A couple of years ago, a woman I went to school with died. She took her life. We weren’t close. We said hi and bye in the hallway and left it at that. I admired how kind and pretty she was. She truly was a rare piece of calm and kindness in a sea of fickle teen girls.

Several years later, our paths crossed again, this time as co-workers — briefly. I was starting at the school as a nurse, and she was leaving at the end of the year. We spoke and reminisced about high school. I asked her where she was going at the end of the year, thinking she must be transferring schools or districts. Her response was not what I expected. She told me about her struggle with depression and anxiety — that it had reached a point where teaching was impossible. She was honest, and I recognized that her sharing that with me was no small thing. I shared a bit of my struggle — just a bit. I wasn’t as brave as her.

Later that night I received a friend request and accepted without hesitation. We exchanged hearts and likes over a year. One day she was on my mind heavily, in a way that you know you weren’t the one who placed the thought there. I messaged her. I had been wanting to start a group — a community — something for women like ourselves who loved Jesus but struggled to pull ourselves out from the weight and stigma of depression. She responded in the sweet and kind way she always did. She explained she wanted to do this very thing — that she would be starting a new treatment soon as part of a trial and was hopeful. Her message was filled with emojis and hearts. She told me about some support groups here in our town. I read it, and my heart and spirit were filled by the kindness she poured into me. She said that as soon as she felt better, she’d gather the information and resources she had, and maybe we could figure out exactly how to do this.

That message never came. What did come was a flood of condolences, followed by memories, stories, and prayers on my timeline. No one said what happened, but they didn’t need to. I opened our last conversation, looking for any indication I may have missed. Of course there wasn’t one.

Some would question how she could be so supportive, hopeful, and uplifting while carrying such heavy sadness and pain right beside it. Some would question. I didn’t. I didn’t have to question what she was thinking or feeling, because I knew. I knew that in her mind she simply wanted the pain to end. That she felt like her family would be better without the burden she believed she had become. That she had tried everything she could think to try, and prayed every prayer she could imagine.

I have never once encountered the topic of suicide in church. It isn’t spoken about. We are still fighting the stigma surrounding depression in Christianity — a stigma that keeps people silent, that keeps people hurting, that perpetuates the shame and hopelessness they are all too familiar with.

I will be clear.

You can love Jesus and struggle with depression. You can love God and suffer with anxiety. You can be Christian and spend every waking moment fighting just to be here. To want to be here.

It’s real, and I imagine if you go to church and look around, you’ll see someone whose reality this is. You’ll probably shake hands with them when the pastor tells you to greet your neighbor before you sit.

I do not have any answers or solutions, other than to say we must stop being silent about it. We must stop telling people to pray it away. To go do a Bible study. Because to the woman who is lying in bed after everyone else is asleep, trying to stifle her tears and muffle her nose, that isn’t what she needs in that moment. When she is questioning if her mere existence is detrimental to those she loves, what she needs is connection. She needs to be seen — seen by someone who understands, seen by someone who has been there and may possibly be there again. She doesn’t need to be told one more thing to do. She just needs permission to be.

I still want to create that community. The community that my sweet classmate and coworker needed. The community I needed, and still do, and I don’t know if it will ever happen. Frankly, I don’t even know how. But I know there is a need, and as cliché as it sounds, I am one of the safest spaces for anyone sitting in that struggle — because I struggle too.

There’s a verse that says joy comes in the morning. I think about it most days, lying there before my feet hit the floor. I wonder if I’ll ever actually feel that — or if I’ll just keep reading it, hoping the feeling catches up to the words eventually.

Getting the kids ready is never up for negotiation. Lunches packed, shoes found, hair done, out the door on time — I do it without a second thought, the way you’d expect any mother to. It’s the things I’m supposed to do for myself that take real coaching. Washing my face. Getting dressed. Small, ordinary things that shouldn’t require a pep talk, and somehow do, every single morning.

I try to inject faith into the day anyway. I thank Him first, before anything else. I play worship music while I make coffee, like if the sound fills the kitchen enough, it might fill me too. I pray — but if I’m honest, most days it feels less like reaching toward God and more like a tired conversation. I grab my Bible, my journal, my pen — the whole process, every piece of it — and some days I never open any of it. Other days I do, and the words just sit there on the page. I read them. They don’t reach me.

Then the day starts asking things of me, and as always, I answer.

