January 2024 ended with a conversation that rearranged everything I thought I knew about my family. My parents were getting divorced. I’d sensed something was wrong in the weeks before, but feeling something is off and having it confirmed are two different kinds of hard. From then on, nothing about my family looked the way it had looked the day before.

I remember the disorientation that comes when the ground you’ve stood on your whole life turns out to be less solid than you thought. Not just my parents, but my whole sense of what home meant, what holidays would look like, and more. There are so many questions and unknowns that come with a big change like that, and everything felt like it was moving at once.

So I did what made sense to me at the time. I held on tighter to the things that were still standing still: my faith, church, work, and close relationships. I didn’t take a break from any of them and continued to reach out to loved ones. A friend told me something that year I’ve never forgotten. When everything around you is shaking, don’t change the other big things too. Don’t quit the job, leave the church or make things worse by uprooting what’s steady. Whatever those things are for you, let them hold you up while you’re finding your footing again. I couldn’t control my parents’ decisions, but I could control how I showed up at home, at work, and at church.

I also learned not to make any big or impulsive decisions while being emotional. If something felt urgent in the heat of the moment, I tried to wait it out before acting on it. In the middle of 2024, I felt the urge to move and switch jobs because I was burnt out and unsure of what I wanted, but chose to pause until things felt more settled.

So I still showed up every week. Not because I had some grand clarity about what God was doing, I didn’t. But I knew that if I let go of everything at once, I’d have nothing left to stand on. A week after that January conversation, my church hosted a conference with a speaker named Ps. Bill Johnson, and his whole message was about navigating disappointment. “Great faith comes from surrender, not striving,” he said. “Our experience doesn’t change who God is.” God knew exactly what I needed before I did, and He handed it to me before I even had the words to ask for it. He didn’t rearrange my whole life in the middle of my hardest season. He asked me to keep showing up to the parts that were already good, and let those carry me through the parts that weren’t. Sometimes faith looks like still showing up and trusting God even when you aren’t sure what He is doing.

I’m grateful that I was already planted somewhere before any of this started. I didn’t have to go scrambling to find a church home in the middle of the heaviest season of my life. Being planted doesn’t stop the storms from coming, but it makes a notable difference to already have shelter built before the rain starts, instead of trying to build it while it’s pouring.

Things looking different doesn’t automatically mean things are bad.

My family looked different after that January and it still does, but different isn’t the same as worse, and it took me a long time inside that year to believe that. Sometimes it looks like smaller family gatherings but more one-on-one time with people you love and deeper, authentic conversations about how you’re actually doing.

I used to think grief only had one shape: the kind that comes when someone dies, when a person you love is suddenly not in the world anymore. 2024 taught me otherwise. Grief is the deep sorrow that comes with missing a certain relationship, dynamic or situation, the process of longing for something that once was.

In the first half of 2024, my Uncle Rich, my dad’s brother, became my dad’s go-to person. They were constantly going out to dinner, biking, golfing, and more, my Uncle Rich helping my dad through this time since he’d gone through a divorce himself.

That July, my Uncle Rich passed away suddenly.

What sends chills down my spine is that my parents’ divorce gave my Uncle Rich and my dad more quality time together than they’d ever had, in the very months before he passed. That same season of closeness is what led my Uncle Rich to reach out to have dinner, just him, Nick, and me, something we’d never done before. Four days later, he was gone.

That grief was the kind everyone recognizes: sharp, sudden, unmistakable.

But there was a second kind of grief threaded through that whole year too, one that had actually started months before Uncle Rich passed. My parents’ divorce was its own kind of loss, quieter and harder to name, because it was the death of a situation rather than a person, the grief of a family changing shape, of a version of normal I didn’t know I’d taken for granted until it was gone.

Father’s Day that June was the first one without my mom there. I remember not knowing how it was supposed to look. Nobody had written the rules for this yet. Sometimes grief shows up on an ordinary Sunday in June, in a house that looks the same but doesn’t feel the same, grieving a version of normal that isn’t coming back. For a while, going to my dad’s house was painful because being there meant noticing everything that used to be different, one of the biggest ones being my mom’s absence.

My mind would sometimes run ahead of me into places I didn’t want to go. What would that look like if my parents started dating other people? I had to learn to catch my own thoughts before they got too far down that road and bring myself back, crossing that bridge when we get there. One day at a time, and if that was too much, one hour. If that was still too much, one minute. Jesus reminds us in Matthew 6:34 to only worry about today because tomorrow has enough trouble of its own, and that Scripture is something I’m still putting into practice.

Late February, I was in the bathroom at church and saw a sticky note someone had left on the wall. I don’t know who wrote it or why they left it there. It just said, if you feel like you’re drowning, don’t worry, your lifeguard walks on water. Nobody who left that note knew anything about my year. They weren’t writing it for me, but it was exactly what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it. God winks happen more than people realize, if you’re paying attention. There are no coincidences.

If 2024 taught me anything about people, it’s that relationships are one of the best investments you can make. The right people will show up for you in the small ordinary ways and the big ones that add up to something enormous by the end of the year.

The chaos of 2024 erupted while I was still on staff at Awaken, which felt like a landing pad looking back. There were times I got up from my desk mid-workday because the weight of everything caught up to me. Sometimes I just needed a good cry, and crying became a release valve I needed regularly. Someone would often come with me and offer whatever I needed at the time, whether that was advice, prayer or just a listening ear. There were lunches and phone calls that helped me think clearly again.

I don’t think I could have survived that year at a corporate desk job surrounded by people who didn’t know my story or care to. I was exactly where I needed to be.

I remember telling one of my close friends at the time about the situation and when I came to work the next day, she had put a Trader Joe’s bag on my desk full of my favorite things. It made me feel incredibly seen and loved.

My family members showed up for me in a way I didn’t fully expect that year, present in the ordinary in-between moments as much as the big ones, including weekly texts and regular check-ins, lunches during work, and more. One of the standout moments was in February, when I sat in my aunt’s living room with other family members who offered support and guidance. One of my cousins told me that a transition like this would probably bring up every emotion possible, that it would feel like a roller coaster, some days harder than others. Sometimes things get worse before they get better. And then there was Nick, who was building a life with me in the middle of all of it, steady in a year that had very little steadiness to offer either of us.

God continually reminded me how surrounded I am.

Not everyone who showed up for me in 2024 is still in my life today. I’ve had to learn that a season of love doesn’t need to become forever in order for it to have been meaningful. Some people are placed in your path for exactly as long as you need them to be, and that’s not a failure but the shape it was always meant to take.

If there’s one thing I’d tell anyone walking through something hard, it’s to let people in. Be honest about how you’re feeling and tell the people you love what they mean to you while you still can. There is power in saying: I’m feeling down or struggling today. Give yourself permission to fall apart. It’s okay to not be okay and know that your emotions are valid. Allow yourself to feel what you need to so you can work through it, because resisting emotions only makes them grow heavier. One friend told me that it’s okay to be sad for a while because I’m grieving a situation I’ve known for almost 30 years. I didn’t always get this right in 2024. But the moments I did are some of the ones I’m most grateful for now.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I found a Word from God I could hold onto when nothing else made sense: No matter what happens, He still has good plans for me. Not despite what happens, not once things get resolved, but in the middle of the mess, while everything is still unsettled. I didn’t come up with that on my own. I needed God to reveal it to me, because on my own I would have spent 2024 believing the opposite.

If you’re in a similar shaking season, I would recommend finding Bible verses to cling to. Memorize and repeat them until you believe them.

I also started praying specific prayers instead of vague ones. Not just “God help me,” but actual, named requests for the things I was hoping for. He cares about the details as much as the big picture, and praying specifically taught me to actually notice when those details came through.

There were two specific songs that carried me through that year. One was “I Belong to Jesus”, the reminder that even when the rain falls and the floods come and the wind blows, I’m never alone or abandoned. The other was “I’ve Witnessed It”, which says exactly what I was starting to understand about my own life. That God’s faithfulness is something you get to actually witness, over and over, until you have your own stories to tell about it. I didn’t just believe God was good in 2024. I watched Him show up, specifically, personally, over and over, until I had no choice but to believe it.

I remember Easter that year my whole family came to church which was incredibly special, and later that day I saw one of the biggest rainbows of my life, almost like God was reminding me that everything was going to be okay. If you’re paying attention, you’ll see His fingerprints everywhere.

That’s the thread running under every single one of these lessons: There are no coincidences. Not the friend who told me not to change the big things while everything else was shaking. Not my dad and Uncle Rich finding more time together in the months before he passed. Not the sticky note in a bathroom stall. I have spent a long time now collecting evidence, and every single piece of it points to the same conclusion. God didn’t cause the events of 2024 to happen, but He didn’t waste any of it. He was in it, specifically, with me, the entire time.

Throughout 2024, I heard several stories of redemption, God turning even the darkest situations around and bringing beautiful things out of them. One message that stuck with me was called Preparation for Resurrection by Ps. Alex Klott, about how we sometimes limit God to answering our prayers exactly the way we asked, when He might actually want to do something different than what we prayed for. That’s exactly what happened in my own life that year. God met me countless times at church where it felt like the message was specifically for me. Testimonies build our faith while we are waiting on God to come through for us.

