to stand.

Because on the other side of that obedience: freedom.

Something breaks loose when you stand at that line and don’t back down. When the fear and the faith square up, and you don’t flinch. You stop living braced for the next blow. You stop white-knuckling an outcome you were never meant to carry. The hands you’ve kept clenched for so long - finally, slowly, they open.

That’s the freedom. Not that the ache is gone. Not that everything is suddenly fixed. But that you are no longer chained to the what-ifs. No longer held hostage by the fear of being hurt again. Your peace stops hanging on what your child does next, and starts resting in the One who holds you both.

You were never free behind those walls. You were guarded. You were surviving. But on the other side of obedience, you can breathe again. You can hope with open hands and an unclenched heart.

And that, friend… is when you know it’s time to hope again.

Standing with you between hope and heartbreak-

Nicole

If so, I want you to read this slowly:

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but th…

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We want the big answer. The phone call. The reconciliation. The door reopening. And sometimes He gives us a song on the radio at the exact right moment. A stranger’s kindness at the grocery store. A morning where the ache was a little quieter than yesterday.

…

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She wasn’t sure what stories had been told about her to all these people in the room.

Sit with that.

Imagine how it would feel, even if you’ve never been cut off from your child. Just imagine you know someone has been telling their version of a story that involves you. The worst version of you. Maybe these people know you, maybe they don’t. And then you walk into a room full of them.

Imagine how fast your heart would race. How sweaty your palms would get. How your mind would spin. How on guard every nerve would be. I don’t want to be all the things they think I am, so you apologize for everything before anyone can even accuse you. You want to stay small. You hope no one really sees you. Meek and mild. Don’t make too much noise. Don’t laugh too loud. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t hold anyone’s eyes too long. Don’t arrive too early, don’t leave too late.

Imagine the vulnerability it would take to walk into a room full of people who have only ever heard the worst of you.

That’s what mothers do after reconciliation.

We willingly walk into rooms where we’ve been obliterated. Knowing our mistakes, our shortcomings, our ordinary human failings as parents have been twisted to fit one person’s narrative - retold and retold with no one there to defend us, broadcast to everyone in the room. Because no one cuts off their mom for no reason. That’s what the world believes. That’s the scarlet letter we wear into every room.

When I was a kid, I remember our pastor preaching on marriage, cautioning husbands and wives against “venting” to other people about their spouse. Because, he said, those people carry the burden of the issue without ever being there for the forgiveness. They’re left holding the hurt long after the couple has healed.

That’s it. That’s what I’m trying to name here - except the mother is the one left holding it. She carries the weight of stories told about her in rooms she was never allowed into, to people who only know the worst of her and are never told the rest.

We don’t talk about the aftermath of estrangement, the damage that mothers keep carrying long past reconciliation, the weight that doesn’t lift just because the relationship was restored.

And still. They would do it. They walk through the door, into those rooms, exposed, defenseless, but willing. Every single time. Only a mothers love makes that possible.

God gave mothers love for our children so strong that we would stand tall and walk into any room where we’ve been annihilated - if it meant we got to stand with our children. The child who forgave us. The child we have forgiven.

The depth of our pain and the vastness of our love - there is nothing like it this side of heaven.

Standing with you between hope and heartbreak.

Nicole

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Christian moms - we made motherhood an idol.

Nobody meant to. It happened slowly. In the way we built our identities around them. The way we measured our worth by their grades, their friend groups, their phone calls home and their success. The way our peace rose and fell with their moods.

We put them on a pedestal.

We put motherhood on a pedestal.

And then estrangement walked in and knocked the whole thing over.

Let me be clear before I go any further: I am not writing this from a pedestal of my own. I am in this. Right now. Working through it in real time.

This experience became an unraveling of who I thought I was..

“If I’m no longer a mother in the way I thought I would be… who am I?”

“If it doesn’t look how I expected… now what?”

How do I realign my life - my worth, my purpose, my future - back to something that actually honors God? Because if I’m being honest, the version of motherhood I had built in my head wasn’t honoring Him. It was honoring an outcome. A picture. A version of me and my family on the outside that felt socially acceptable.

Take that away, and who am I?

That’s the question.

I sat at the feet of Jesus broken. Gutted. Rejected in the most personal, most vulnerable way a person can be rejected. And I asked Him - really asked Him - “ What now?”

He didn’t flinch.

He just started, gently, picking up the broken pieces of me. He didn’t put them back the way they were. He put them back better. More whole than I have ever been in my entire life.

Here is what I’m learning…

Our kids were never supposed to make us whole.

That spot wasn’t theirs. That spot was Jesus’. And we gave it away. We handed it over to flawed humans - humans who were never built to carry the weight of being our worth.

Your worth was never supposed to live in your child’s approval.

It was always supposed to live in God.

The estrangement didn’t take your worth. It just showed you where you’d been storing it.

That’s why we unraveled when they left.

Okay but Nicole. My calling was to be a mom.

You still are one.

Your calling isn’t done unless God told you it was done. And let me say the quiet part out loud:

Your kids don’t get the say.

Your child’s silence doesn’t revoke your calling. Your child’s anger doesn’t revoke your calling. The fact that motherhood doesn’t look how you pictured it doesn’t revoke your calling.

So why are we going to waste what God wants to use?

I am not a biblical scholar. I am not qualified in the way the world counts qualified. But I am called. And Scripture says that's exactly how God works - He chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; the weak things to shame the strong. (1 Corinthians 1:27). I’m going to keep talking. And I’m going to ask you what I had to ask myself:

What is God trying to show you in this season?

Because nothing is wasted with Him.

Hear me - nothing is wasted with Him.

Not the tears. Not the silence. Not the version of yourself you thought you were going to be. Not the years that feel like they were stolen.

God actually speaks directly to that last one. "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten." (Joel 2:25) The stolen years. He sees them. He's not done with them.

Now. Before you spiral. Let me read your mind.

You’re thinking you don’t understand. No one understands. The church will judge me. My friends are already judging me. I failed.

Friend. Sister.

The Bible is full of broken families.

Joseph's brothers sold him. Sold him. And years later - after the pit and the prison and all of it - Joseph looked at them and said you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good. (Genesis 50:20) That is not a tidy story. That is a gutted, years-long, nobody-saw-it-coming redemption. And God wrote every chapter of it.

The Bible is full of people who made terrible, dumb, selfish, generational-curse-level choices and God still called them. Still used them. Still wrote them into the story.

So when Satan is over here whispering you failed, you’re washed up, no one will understand, you must be a horrible person - Jesus is over here saying show me where it says that?? Let me show you instead.

Then He hands you a Bible full of broken people that He still used.

Estrangement is a defining season.

It reshapes you. That part is not optional.

How it reshapes you… that part is up to you.

Will you stay sad, bitter, and angry? Or will you let the Lord work? Let Him rebuild? Let Him walk out His calling on your life even when it doesn’t look like what you expected?

You don’t get to skip the reshaping.

You do get to choose the shape.

xoxo-Standing with you between hope and heartbreak,

Nicole

No funeral. No casserole brigade. No one bringing flowers to your door. Just an empty chair at the table and a phone that doesn’t ring and the strange, disorienting experience of mourning someone who is still alive.

And because there’s no language for it, there’s no real permission for it either…

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