I smile in the pickup line. I’m patient on the phone with the mechanic. I’m warm with a coworker who has no idea what my morning looked like. My son calls asking for money and I make a joke, easy and light, like nothing in me is heavy at all. On, off. On, off. All day. Nobody sees the switch — that’s the whole point of it — but I feel it flip every single time, and by the end of the day I’m not tired from what I did. I’m tired from what I hid.

By the time I’m falling asleep, I’m still thankful. That part never leaves. But underneath it there’s a quiet shame I can’t quite shake — the sense that I didn’t do enough with the day God gave me, that somewhere in all that switching on and off, I lost Him a little.

I hope tomorrow will be different.

I know it probably won’t be.

This one’s personal. I’ve carried it for most of my life, and writing it down still didn’t feel like enough — so I’m telling it here too.

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My cousins were going to the pool and begged to go. My parents relented and allowed me to go. Now, forty years later and four kids into parenting, I couldn’t fathom doing the same. But for those of us who had the blessing of being born in a simpler time, the 1980s were just different.

I remember hanging on to the side of the pool. I was a ways away from my cooler cousins and their friends. I was instructed not to bother them, and so I didn’t. The ripples of the pool were so relaxing. I remember being so sleepy. I remember the lady to my left telling me to get out of the pool if I was tired. I remember closing my eyes. I remember opening them again underwater. Next, I remember being in the sky.

It was so strange. I felt great. I realized I wasn’t alone. I didn’t see anyone up there with me, but I felt them, and I spoke to them — not with my mouth, but with my mind. I began to try to piece things together. I looked down and to my right, and there was a crowd hovered over something — or someone, it turns out. I saw myself lying there on the ground. I asked whoever I was with if that was me, and they said yes. I don’t even remember being bothered by that. To my right, a dark tunnel appeared. The angel I was with told me to enter, and that there would be light at the end. That I was scared of. I asked the angel to go with me, but they said they couldn’t — that I would be okay, just to keep moving toward the light. And that is what I did. It was so dark — I think that’s what scared me, because there was nothing foreboding or frightening in the tunnel. I felt encouragement and love.

Soon I was faced with the brightest light I’d ever seen. It started as tiny as a pen, and soon was all around me until I emerged from the tunnel. What I saw, I have failed to describe in a way that would give justice to the beauty and life that was there. I was on a beach. The sand was soft, not hot, even though it was so extremely bright. The ocean was moving, but there was no roar that usually accompanies waves. There were animals and flowers. The colors were so vibrant. When I later described the experience to my mom, I ran to grab my Lisa Frank pocket folder from school so that I could show her, but even that wasn’t nearly as vibrant and alive as what I experienced. Everything was alive; it moved and responded. I felt love coming from every grain of sand, flower, plant, and bird.

And then there He was. I remember His robe, and I remember His hand reaching for me, and I took it. We walked down the beach, and I realized that the flowers, the sand, the water — they were all responding to Him. He told me I could stay or go back. I was torn. I asked Him who would take care of me if I stayed. He replied that He would. I asked if my parents would be okay. He said they would be very sad, that they would not have any more children. My mother was pregnant at the time. I was going to have a sister — no one knew that, my parents chose not to find out. He said it would be very hard for them, and that they wouldn’t be the same, but that they would be okay. I asked what would happen if I returned. I don’t remember much of what He said — in His wisdom, I’m sure He knew I wouldn’t steward that information well — but I do remember He said life would be very hard. That has proven to be true. I chose to come back, still conflicted — happy that my parents wouldn’t be sad, excited to have a sister, but sad to leave the presence of the most pure and profound love there is. Over the years, there have been times when I’ve experienced something and then had a sudden feeling of familiarity, like I was told about this before. I experienced it when my parents died.

I popped back into my body. I remember my chest and throat being so sore. I remember my cousins rushing me out of the park and walking the mile home. I told my parents what happened. My mom believed me, though we didn’t talk much about it. My dad said I’d made it all up and refused to entertain the thought. Our house was situated by a huge drainage pipe for a creek behind our house. My parents would often catch me staring at it. It was large and dark, and I often thought about walking in with the hopes of returning to Jesus.

Years later, I was sitting in my parents’ living room.