I was disappointed plenty of times that year. I didn’t understand what He was doing, or why it had to look the way it looked. But I’ve learned that disappointment and trust aren’t opposites. You can hold both at once. You can say God, I don’t understand this, but I believe You’re working it together for good. That’s not spiritual bypassing, but what faith actually looks like when you can’t see the full picture yet. God uses trials to develop character and endurance that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

2024 also taught me how to stay afloat. Surviving a hard season isn’t just about getting through the big, heavy moments. It’s about building small, protected rituals that keep you tethered while everything else is in motion.

Nick and I started protecting our Monday dates like medicine. They weren’t anything extravagant or complicated, just something consistent on the calendar regardless of how heavy that week was. Sometimes that meant feeling the sun on my face, or driving to the ocean to look at something bigger than us. I didn’t know at the time how much I needed that consistency and exhale. To this day, getting out of the house and seeking beauty is something that I do to regulate myself, especially when I need a boost.

I learned what filled me up that year and I started making time for it on purpose. I stopped feeling guilty about rest and viewed it as necessary. A day off wasn’t me being lazy or falling behind. It was me making sure I had anything left to give the rest of the week.

In the middle of hard seasons, you need things to look forward to, no matter how small, that serve as bright lights in a dark tunnel. I started an exercise in the beginning of 2024 where I would write down one good thing that happened every week and put it into a jar, so I could look back and remember all of the good things taking place even in my darkest season. Practical things like this force your brain to look for the positive and remain grateful.

Worship is what actually shifted things for me. Not just in the emotional sense of feeling better for a moment, but changing my whole perspective when I stopped focusing on everything that was wrong and started dwelling on unchanging truth. It’s hard to stay in the same spiral when you’re actively declaring that God is good and faithful, even in a season that doesn’t feel any of those things yet.

The last thing 2024 taught me, and maybe the hardest one, was to release the anger and bitterness before it had the chance to take root. It would’ve been easy to hold onto resentment, toward circumstances, toward people, toward a version of my life I didn’t choose and didn’t want. But bitterness doesn’t actually protect you from anything. It just adds weight to a season that’s already heavy on its own. I had to consciously hand that over and choose to release it instead of carrying it forward into whatever came next. If something was bothering me with someone, I tried to bring it to them directly rather than letting it sit. Every time I did, the relationship came out of it deeper, not weaker. Leaving something unsaid rarely protects a relationship but delays the conversation that would have strengthened it.

2024 was the hardest year of my life, but it also handed me twenty four lessons I didn’t know I needed, each one a small piece of evidence that God is specific and intimate and present through it all.

When you’re in the pit and life feels extremely hard and your emotions, sadness or grief can feel all-consuming, you find yourself wondering “How or when will this get better?” But over two years later, I assure you that things will get better eventually and those moments are temporary. That same hard year is part of what led Nick and I to move to Rochester, one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. And somehow, the same year that broke me open also ended on a string of good things, one after another. A fall trip that gave us the clarity to make that move. A raise at work. The Wicked movie finally arrived after a year of waiting for it. A Christmas with my whole family together.

The hardest year of my life didn’t end in the wreckage it started in. It ended in redemption.

I don’t think I would trade that year for an easier one, even if I could. Because I came out of it knowing something I hadn’t known going in: that I belong to Jesus, that I’ve witnessed His faithfulness, and that no matter what happens, He still has good plans for me.

Save the image here with all 24 lessons:

By the time we sat down, I was fully prepared.

My mom wondered if she was a bad parent since I was the only kid in the audience that night. I was curious what my face looked like during the show, and my mom said that every time she glanced over, I was locked in, mesmerized, and loving every second. All the adults around us were impressed that a girl that young could sit still and stay quiet the whole time. “Your dad is such a good storyteller,” she said. I thought to myself, that’s where I got it from.

She also said, “Knowing your dad, we were probably right under the chandelier.” We laughed, because he never does anything halfway. My mom told me she felt like she was intruding on a special moment between my dad and me.

Something in me went warm as she told me. I had never heard this from my mom’s perspective before. I just knew I’d loved Phantom since before I could explain why.

I was telling Nick about this conversation when it hit me. This is what God does with all of us. He prepares us for everything we’re about to walk through. He knows the beginning from the end, and exactly what we’ll need for the road ahead. Just like my dad did, so that when I finally saw Phantom, I wasn’t afraid. I was ready to receive it. And I did, fully.

When I was little, I wanted to be Christine. I identified with characters from every story I loved and asked to be called their names. My dad wrote about it in our family Christmas letter that year: “Sydney is 5. Most recently she is ‘Christine’ from Phantom of the Opera. She is in a constant place of fantasy, always somebody else, somewhere else.” We used to reenact the mirror scene together, him playing the Phantom, me playing Christine.

So when the Phantom took my hand at Masquerade and led me down the hallway almost 25 years later, I wasn’t scared. I’d been waiting my whole life for that exact moment, and some part of me had been rehearsing for it since I was little. As the Overture started and the chandelier rose right in front of us, I felt something crack open that had been sealed shut since I was small. I looked over at my dad and his eyes were already filled with tears. He wasn’t just watching me receive this. He was right there with me, just as overwhelmed. He prepared me for that night before either of us knew it was coming.

This kept happening. Just in different rooms.

I spent a decade at Awaken Church in San Diego. It was theatrical and full throttle with production after production. For years, I loved every second of it. God used the spectacle to get me in the door, making me fall in love with His House. Once I was in, I built my foundation there, the kind that has nothing to do with lighting or staging. But I wouldn’t have appreciated a church that wasn’t aesthetic but was Spirit-filled if I hadn’t loved the aesthetic one first. I needed the full production to make me receptive enough to receive the Holy Spirit, so that when the staging fell away, I’d still go all in.

Awaken was the beach entry, offering good teaching and an invitation to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I got to ask all of my questions and wade in at my own pace. When Nick and I landed at Faith Church in Rochester, it was the deep end with no ramp or easing in. Expressive worship, praying in tongues, flag waving, as if everyone there had already received the Holy Spirit. I recognized it immediately because Awaken had already taught me how to swim.

Awaken had given me a spiritual palette without my realizing it. An environment that felt alive. Voices of both spiritual fathers and mothers, not just the men every week. We didn’t realize how rare that actually was until we found a church led by a husband and wife who both preach. A rotation of voices instead of the same person every Sunday, because empowering people was part of the culture. Room for everyone to get involved. A church willing to challenge people from the pulpit instead of staying safely seeker-friendly. When Nick and I started church hopping in Rochester, I didn’t know I was holding a checklist. I just knew when something didn’t feel right, and I knew the second something did.

At Awaken, the Young Adults Pastor at the time, Laurén, answered all of my questions about speaking in tongues. Over a decade later, at Faith Church, I had a question after a service and went looking for someone to ask. The woman who answered me, warm and patient with every question, was also named Laurén.

Here’s the part I didn’t connect until recently. Pastors Jurgen and Leanne moved to San Diego in 2005 to plant Awaken. Pastors Steve and Darla, who lead Faith Church, took it over in 2005 too. Same year but on opposite coasts. Ten years before I needed one, about twenty before the other, He was already building both rooms.

Faith Church is still a little theatrical too, just smaller and quieter. I said to Nick when we went to their Good Friday production, “Of course God brought us to a theatrical church.” God gave us a church that’s very passionate and expressive because He knows that I’m passionate and expressive. Even the women’s bathroom has chandeliers. Nobody needs a chandelier over a sink. He’s in the details, right down to the bathroom. That’s God knowing exactly what would make me feel at home.

I almost didn’t make it to February. January had me looking at flights home, craving the familiarity of San Diego. What I didn’t know is that the lowest month of the move set the table for the trip that would crack everything wide open. There’s actual science behind why Masquerade hit me the way it did. When you’re emotionally depleted, your defenses quietly abandon you. The part of your brain responsible for filtering and dampening reactions gets tired right along with you, and stops doing its job. So when something beautifully sensory arrives, there’s nothing left to soften it. It hits raw, full voltage. January didn’t just empty me. It left me unguarded.

Since our phone cameras were covered the entire night, my brain had nowhere to offload the experience. No camera to hand it to or “I’ll remember this through photos and videos.” My mind had to do all the work itself, which means it encoded everything: the music, the candlelight, the ethereal atmosphere, the hand grab. I still get a sensory hit every time I put on the Phantom score. I don’t have to remember Masquerade. I get to relive it for the rest of my life every time the Overture starts.

It’s like something in me got plugged back in. An outlet I didn’t know had gone dark, fully restored with no resistance left to slow it down.

2024 took a lot from me and forced me to adapt, watching my family change shape in ways I didn’t choose. By the time 2025 asked me to leave everything familiar and drive to the other side of the country, I already knew how to walk through uncertainty and still come out the other side as myself. The hardest season of my life turned out to be training for the bravest one.

None of it was random. Not the chandeliers, not January, not Awaken, not the decade before any of this unfolded. He was always building the next room before I knew I’d need to walk into it.

I didn’t know any of this while I was living it. Not in the audience at five, not in the pits of January or 2024, not while inside Awaken. You rarely do as it’s happening. My mom said she felt like she was intruding on something special that night under the chandelier. She was right. I just didn’t know yet that the man teaching me how to receive a story was also teaching me how to recognize the One who’d been writing mine the whole time.

Around five years old, I remember my dad tucked me in as we said our nighttime prayers. There was a pink poster on my wall with all the Disney princesses on it, and at some point I decided they needed to be included in our prayers too. So we prayed for all of them, one by one. I don’t remember thinking it was strange. They were as real to me as anyone, and since the people I loved went in my prayers, so did they.

In 2001, I drew a picture of myself with headphones on, eyes shut, completely lost in the music. Underneath it I had written that I fell in love with the music from Phantom of the Opera and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I didn’t have the words yet for what was happening to me. But the little girl in that drawing already knew.

My dad had a patient who was an amazing painter. She would paint my brother’s and my rooms in different themes, including a jungle with lots of animals. When I was in my princess phase, she painted my room like a fairytale. I can still see it: light blue skies with white clouds, green rolling hills, pink and purple castles, and flowers all around. It was as if we were stepping into a magical storybook world every time we walked into our rooms.

I’ve always felt things deeply. I think I came out of the womb that way. Stories and characters became the safe place for all of it, the container big enough to hold how intensely I experience everything. I don’t just watch a character and appreciate them from a distance. I feel them and find parts of myself living inside them, recognizing something true about who I am. For a while I thought this was a little embarrassing, maybe too much.

I’m learning to embrace it.

There are no coincidences in the stories and characters I’m drawn to. It’s a well God put inside me, and these are the five stories He used to form me.

My whole life has been a series of obsessions. The subjects change, but the intensity never does. There are five stories that made me who I am, and inside each one there are characters who, every single time, show me something I already was.

The Phantom of the Opera: My Soul

Phantom has been explaining me to myself since before I could comprehend it.

My dad introduced me to the soundtrack before we saw the show. The music came first, which is usually how I fall in love with a story. By the time I sat in that velvet seat, I already knew every note and had become familiar with the Phantom, the man behind the mask. I understood him in a way that didn’t click until recently. The obsessive creativity. Viewing beauty and music as sacred. The need to retreat into the dark to create beautiful things. The terror that if anyone truly saw him, the unmasked, unedited and too-much of him, they would run away.

What fascinates me about the Phantom character is that nobody knows who he truly is, especially in his relationship to Christine. Ghost? Mentor? Lover? Father? None of these yet all of them. I’m the same way. I don’t want to fit into one label. I’m a graphic designer but also a writer, storyteller, visual experience creator, and more. I refuse to accept just one.

And then Christine comes in, who has a gift being drawn out of her by something she can’t see, and a father who is the guiding voice underneath all of it. I have one of those too. But what I love most about her is her posture. She takes the Phantom’s hand and lets the music wash over her completely, surrounded by candlelight, overwhelmed by beauty, and fully surrendered to the feeling. That’s how I want to experience art and beauty and music. I want to step inside it, feel it in my veins, and let it overwhelm my senses.

God always knew my love of stepping inside stories and He gave me Masquerade at exactly the right time. I didn’t realize how much it would alter my brain chemistry. I’ve always believed music is spiritual, but Masquerade showed me what transcendent music feels like in your body, and that art doesn’t have to be labeled Christian to carry something sacred. That night became a reference point for the way I want to experience art forever.

There are experiences that language can’t fully hold, and Masquerade was one of them. As my dad and I descended into the Phantom’s lair surrounded by candles and music, I left my body somewhere on that escalator and didn’t come back until we walked outside. Deep inside the story and already floating, the Phantom grabbed my hand out of the crowd and led me down a hallway. As I walked behind him through a door and into the next room, I thought, I wanted to be Christine when I was little. I had been preparing for this moment my entire life. He sat me at his desk and I signed my name beside his on sheet music. The Phantom invited me into his story as a witness and writing has been flowing out of me ever since. At the end of the night, I understood something I had been circling my whole life. Stepping inside stories has been something I’ve been doing since before I could walk, and God allowed me to step into the story I love most.

The Phantom is my soul story. Read more about Masquerade and my connection to Phantom in this piece: A Safe Place to Feel Big.

Wicked: My Conscience

If Phantom is my soul, then Wicked is my conscience that reminds me to stand up for what’s right and to cherish the relationships that change us for the better.

I love Glinda for the reason most people miss her entirely. The world reads her as bubbly and sparkly and popular, and while she is all of those things, she also has a depth that most people miss. I know how it feels to be the bright one in the room and wonder if anyone will ever look underneath. I love her pink wardrobe and desire to make everything aesthetic. I love watching her swing on chandeliers and twirl down hallways. I also try to live like unapologetic aliveness is the whole point. I tell Nick all the time that I, too, came into the world by a bubble. Glinda also has one of the most satisfying character arcs. She has to go on her own journey of discovering truth and eventually stands up for what’s right.

And underneath the sparkle is Elphaba’s spine. I admire her refusal to shrink and willingness to see the truth and speak up anyway, even when it costs her everything. Like Elphaba, I feel injustice in my body before I name it in my mind. I’ve had to learn that not every battle is mine to fight and not every broken thing is mine to fix. Sometimes the bravest version of the story isn’t the dramatic exit. It’s passing the torch to the right person and walking out quietly with your integrity completely intact. There are no coincidences in the stories He gives us. “No Good Deed” became my favorite song during the peak of my burnout in San Diego. “Defying Gravity” is less a song to me and more of an anthem, carrying the feeling of refusing to accept the limits other people drew around you. I especially love to sing “Defying Gravity” while running, which is fitting because Rochester Sydney is through accepting limits and living by rules someone else made up for her.

I met Glinda in character at Universal Studios after seeing Wicked For Good with my dad the day it came out. Everyone in line to meet her had already seen it. A queue full of theater kids vibrating with feelings about the new movie, which felt exactly right. She complimented my outfit the moment I walked up. I told her I’d just seen Wicked For Good and she asked if I cried. I said yes. I told her my favorite Glinda line “I so enjoy air” which is a little niche, and she loved it. Then I asked if we could do a toss toss. I showed her mine first, and she was impressed. I told her I’d been practicing. She then taught me hers. On my way out I called her bestie and she told me I was always welcome in Oz.

Elphaba and Glinda come into each other’s lives at exactly the right time and allow each other to change for the better. God does that. He brings people into our lives with intention and “For Good” is the song that makes me reflect on every relationship that changed me.

I have 60% Glinda’s aesthetic, 40% the Phantom’s heart, and 20% Elphaba’s spine. The math comes to 120% and that is correct.

I wrote more about Wicked in my other piece Changed For Good.

The Nightmare Before Christmas: My Mythology

This is the one that has always felt most like stepping inside a story just by watching it. Something about an animated world makes the invitation feel more literal. The story begins by pulling you through a door and down into Halloween Town, introducing you to their strange new world.

Jack Skellington (otherwise known as “The Pumpkin King”) is beloved everywhere and still felt empty because he outgrew the world he was born into. When he sings his lament, standing where he was celebrated and admired yet unsatisfied, that was me in San Diego. Over six years in a role I had loved and surrounded by people who praised me, yet quietly aching for a door I hadn’t found yet. He stumbles into Christmas Town and becomes enchanted, the whole world opening up brighter than anything he expected, mirroring my Rochester experience to a tee.

Jack grabbed Christmas, trying to seize it and bend it into his own hands, and it fell apart. I’m not forcing anything but following the doors as they open. That’s why my story doesn’t end the way his does.

Jack lives in a world that separates Halloween and Christmas into different doors. I’ve always loved both seasons equally and refuse to choose between them. October and December are different parts of who I am and I don’t think I should have to pick.

There’s a Christmas letter my dad wrote when I was five. He listed the bedtime stories I made him act out, and the cast included both Phantom and Jack the Pumpkin King. Jack Skellington was also, for the record, my first crush. My coworkers at Awaken even called me the “Pumpkin Queen” and covered my desk in pumpkins for my birthday in October. Phantom and Jack have been sharing a story since before I can remember.

I met Jack and Sally at Disneyland in 2017 and my face in those photos tells you everything you need to know. I looked like someone who had just been reunited with an old friend. Every time I walk into the Haunted Mansion Holiday and the room begins to stretch, I feel myself descending into that dark magical world and the same feeling of the Masquerade descent comes over me. Dark and mysterious and beautiful and surrounded by music, as if something wonderful is waiting for me behind every door.

Hamilton: My Legacy

In August of 2015 my dad and I saw Hamilton on Broadway before the world had any idea what it was about to become. We met the original cast at the stage door after. I felt a little starstruck meeting Lin Manuel Miranda, unaware of the sensation he was going to be. My dad insisted on going even though I wasn’t sure about a rap musical, but he was right. He usually is about the stories that are going to matter. In true Sydney fashion, I fell in love with the story after having the soundtrack on repeat.

Hamilton makes me think about what I want to be known for.

I love how loud Hamilton is about what he believes. I never want to live in a way where anyone has to guess what I stand for. There’s a line in the show about standing for nothing and falling for anything, and it’s easy to drift that way, like Aaron Burr, waiting to see which way the wind blows before committing to having an opinion. I’d rather be wrong out loud than be a mystery to everyone who knows me.

I also know where I’m different from him. He couldn’t stop and wrote like the clock was against him until it was. I know when to step away and take a break from creating. I’m not writing like I’m running out of time. I write because God has been doing so much that I can’t keep it to myself.

Hamilton was obsessed with his legacy and wanted to build something that outlived him. That obsession and absorbing this music makes me think about what I want to be remembered for. I never want to be someone who lived halfheartedly. I want to be all in on Jesus, my marriage, my family, joy, and loving things loudly.

Les Misérables: My Redemption

This one works differently than the others, and that’s why I love it. Les Misérables follows Jean Valjean, a man released from nineteen years in prison who spends his life running from his past while trying to become someone worthy of the grace he was shown.

This story was also introduced to me by my dad. We saw the movie together when it came out, him whispering the story to me in the dark as we watched. In true Sydney fashion, I didn’t fall in love with the story until I saw the movie a second time, after I’d had the music on repeat.

I don’t see myself in a single character so much as ponder what Jean Valjean’s story is trying to teach me. His life gets rewritten by one act of grace from a man who had every reason to turn him in and didn’t. That is the entire gospel of the show in one scene. I do ache for Éponine though, watching her love someone who never loves back, thinking that she deserves to be seen and chosen. That ache is its own kind of mirror.

I was in a high school production of Les Misérables, singing in the ensemble and playing the old woman who cuts Fantine’s hair. Then comes Ramin Karimloo, who we discovered through the 25th Anniversary Phantom recording that sparked my dad’s and my first NYC trip to see him as Jean Valjean on Broadway. We had to go back because our first attempt to see him was an understudy, and on our third time we got to meet him at the stage door. I asked him whether he preferred playing the Phantom or Jean Valjean. He said Jean Valjean. He was playing Jean Valjean at the time, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. Seeing a show as intense and emotional and full throttle as Les Misérables from the front rows is a life changing experience, my top theatre experience after Masquerade.

What All Five of Them Have in Common

Every character I love shares one quality: They feel too big for the world they were born into. Jack outgrows Halloween Town. Hamilton outgrows his circumstances. The Phantom outgrows the lair. Elphaba outgrows Oz. Valjean outgrows his past. And I outgrew San Diego, not because anything was wrong with it, but because there was a door I hadn’t walked through yet.

There is a question buried inside Phantom that has fascinated me my entire life. Who is the Angel of Music, really? What is the force that sees a gift inside someone before anyone else does, drawing it out of them, insisting they were made for more than the life they are currently living? I used to think it was just a beautiful idea inside a story I loved. But Christine sings about her father who spoke of an angel. Mine did too. He just didn’t know that’s what he was doing.

I think I know the answer now. Jesus has been speaking to me in my own specific language since I was five years old, through the exact stories He knew I would love, and He has never once asked me to be less of myself to follow Him. Throughout the Bible, Jesus speaks in parables to reveal truths about life. He has always been a storyteller. My dad, who first led me to all of these stories, told me once that little Sydney would thrive when I could be fully myself. He was telling me the truth about how I was made. Rochester has brought the full Sydney back. The Angel of Music draws out what’s already inside you. That’s what He’s been doing with me since I was five years old.

His message was called The Advantage. I had literally set the stage for my own yes.

That moment on June 18th, 2025 was the clearest confirmation in a five-year story that God was writing. Looking back now from Rochester, New York, where Nick and I have lived for eight months and are closing on our first home, I can see His fingerprints on all of it. The timing. The details. The slow, specific, patient way He moved us toward something we couldn’t fully see yet.

The Wooing

It started with fall.

Nick and I have always been drawn to seasons. For years we drove to Big Bear for fall color, to Julian and Mount Laguna to see snow, because San Diego made you earn what the East Coast simply handed you.

In October 2021, we took our first New England road trip, something I’d been dreaming about and saving up for since earlier that year. We flew into Rochester and used a family car to drive through Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut. I fell in love with everything the East Coast offered that San Diego never could. The seasons, the history, and the feeling of crisp fall air.

Between the striking display of colors, the covered bridges, and the Hallmark towns, I felt right at home there.

We went back in October of 2022. And again in October 2024 during what had been the hardest year of my life. After months of significant loss, shifting family dynamics, and more relational heartbreak than I knew how to carry, I was running on empty and couldn’t tell what I wanted. Whether it was a move, a new job, or an emotional reset, I needed to clear my head.

So we spent a week driving through Vermont and New Hampshire followed by two weeks in Rochester. We visited The Father’s House one Sunday, which was fine but not quite what we were looking for, and figured that if we ever did land here, that was probably the best Rochester had to offer.

We stayed long enough to feel what being far from everything familiar would be like. Being thousands of miles away didn’t fix any of it or give me a clear answer on what our next steps were. But it gave me beauty and breathing room. So I did the only thing I knew to do: I held it out with open hands and left the door cracked.

I realized later that God used every single trip to loosen something in me. Every October I spent on the East Coast, I came home a little less convinced that San Diego was the whole story. I would send family members pictures of me surrounded by Vermont foliage and get responses like: “I think you were born in the wrong state!” Rochester kept appearing, as a base camp, as a quick stop, as the city where Nick’s family lived, as the backdrop of a cousin’s wedding in August 2024 where I casually glanced at house prices and thought, wait.

He was planting a seed. He was just being patient about it.

The Sudden Movement

For a long time, Nick was a firm no. He’d grown up in Rochester and had his reasons for leaving. I kept the door open quietly and prayed a simple prayer: God, make us of one mind if this is where we’re supposed to be.

Then May 2025 happened, and God moved suddenly.

My mom visited Rochester with us over Mother’s Day weekend. She fell in love with it immediately. Sitting in my in-laws’ living room, she turned to me and said, “Should we look at houses?” And we did. Nick’s sister Tori was even recommending the best areas to live based on the school districts.

I cried multiple times on that trip. Not because I was sad, but because suddenly everyone around me was ready and I was still asking God if He was sure.

What caught me off guard wasn’t my own reaction. It was Nick’s. The man who had said absolutely not was now saying yes, and he knew it was God because of his own resistance. That’s how you know something has shifted. When the person who was most opposed becomes the one moving forward without being convinced.

Between May and October, confirmations stacked up faster than I could track them. A pros and cons list that kept pointing in one direction. A voice memo sent to our pastors seeking counsel. And then June 18th, Pastor Jon described a question mark in a bubble that pops, leaving a clear answer. He said: Trust your intuition. It’s the Holy Spirit. You can’t go the wrong way.

We texted our pastors in July: we’re moving to Rochester in October. It was real.

Part of what propelled me forward was a fear of regrets. I didn’t want to look back someday and wonder what would have happened if we’d been brave enough to go. I watched people I loved who had stayed in the familiar and I didn’t want that to be our story. And I reminded myself that we could always move back if we didn’t like it.

I had lived in San Diego my whole life, and somewhere along the way I realized I was ready for more than familiar. We craved a slower pace of life, a yard for our future kids, and to build wealth without burning out just to afford rent. We wanted out of the bubble and into something bigger, newer, and more ours.

After months of friendship disappointment, that spring I joined a friendship-building group in San Diego called Real Roots that was basically speed dating for friends. It gave me the courage to say out loud: I’m looking for new friends. I didn’t know I was in boot camp. There are no coincidences.

The transition season that followed was one of the most emotionally full periods of my life. We sold almost everything in our apartment and bought a van that we named Donovan. We said goodbye to ten years at Awaken, where I’d worked as a graphic designer, sent off with flowers, prophetic words, and a slideshow of photos from all my years there. I later learned that ten is the Biblical number meaning completion of a season, a cycle fully finished. God didn’t just close a chapter. He waited until it was whole. October 2015 to October 2025. Ten years, to the month. And October has always been my favorite month. My team took me to Julian for a fall send-off complete with apple orchards and pumpkin patches. My love of all things autumn had become a running joke, and they leaned into it beautifully.

Between the crowds, the prices, the weather that never changed, I was ready to leave San Diego. I was so over it that I wrote San Diego a sassy breakup letter, just to get it out of my system.

A few days before we left, friends and family gathered in my dad’s backyard for a going away party with a taco truck and everyone I loved. On October 5th, my birthday and four days before driving away, I had one of the best birthdays I can remember. Church with Nick and my dad, brunch with my favorite people, a pumpkin patch, and dinner at my mom’s house. It felt like San Diego was sending me off well. The week before we left, my cousin Jamie and Aunt Jen surprised me with a Wicked singalong and matching embroidered sweaters, pink for me, green for her, both reading “For Good”. The night before we drove away, our church gifted us a white blanket embroidered in gold: We love you, Nolans. Revelation 21:5. Behold, I make all things new.

On October 9th, 2025, we got in Donovan and started driving east.

The Landing

We drove across the country in seven days and God scored the whole journey. We left San Diego and watched the landscape shift underneath us. Red Rocks in Sedona, the Colorado mountains, the flat, windy plains of Nebraska, and a Hallmark main street in Galena, Illinois that felt like a preview of everything we were driving toward.

By the time we crossed into New York, I was crying on the phone with my parents. Not from grief exactly, but from the weight of it being real. I already missed them and it had only been a week. Then as we drove farther east, the leaves turned red and orange and the temperature started dropping, something in me exhaled.

We pulled into Rochester on October 15th, right into peak foliage. God Himself was softening the landing. I had slept terribly most of the road trip, but as soon as we arrived I had weeks of great sleep.

Our first weekend we drove to Letchworth State Park and stood at a waterfall surrounded by color in every direction. But what caught me off guard wasn’t the planned stops. It was the drive to the grocery store. The commute to nowhere in particular. The leaves made everything cinematic, every errand gorgeous, every ordinary moment wrapped in gold and red. San Diego is beautiful, but it never changes.

I kept looking out the window thinking, I can’t believe we live here.

I knew we’d be staying with Nick’s parents for a few months while we saved for a house, so I made his childhood bedroom ours. I hung gallery walls, bought a new bedspread, arranged photos, and filled the shelves with little ceramic houses and personal touches. I was staying in someone else’s home, but I was going to live like it was mine.

God didn’t just bring us here in my favorite season. He kept the beauty coming so fast I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone spiral. October was all color and wonder with foliage everywhere. November brought a day trip to Ithaca, waterfalls and small towns. On November 10th I woke up to my first snowfall here. I ran outside to take a selfie and sent it to everyone back in California, where it was still 85 degrees. The fall leaves hadn’t fully dropped yet, so there was snow on top of still-red branches. Two seasons at once. I didn’t know the world could do that.

Right before we flew to San Diego, Nick and I bundled up and walked through a Christmas market in Fairport. I told him, I thrive in the cold. He laughed and said we’d see if I felt the same way in January.

That same month we flew home to San Diego because my dad and I already had our Wicked Universal Studios trip on the calendar. Once November hit, I was so consumed with excitement about the second Wicked movie that I could barely think about anything else. Honestly, knowing I would see my loved ones again the next month was what got me through the homesick days of the transition. God being who He is, He turned a calendar item into a lifeline. We spent the second half of November in San Diego where we did the Christmas festivities I love there AND came home to Rochester for December. I didn’t have to choose.

December arrived and Rochester became a snow globe. The Christmas Village downtown was all string lights and white market tents, fire heaters glowing, the city skyline watching over all of it. We went on a neighborhood Christmas lights crawl and found a local festive bar. We spent an afternoon at the George Eastman Museum and walked through a snow-covered Christmas tree farm in Pittsford. Christmas Eve was a candlelight service and matching pajamas. The weekend after Christmas, we drove to Skaneateles for our anniversary, where we were met with a frozen lake, a white gazebo, and snow falling on a small town that was straight out of a storybook. Out of His kindness, God kept filling my cup with things that were sparkly and cinematic. He kept handing me the next beautiful thing before I had space to grieve the last one.

Then January hit me like a train.

There were days in January where I looked at buying a ticket home just to get a break from temperatures under 30 degrees. The cold was a culture shock and the loneliness was real. January also came with its own paperwork version of hard. Getting a new license, figuring out health insurance, hitting wall after wall to get the practical pieces in order. We tried a small group that just wasn’t the right fit. Nothing was easy yet.

In the middle of one of my harder January days, I called my mom in tears. She asked me casually if I liked watercolor. A few days later, a set showed up at the door. Just her knowing exactly what I needed and making me feel seen.

What got me through was knowing my dad and I had a New York City trip in early February and Masquerade tickets, an immersive Phantom of the Opera experience. Having something on the calendar to look forward to was everything.

So I kept going.

Our NYC trip pulled me out of the worst of it. We saw theatre, walked through sensory art, stood in Central Park in the snow, and more. My spark had started coming back on January 31st at ARTISANworks in Rochester, and NYC blew it wide open. A week after I returned from NYC, God spoiled us with a cruise because that’s just who He is. He knew I needed sparkle AND sunshine. He loves to take care of His kids.

We came with a list of churches to try. Every Sunday became its own small experiment. Some we liked, some we knew immediately we’d never return to. We landed at Northridge for a season. It was good, but not quite right. We needed more Holy Spirit and deeper messages. I looked up Spirit-filled churches and found Faith Church on Instagram. Nick checked out a few messages, loved that it was led by a husband and wife together, and encouraged me to listen too. Within minutes I could tell the difference. There was a message about being filled with the Holy Spirit that carried the same theology I’d grown up on at Awaken. It felt like eating a meal I had missed. Like an old family recipe.

What I didn’t know until recently, looking through old screenshots, was that Faith Church had shown up as the top recommendation in a search I’d done back in July. It was never on our Sunday rotation. But it was already marked.

Faith Church became home. I’m now volunteering as a graphic designer there, similar to Awaken but in a new place with new people. And slowly new ones are taking root here. My first solo coffee date in Rochester was with a girl named Kaci from a women’s Bible study that I joined. I told her honestly that I needed friends and asked if we could aim to hang out once a month. She received it naturally and we scheduled a double date for the next month. I realized later that the girl I connected most with in my Real Roots San Diego group was also named Casey. God doesn’t waste the rehearsal.

In 2019, right after our wedding, Ps. Jurgen spoke over us: When you build His house, He builds your house. We spent years at Awaken building, serving, showing up. And now God is building ours. In a couple of weeks, Nick and I will close on a fixer upper. We can’t wait to transform it into something beautiful and cozy and completely ours.

Rochester keeps surprising me. Discovering all the coffee shops here has been a delight. Steven James and Albunn have become my favorites, the kind of places you settle into for hours with a laptop and a latte. We got museum memberships because, as I told Nick, we are museum people now that we live somewhere cold. The architecture stops me in my tracks on a regular basis with its stone churches, brick buildings, and ironwork gates. The neighborhoods are full of charm and character. Spring in Highland Park gave us blooming trees so full they look fake. Fields of dandelions so vast that we pulled over just to stand in and document them. Letchworth in every season. Lake Canandaigua on a grey afternoon. The diners. The jazz lounges. The moody, rainy days that are, it turns out, peak conditions for someone who loves to write.

I came here for the fall. I stayed for all of it.

I used to say we would never move somewhere without a good church already waiting. I did it anyway, trusting God with an open mind. And God gave us exceedingly, abundantly more than anything we could have asked for or imagined. He had Faith Church already marked for us. He had Kaci already practicing her name with a different spelling in San Diego. He had the house already waiting in Irondequoit. We just had to get in the van.

I tell Nick often that moving here is one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Not because it was easy. But because on the other side of the uncertainty, I feel more free, more creative and more like myself than I have in years. My soul needed the space. The distance gave me clarity I couldn’t find in the familiar.

“If you’re worried about the cost of going for it, you should see the price of staying exactly where you are.”

The fears are real. The doubts are real. And so is what’s waiting on the other side.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to be willing to get in the van.

There was no lightning bolt or booming voice from the sky. I just woke up one morning in my dorm room at Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU), looked at the clock, and realized I was excited. No obligation, guilt, or negotiation with myself about whether I had time. Just looking forward to going, like I had plans with a friend I actually wanted to see.

I remember thinking, When did that happen?

Because for most of my life, that was not the relationship I had with Sundays.

I grew up going to a nice church in Rancho Bernardo. I want to make that clear before I say anything else. It was a good church where people loved Jesus and helped the community. My parents built friendships there and it’s where I learned the basics about the Bible.

But it was my parents’ church. It wasn’t mine.

I went because my family went. None of it was a choice I had made for myself. It was the wallpaper of my childhood, and you don’t choose wallpaper, you just grow up looking at it.

By the time I was in high school, I was a Cheaster. Christmas and Easter only. And honestly, the reason I started showing up more wasn’t a spiritual awakening. It was that I was applying to PLNU, my dream school, and I needed a letter of recommendation from a pastor. I started going more regularly because I needed someone to know my name well enough to sign their name to a piece of paper for me.

I signed up to volunteer in Sunday school as well because I planned to major in Child Development. Another check mark for my resume and applications. Sometimes I would serve with the kids then leave to go shopping instead of attending the second service. I felt vaguely guilty about it, but mostly relieved.

Somewhere in the process, I got baptized. Not because I’d had a big moment with God. I was looking for ways to get involved, saw water baptism, and thought, “Oh, I should probably do that.” So I got baptized in the ocean, still not totally sure what it symbolized. Nobody really taught me.

There were moments before Awaken when God still met me. One Sunday they were playing the song “Oceans” on repeat during a ministry moment, and I started crying and couldn’t stop. I had no idea why. I was just responding to something I couldn’t see.

I kept a prayer journal that year. I didn’t know how to pray out loud yet. Nobody had taught me, and the idea of speaking to God out loud felt too intimidating. So I wrote my prayers down instead.

I also tried reading the Bible on my own around that time. I bought a beginner’s Bible with daily applications. I started in Genesis and was completely lost a few chapters in. I’d see people on Instagram post about their Bible revelations and wonder why that wasn’t happening to me. I remember breaking down in the car with my dad, and he encouraged me to start in the New Testament where I’d understand more.

Looking back now, I can see God was planting seeds. I just didn’t have the soil yet.

If you’ve ever felt that mixture of guilt and relief, guilt that you weren’t more interested in God, relief that you didn’t have to sit through another sermon, I want you to know that I was right there with you.

I wasn’t on fire. I was itching to get on with my day.

Then I went to college.

PLNU sits on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It had been my dream school for years, and on paper, it was perfect: a small, private Christian school 35 minutes from home, with the program I wanted. When I got in, I was certain it was where God wanted me. So I packed up, moved into the dorms, and waited for everything to fall into place.

It didn’t.

I was lonely and sad. Freshmen can’t have cars on campus because there’s not enough room, which meant I was stuck there most weekends with a homesickness I couldn’t drive away from. I kept praying the same prayer over and over: God, You brought me here. Show me why.

I tried other churches and got rides when I could, but I didn’t want to keep asking people to drive me places. Oftentimes I would just stay on campus. Sunday mornings came and went.

Then a friend invited me to Awaken Church (C3 Church San Diego at the time). It was a 5PM service with a college crowd, and a big group from Point Loma went every week. They had a carpool system from campus, so rides were always secured.

Most of my PLNU friends had tried Awaken before me and hadn’t loved it. They said it was weird, so I had my own quiet hesitations.

But before I even walked through the doors, a girl named Wendie offered me a ride. She said she wanted to get to know me on the drive. I barely knew her. I cannot tell you what that meant to me as a sad, lonely 19 year old who was wondering why God had brought me here. Someone wanted to know me.

I kept going because of the carpool. I didn’t have to figure out a ride or bother anyone, just walk to the cross at 4:15 and get in the car. God used the fact that I was a freshman without transportation and a group of students with extra seats. That’s how I got to the church that would change my life.

I walked into Awaken Church on October 18th, 2015.

The worship was alive, hands up everywhere around me, and people singing like they were engaged. Not watching a performance, but responding to something I couldn’t quite name yet.

Pastor Matt Tuggle was preaching that night. He and his wife Laurén led the young adults ministry at Awaken, and his message was called Unfiltered, part of a series called Facetagramiscope. The tagline was: we can filter our lives like a photo, but only God can perfect our image. I felt seen in a way I hadn’t expected to feel seen at church.

At the end of the service, there was an altar call. Anyone who wanted to give their life to Jesus or come back to faith was invited to raise their hand and walk to the front. I raised my hand and went down. They brought me to a small room to meet me, gave me a Bible, prayed for me, and offered next steps.

It was overwhelming, but in a good way. Like walking into a room where the lights were brighter than I was used to and realizing my eyes had been adjusting to dim for a long time.

After the service, the young adults went out to dinner, which was a weekly thing. I sat next to a girl named Brittany who wanted to know everything about my life: where I was from, what I was studying, about my family and upbringing. I cannot tell you what that meant to me to be on the receiving end of genuine curiosity. Someone wanted to know me and truly cared about me.

My friends were right, Awaken Church is different. But different is exactly what I needed.

I went back the next week. And the next. And the next.

The longer I was at Awaken, the more I picked up on things I had never heard mentioned in church before. They talked about physical healing as something that still happens today. They taught about prophecy, speaking in tongues, and people being slain in the Spirit, meaning getting prayed for and falling backward under the weight of God’s presence.

I had so many questions. What actually happens inside you when you’re praying in tongues? Why do people sometimes fall over when they’re getting prayed over? Is this in the Bible? Is this even real?

Awaken let me ask all of them. Nobody acted like I was being disrespectful for asking and every question was answered with openness. I spent almost a year just watching, asking, and learning. I would see something happen in a service and then ask about it later. They’d explain it without making me feel like I was stupid for asking.

My Campus Pastor at the time, Jon Heinrichs, soon became one of my favorite speakers. He preached about the Holy Spirit constantly, and taught about Him in a way that made everything click for me, like a door I had been walking past my whole life.

He preached a sermon about how being a Christian who hasn’t experienced the fullness of the Holy Spirit is like having a pile of unopened presents under the tree. The gifts are already yours. They were bought for you, you just haven’t unwrapped them yet. I had been a Christian my whole life and had never opened a single one.

That image rearranged something in me. I realized that everything Jesus did in the Bible was available to us today. Jesus said that we will cast out demons in His Name, speak in new tongues, and place our hands on the sick, and they will be healed (Mark 16:17-18). The Bible itself was coming alive to me for the first time.

I got filled with the Holy Spirit on October 1st, 2016 at Cherish Women’s Conference.

Pastor Mike Connell spoke, a lovely old man who had this way of making weighty Bible topics feel lighter with his joyful presence. His whole message was about being filled with the Holy Spirit: what it is, why it matters, what it feels like, why so many believers never receive it. He told stories and explained praying in tongues, illustrating what Scripture says about it. By the end of his message, something in me that had been hesitating for almost a year just… settled. I was ready.

He led us in a prayer after, walking us through a simple four-step process. I opened my mouth and it came out of me like water. My first thought was: Oh! This is it. This is so cool.

It wasn’t theatrical, scary, or like trance or anything I had to perform. It was a language I didn’t know flowing out, like a well inside me finally getting opened.

I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever experienced.

Ten years later, I still think it’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.

The atmosphere at Awaken was different: buzzing, electric, and the preaching was alive. The worship felt like the ceiling was thinner than usual. There were multiple instances where it felt like the book of Acts was playing out right in front of me: miracles breaking out, the Holy Spirit disrupting the service, an environment of expectancy like God could do anything in that moment.

The first time I experienced it, I thought maybe it was just Awaken. Then my husband and I moved across the country, from San Diego to Rochester, New York. We tried multiple churches in search of that same atmosphere we experienced at Awaken. Then we found Faith Church. From the first message I heard, I felt it again. Same fire but in a different city, different building, and with different people. Same Holy Spirit.

That’s when I realized how many people are sitting in churches without Him. Going through the motions, checking the boxes, wondering why their flame always feels dim.

It was never the building. It was never about Awaken or San Diego specifically. The Holy Spirit is why a room feels like Heaven is leaning in. He’s the difference between a church that’s nice and a church that’s alive.

Pastor Jon Heinrichs had a name for it: full-contact Christianity. A faith where miracles, deliverance, and healing aren’t just sermon topics but realities you walk with every day of the week.

When I first started experiencing this, I felt a little robbed. Like I had been a Christian for almost two decades and nobody had told me there was a feast on the other side of a door I’d been walking past my whole life. I kept thinking, why didn’t anyone tell me about this?

If you’ve never experienced the Holy Spirit like this, I think you’re missing out. Not because you did anything wrong, but because a lot of churches don’t teach about it. Some don’t know how or are uncomfortable with how it looks. Somewhere along the way, the supernatural aspects of the Gospel got quietly filed away as things that happened in the early church and don’t happen anymore. A couple of generations grew up Christian without ever hearing that the gifts are still under the tree. But it’s real, it’s biblical, and it was always meant to be yours. There’s a church out there that will light your fire. You just might not have found it yet. And the secret ingredient? It’s Him.

Let me clarify what I mean when I say “being filled with the Holy Spirit.” When you accept Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes to live in you. But being filled is a separate experience where you invite Him to empower you and activate the gifts He has for you. In Acts 19, Paul meets believers who had been water baptized but hadn’t received the Holy Spirit yet, so he lays hands on them, they’re filled, and they start speaking in tongues. Even Jesus told His disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit before doing ministry (Acts 1:4-8). If the men who walked with Jesus still needed to be filled with the Holy Spirit to fulfill their calling, so do we.

The gifts are still under the tree.

If church has been boring, if it has felt like a box you check, if you have been running on empty and couldn’t figure out why, I want you to consider that you may not have seen everything yet. There is a church out there that will light your fire. You just might not have found it yet.

And the secret ingredient is not a building or a city, it’s the Holy Spirit. He is still being poured out all over the world on people who walked in unsure and walked out differently.

This is the first piece in a series I’m calling The Missing Pieces, essential elements of Christianity that most of us were never told about. Over the next several months, I’ll be writing about knowing God, being born again, baptism in the Holy Spirit, spiritual warfare, walking in power, calling, and abundance. This piece was the door. The series is the rooms.

I’m so glad you’re here.

Bible References: Mark 16:17-18, John 14:12, Acts 1:4-8, Acts 2:1-12, 17-21, Acts 19:1-7, Romans 8:26-27, 1 Corinthians 4:20, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, 1 Corinthians 14:2-4

I knew a few of the songs and understood, vaguely, that Wicked did something to people. That changed for me in November of 2023 when my dad and I saw Wicked on Broadway. McKenzie Kurtz was playing Glinda, and from the moment she floated down in her bubble I was hooked. I turned to my dad somewhere in the middle of act one and thought, Oh. I get it now!

Then 2024 hit. The ground shifted. Things I thought were steady weren’t, and I didn’t quite know how to find my footing. One of the things I held onto were glimmers of light and things to look forward to. Part one of the Wicked movie coming in November 2024 was one of those glimmers.

It began on Superbowl Sunday of February 2024. As someone who couldn’t care less about sports, I was there for the company and the snacks. And maybe a few of the commercials. I heard rumors about the first Wicked trailer playing during the Superbowl. I remember standing in the home theater at my dad’s house, surrounded by family and seeing the bright colors of Oz come across the giant screen, filling the dark room. I gasped, not knowing what to do with myself.

For those who haven’t seen Wicked, it’s a prequel to the Wizard of Oz and explains the backstory of Elphaba, the wicked witch and her friendship with Glinda. It’s funny and heartbreaking and more layered than you’d expect. The closing duet, “For Good”, is the moment where Elphaba and Glinda say goodbye, acknowledging that their friendship changed each of them for the better.

Wicked first came into my life when I was in fifth grade, when my family made a trip to Hollywood to see the production live. I don’t remember much besides “Defying Gravity”, the showstopper that closes act one. It wasn’t until years later in November 2023 that it truly became mine. My first introduction to the song “For Good” was hearing it in the video slideshow my dad put together for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. I would listen to it periodically throughout high school, usually met with waterworks.

My Uncle Rich, my dad’s brother, was the definition of “funcle” and one of my favorite people growing up. My first memory of him was when I was around four years old and he came over and let me put stickers all over his face. He was one of the silliest people I’ve ever met and would tell the best stories that usually went on too long. He loved music and would play the guitar and sing at our family gatherings. He and I would sing “American Pie” together with him on guitar.

He was also a big fan of Oz. Wicked was his favorite musical and he took his daughters to see it live multiple times. I found out later that he even had an Oz-themed room in his old house.

On July 15th, 2024, my mom called to tell us Uncle Rich had a sudden heart attack and probably wasn’t going to make it. We later went to say goodbye to him in the hospital surrounded by other family members. I had seen him the day before, and a few days prior Nick and I had dinner with him. Just the three of us, which we had never done until July 11th, 2024. It still gives me chills thinking about it. There are no coincidences.

We had his burial in September just with our family members. My cousin made a personalized box with his ashes and the lyrics “Music makes pictures and often tells stories. All of it magic and all of it true. And all of the pictures and all of the stories. All of the magic, the music is you.” It was a wooden box engraved in gold with a guitar, musical notes, and the Emerald City skyline. We played a few songs including “For Good”, knowing that he changed all of us for the better.

But even in the middle of all that 2024 brought, Wicked kept showing up. Breadcrumbs throughout the year with various trailers, behind-the-scenes clips, song previews and more. Snippets of joy in the midst of heaviness.

Then my birthday came around. It started with an Instagram post. I saw that Universal was doing a whole Wicked experience with displays and themed activities and sent it to my dad immediately. We looked at the calendar, blocked off the dates, and it became my birthday gift: an overnight trip to Universal to celebrate Wicked and getting away just the two of us. We drove up Sunday, stayed the night, and planned to spend Monday in the park soaking up everything Wicked days before the movie came out.

Seeing the movie at Universal Studios wasn’t the original plan. Then I got an ad about an Amazon Prime early screening offer. The movie didn’t release until Friday, but Monday night there was a showing at the AMC at Universal CityWalk. We were already going to be right there. So I called my dad. “Dad. What if we saw the movie that night?” I made that call from Rochester, a city I didn’t know would become my home a year later. The trip that was already special became something else entirely. A day in the park, followed by an early screening four days before the rest of the world got to see it.

My dad and I drove up from San Diego on Sunday, stopping at a gorgeous restaurant in Orange County on the way. A little preview of the celebration ahead, drinking wine and looking at panoramic views of Orange Hills. We checked into the Sheraton on the Universal property that night, and I remember settling into the M Club, Elf playing quietly on the TV, feeling this warm anticipation. Tomorrow was the day. I could hardly sleep that night.

Monday was perfect. The weather was the kind that feels like a gift, high 60s and sunny. In true Sydney fashion, I had my full Wicked outfit on: a green sweater with a pink W and a bedazzled pink headband. We had lunch at an Oz-themed café and walked through displays that felt like stepping inside the world I’d been dreaming about all year. My outfit kept starting conversations with strangers stopping us, finding out we had early screening tickets that night, equal parts jealous and delighted. One woman working there even handed us a free skip-the-line pass as if God was saying, let them through.

At one point my head hurt from my headband, so my dad put it on as a joke. We bought a water bottle while my dad stood there in my pink Glinda-coded headband. I was losing it. The vendor mentioned he wasn’t an Ariana Grande fan, watched our disappointed faces and gave us a discount. My Wicked outfit provided for us that day in ways I didn’t anticipate.

I kept checking the ticket for our movie showing. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening.

That evening we had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in CityWalk. Many of the restaurants had featured pink and green items. I ordered the Wicked margarita, which came with a little Elphaba straw. I remember my dad looking up the plot of Wicked over dinner as a refresher of the story. Then we got some VooDoo doughnuts and walked to the theater. There was a sign on the door: closed to the public. Wicked screenings only. Everyone inside that dark, beautiful theater had chosen to be here early. We were VIPs. A room full of people who already loved something, gathering to finally see Oz come alive on the big screen.

When the lights went down, I felt immediate joy and wonder bubbling up inside me, the opening pulling me straight into Oz. I was transported. I’ve seen many musicals live, but never like this where the magic of a live show is replicated on screen. I turned to my dad during the “Wizard and I”, about twenty minutes into the movie and whispered I already love this.

There’s a scene in the movie during the song “Popular” where Glinda swings on a chandelier and twirls down a hallway singing, unapologetically herself with unfiltered joy. I watched that and felt something change within me. I didn’t want to just watch her. I wanted to BE her. Not the pink dresses or perfect hair, but that specific quality of aliveness. Something in me recognized it and thought, Yes. that. I want that back.

I think that’s what God was doing the whole time. Not just giving me something beautiful to look forward to in a hard year. He was using a pink, chandelier-swinging, hallway-twirling Glinda to remind me of something I had lost somewhere in the heaviness of 2024. That joy like that was still available to me. That I was allowed to take up that much space. That the most fully alive version of me was still in there, waiting.

When the movie ended, my dad and I walked out floating. We did our favorite post show activity: a full debrief session, sharing our favorite parts and replaying everything we’d just seen. We felt slightly nervous going in because musical movies can be hit or miss. But it hadn’t just met our expectations, it exceeded them entirely. We felt light in a way that was hard to explain, like something had been lifted after the heaviest year of our lives.

We drove home listening to the soundtrack and that’s when I fell in love with the music. Before seeing the movies, I only listened to “For Good”, “Popular” and “Defying Gravity”. Now every song had come alive to me in a new way. And then for weeks afterward, I stayed there in that lightness. I remember telling Nick, I haven’t been in a bad mood since seeing Wicked.

I saw it three more times that first week. Twice more in December. I took everyone I loved into that theater including friends, family members, and anyone who would say yes to coming with me. I listened to the soundtrack on loop and felt genuinely joyful for the first time in months. I am aware that five viewings is not normal behavior. But I think that’s kind of the point.

I hadn’t felt that level of obsession since middle school Sydney was seeing Twilight in theaters multiple times. I didn’t realize until Wicked how much I had missed her. For a long time other things had become my whole world and identity. Then Wicked came along and woke something else back up. That unashamed, fully committed, whole heart girl. She hadn’t gone anywhere. She was just waiting.

What followed was a whole era. Nick surprised me with tickets to see the touring production live in San Diego in February 2025 because he knows exactly who he married. A painting class where Nick and I painted Glinda and Elphaba. My Aunt Jen and cousin Jamie watching it in my dad’s home theater with a pink and green snack board. More singalongs, more viewings, more people I loved getting to experience something that lights me up. God didn’t just give me one good day in a hard year. He opened a floodgate.

But the moment that lives at the top of the list happened a week before Nick and I moved to Rochester. My Aunt Jen told me to keep the night of October 2nd free and to bring a jacket because we’d be outside. I suspected it might be Wicked because I knew there was a singalong happening at the Vista Moonlight Amphitheater. We had dinner first with me, my dad, Aunt Jen and cousin Jamie. That’s where Jamie surprised me with the matching sweaters. Pink for me, green for her, both embroidered with the words “For Good”.

For Good. The song from my grandparents’ 50th anniversary video. The song we played at Uncle Rich’s burial and during his celebration of life. And now the phrase placed on my body, by the people who know me best, one week before I left San Diego.

When I think about all the special things people have done for me, that night is at the top. My cup was overflowing. Not just because of the surprise or the sweaters or the singalong, but because of what it meant. These people saw me. They knew exactly what this musical meant to me, exactly what this season had cost me, and they wrapped me in it before I walked into the next chapter.

A year later I flew back to San Diego from Rochester specifically to see the second movie, Wicked For Good with my dad at Universal Studios. Because some traditions are worth the flight. Because some things God plants in you at age four with Barbies and a Halloween costume, and tends for twenty five years, and then uses in your hardest season to remind you who you are.

I grew up wanting to be Dorothy. Brave enough to follow the yellow brick road, desperate enough to find her way home. But God had other plans. Elphaba on the inside, Glinda on the outside. The one who twirls down hallways with unfiltered joy and the one who finally, after everything, stops asking for permission to fly.

None of it matched yet all of it belonged.

Then we went further into the space where each room was pure chaotic maximalism, but it drew me in anyways. Something about the art there brought back memories of pieces from my childhood home or reminded me of computer games I used to play. Hallways and endless rooms filled with art. So much so that no wall or section was left untouched. Makes sense for the little girl who loved Alice in Wonderland to feel at home with ARTISANworks. That afternoon, I made a playlist and called it “SparkJoy.” I felt a flicker of Sydney start to come back.

Six days later, my dad and I were in New York City. Walking out onto the street after Masquerade felt transcendent. We kept looking at each other and laughing in disbelief, asking the same question over and over: what did we just experience? The night air was refreshing as we walked back to our hotel. Strangely, I don’t remember feeling cold at all, even though it was February in New York. We returned to the Marriott Marquis still floating, already texting family and looking forward to telling everyone.

Over the next few days, I told the story of the Phantom choosing me out of the crowd at least seven times. Every time my dad explained the scenes from that night, he lit up the same way I do. That’s how I knew something real had happened. Not just to me, but to us. When I got home to Rochester, I was still lit up. My in-laws, my cousin Ashley, my friend Chloe over FaceTime; everyone got the story. Every single time I told it, I felt it all over again. I couldn’t stop giving it away because it had given me so much.

The morning after Masquerade, we were still foggy from the fever dream and barely any sleep, but I didn’t want to recover.

I wanted more.

We walked into the Arte Museum. Each room was a different world. Roses projected from floor to ceiling, so large and vivid like they were blooming in real time. Monet’s garden wrapped around every wall until the flowers were at our feet. Van Gogh’s Starry Night was so enormous that we were standing inside the brushstrokes. The Northern Lights stretched down an entire dark hallway. Some rooms even had scent, the air itself part of the experience. At one point I giggled to myself and said to my dad, the theme of this trip is immersion. I hadn’t planned it that way. I wasn’t observing art anymore. I was standing inside human expression spanning centuries. I wanted to stay there forever.

I came home to Rochester changed. And it was as if Rochester had been waiting to show me something too.

I had driven past the Memorial Art Gallery before going inside. An Instagram post about a still life exhibition finally got me through the doors. Nick and I bought a membership at lunch beforehand. Our thinking was practical at first, that if we visit a few times it’s worth it, and we can bring people when they come to visit. But something happened inside those rooms that I didn’t expect. It was reverent in a way the other experiences hadn’t been. People spoke quietly, almost instinctively, the way you do when you sense something sacred is nearby.

I stopped in front of the Desire and Abundance exhibition, paintings of every size covering a deep purple wall floor to ceiling, each one different, none of them out of place. I stood looking at all those paintings. Centuries of still lifes, fruit and flowers and light caught in oil paint.

Something hit me that’s almost too simple to be profound: People have been using art to express what they feel for thousands of years.

Every single one of these paintings was someone saying, I was here. I felt this. Does anyone else?

My dad and I went to Shake Shack for lunch the day after Masquerade. He was answering work texts. I was completely elsewhere, mentally still descending into the Phantom’s lair, trying to figure out why the whole experience felt so spiritual. I’ve had powerful moments in worship before. But something about ARTISANworks, Masquerade, and the Arte Museum kept hitting the same frequency. I think I finally understand why.

I’ve been drawn to things that make me feel like joy, awe, wonder, and imagination are bubbling up inside me. Expressive theatre experiences and certain art museums have that effect on me. The best churches I’ve been to do this too, the ones where nobody holds back. I’ve discovered how deeply divine it all is. Art is so big and diverse and that’s the point. The closer I get to who God made me to be, the more alive I feel. He isn’t limited to what we label as Christian. He can be in anything.

So if you’ve ever stood somewhere and felt something crack open in your chest, something warm and overwhelming, that’s not you “being too much.” That’s you being exactly who you were made to be.

Don’t look away from it. Walk toward it. Let it overwhelm you.

Unlike a traditional show, you move through the story alongside the cast, inches away from the action. Everyone is required to wear masquerade masks and your phone cameras are covered, ensuring everyone is fully present for what transpires inside.

Our group was guided into the next room just as the Overture began. I will never get over the Phantom Overture. As we entered, the chandelier began rising right in front of us while we walked into the room. The chandelier blazed above us, cascading crystals catching the light like something pulled straight from a dream. The chaos of the Opera rehearsal unfolded all around us, with set pieces and performers moving through the space. Christine and Meg were giggling together in the background while the Phantom lurked on the upper level.

What had been dry inside me began cracking open as I stood next to my dad, my lifelong theatre buddy, entering a scene that I had watched so many times on stage or on screen but this time we were inside the show. He and I kept making eye contact in disbelief of what we were witnessing, his eyes already filled with tears.

My dad and I have seen many shows on Broadway, but this time the line between audience and the cast blurred. We were part of the performance. Christine was singing “Think of Me” on the stairs right behind us, so close we could hear every note clearly. They even handed out pink roses for us to throw toward her.

My dad introduced me to Phantom of the Opera at five years old after he saw how I loved to engage with stories and characters. I remember being scared of the chandelier falling the entire show, while my dad was nervous about me having to use the bathroom in the middle of it. We always sit as close as possible. One thing my dad and I share is the need to feel the music in our veins. The people around us were impressed by how I was able to sit still the whole time.

On my last trip to San Diego, my dad and I were on a walk and he told me what I was like as a little girl. Expressive. Animated. I loved dressing up and becoming characters. I wanted the same books read to me over and over. I sang constantly. I loved becoming Christine in our living room reenactments of the mirror scene, my dad a very willing Phantom, and I ate up every second of it. In 2001, I drew a picture of myself with headphones on, eyes closed and wrote out: “I fell in love with the music from Phantom of the Opera”.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t quite have words for then: I haven’t changed. Not in the ways that matter. The little girl who wanted to step inside stories and live there is the same person who puts on the Phantom score and creates a 46 page memory book from her Masquerade experience. The little girl who wanted the same books read over and over is the woman who watches her favorite movies on repeat and would do it again without hesitation. The little girl who became characters in her living room is the same one who stood on stage at a Broadway rave and sang show tunes into a packed nightclub. Nothing has changed. Slightly quieter now only when necessary.

January tried to convince me otherwise.

We had been living in Rochester for three months and I had just experienced my first Christmas in 29 years away from my family. Nick and I went to see the Stranger Things finale in theaters on New Year’s Day, and I remember coming home feeling an unexplainable crankiness. Nothing in particular had set it off, but a deep sadness began overtaking me in ways that scared me a little.

The newness of Rochester and the sparkle of the holidays had ended and homesickness was hitting hard. I was figuring out responsibilities like health insurance, applying for jobs, and switching my license from California to New York. There were hiccups getting all of these things in motion and I began to spiral, looking at flights back to San Diego, dreaming of going to live with family and having endless amounts of time with loved ones. Meanwhile Rochester was having one of its worst winters in years. Not a single day above 25 degrees on the horizon.

I tried to focus on the positive things every day, even if they were small. Things like getting my nails done, finding a cute sweater with a matching bow for $13, and talking with my parents. One afternoon I was crying on the phone with my mom and she asked “Do you like watercolor?” A few days later, the exact watercolor set I had been looking at earlier at a coffee shop showed up on the front porch!

On January 15th, my dad texted me that he had gotten tickets to Masquerade in New York City. It was the only thing that kept me from booking a flight home. Two weeks later I was packing for our trip, the 25th Anniversary of Phantom in the background while I laid out my NYC outfits.

A few days later, we arrived in the city. I was thankful for a much shorter flight.

From the moment my dad and I walked into the first room inside Masquerade, a violinist playing the Phantom score while champagne was passed around, I knew this was unlike anything I had ever experienced. We weren’t watching the show. We were inside it.

A large door opened and mist poured through as “The Phantom of the Opera” echoed through the hallway, guiding us onto escalators and descending deeper into the building alongside the performers. When we stepped off, a long dark hallway led us into the Phantom’s lair, illuminated by candles and drifting fog. It was then that I felt something I still have a hard time describing.

Then, the Phantom grabbed my hand. He led me twenty feet ahead of the group into a room filled with music sheets, where he sat me at a desk and had me sign my name above his while he stood over me. He guided me to Christine’s bedside and seated me next to it like I belonged there. Later on in the show, my dad and I ended up at the front of the group, Christine chatting to us in character as we walked downstairs together.

The evening ended with the Phantom unmasked and vulnerable on a platform in the center of the room, reunited with his younger self, signaling for his mask to come off. Then we all took off our masks too. It felt like the story was quietly releasing us back into the real world, a simple gesture that lingered with me long after we walked back out into the city streets.

On the plane ride home I couldn’t stop writing. I filled pages with everything I had just experienced, trying to capture it before it faded. It was the first time writing had ever poured out of me that way.

As I’ve been adjusting to life in Rochester since October, I’ve had more free time than ever before. Nick’s family lives here which is a blessing, but everything else has been stripped away from me. The new quietness has forced me to ponder the question, who really is Sydney under all the noise, distractions, expectations, and familiarity?

The combination of less pressure to perform and less history attached to how I should be has brought out who I am in my purest, truest form. Everything changing externally has revealed what’s actually stable… my core self.

Since then I’ve never felt more like myself, more alive, or more creative. I’m caring for and nurturing what God has trusted me with by working on my own creative projects and playing with my imagination through storytelling.

When I got back from New York City, I said to my husband Nick “I fear my Phantom obsession has reached new levels.” I mean how could it not after sitting in the Phantom’s lair alongside my dad as “Music of the Night” was sung inches away from us? But God recently showed me that this story being brought back into my life in a new way and this recent obsession goes way deeper than just loving the story and the music, even though that’s certainly part of it.

Phantom was never just a story to me. It formed me. From the very beginning, it gave me something I didn’t have words for yet: a safe place to feel big. The characters, the drama, and the danger was all contained within the world of the story, which meant I could feel everything fully without anything falling apart. That perfect mix of beauty, danger, and mystery wasn’t coincidental. It was the exact combination my soul has always been drawn to. And underneath all of it was an invitation into something deeper and otherworldly. The atmosphere of the Phantom’s lair felt like a dream-like world beyond our own, and that’s exactly why it captivated me. The Masquerade moments, being drawn in, being led deeper; that longing wasn’t just theatrical feeling. It was the most like myself I had felt in months.

Phantom is a doorway to little Sydney and reconnecting with myself at the root. I’m learning who I am in my purest form and I really love her. I believe this is who God made me to be and I want to steward that well. The core Sydney is full of imagination, wonder, awe, passion and tenderness.

To little Sydney, you don’t have to be less. You don’t have to grow out of wonder. I’m going to protect you.

A Note on the Imagery: Photography and video were not permitted during the experience, so some images in this article have been created using AI. These visuals are not exact replicas, but intentional interpretations designed to reflect the atmosphere, emotion, and meaning of the moments as they were felt.

I’m a visual storyteller and writer based in Rochester, NY originally from San Diego. I spent over six years as a graphic designer at a church and I make custom memory books for people who want their most meaningful experiences preserved beautifully. I have a love for musicals that I won’t apologize for. Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, and Hamilton in particular, the kind that imprints on you and stays there.

This Substack is where I’m going to write. Personal essays about life, creativity, art, faith, moving across the country, and finding meaning in the everyday. Some pieces will be about musicals. Some will be about what I’m learning about myself. Some will be about God, though maybe not in the way you’d expect.

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. I’m doing it now because God is doing so much in my life that I don’t want to keep it to myself anymore.

I’m glad you’re here. I hope as you read these pieces you’re able to discover more about yourself, life and a God who is madly in love with you.