Out of the blue, he said, “You said you saw heaven, right?” I told him yes. He’d never believed me before, so I didn’t offer anything else. Then he said, “Tell me what happened.” I told him the whole story. He never said a word, but he was listening in a way that he never had before. When I finished my story, he remained quiet but seemed satisfied with my depiction, and we never talked about it again. He died a year or so later, and in hindsight, I realized two things: God had given me a gift that I was able to use to bring comfort, and — secondly — that my dad was simply getting directions for his trip home.

Or maybe your story is more like mine. I loved Jesus for as long as I can remember — by five, I was leading my dolls in prayer. But kids do what kids do, and I fell away, tucking that love into a tidy corner of my mind. Always there, rarely acknowledged. Until exhaustion taught me what only wrestling with darkness can teach, and I came running back. He met me with open arms. I was home. No more fighting for my life, no more filling parts of my heart with things they were never meant to hold. It would all be better now, I thought.

I imagine you thought so too. And it was — and it wasn’t.

The battle just becomes different. The obstacles shift into things that actually matter, consequences that ripple not just through your physical life but threaten your spiritual identity. You find yourself fighting for your life in a new way, struggle after struggle, and somewhere in the intermission between crises you look up and everyone else seems to be handling it just fine. Her, in the pew three rows up, smiling like she’s never once had to fight for anything.

Then the question every Christian asks and no one admits to comes forward: what is wrong with me? I’ve asked it more than once. More than a dozen times. What is wrong with me that even after knowing, seeing, feeling God’s love, I still can’t get it together?

The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t have an explanation. There isn’t one — not one we’ll know this side of heaven, I don’t think.

Here’s what I do know. In the middle of my toughest struggles, when I’m pulling my hair out in the spirit, no one else would know it. I show up. I function. I help. I smile. I put on the mask that says I’m fine. And I’d bet everyone whose path you cross today is wearing some version of the same one. No one is really fine. Some of us are just better at managing, masking, pretending.

So what if we aren’t broken? What if we’re just stretching — and building?

Picture a stretchmark. I know. Stay with me — I’m the owner of more than a few. When they’re forming, they itch, they burn, and we go looking for anything to soothe them, stop them in their tracks. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But the discomfort never lasts forever. It heals. The evidence stays, but the pain doesn’t — and just like stretchmarks, some of us get them earlier, some later, some more than others. My son grew so much, so fast, between middle school and high school that he got them on his knees. His whole body could probably fit inside one pant leg of mine.

You are not broken. You are stretching, and bending, and growing. That discomfort is evidence — of progress, of becoming. And I’d guarantee everyone you meet today has the same marks, in different stages of healing, hidden under the mask and the clothes we put on to face the world.

I saw you on Sunday. You looked amazing as always. I’ve always admired your ability to appear so calm and poised. You carry a gentleness and strength that feels like the most comforting hug. Sometimes when I catch your eye I catch a glimpse of the weight you’re carrying. The exhaustion from being strong. From holding up the walls that protect your heart. Most don’t see it. I do, because I carry it too.

I desperately want to pull you aside and tell you that you’re not alone. Give you a glimpse of the weight I’m carrying so you can set a little of yours down. Be a place where you find some respite - maybe we both could. I’m not sure what stops me. Maybe fear. Maybe pride. Maybe a combination of both.

You know that verse about the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak? Sometimes I feel like my spirit isn’t that strong either. Do you? I find myself clinging to Jesus for my life. Reaching for a single fiber of the hem of his robe just to make it through another hour. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? To love Jesus with your whole being. To desperately want to follow and serve him while feeling unworthy, unclean, and doubtful of everything inside yourself.

Sundays are manageable. Monday isn’t even that bad. But Tuesday - that’s when it gets hard. I spend every bit of strength I have carrying my faith from Sunday into Monday, and by Tuesday I’m running on fumes. Then I start longing for Sunday again just to fill back up.

Do you ever find yourself scheduling times to cry? It would be funny if it weren’t true. Carving out the window between dropping the kids off and clocking in, but timing it carefully enough that you don’t walk into work with swollen eyes.

I’m sorry for rambling. I just wanted to tell you that I loved your dress. Your kids are wonderful. You’re doing a good job.

See you next Sunday.

If this letter found you, it was meant for you. You are not alone on Tuesday.

I’ve never liked surprises, and spontaneity has always felt completely foreign to me. I like knowing the ending or the expected outcome. I even Google the ending of movies because the anticipation is too much.

In some ways, this trait has served me well. Planning ahead has helped me stay organized, prepare for challenges, and think through important decisions before acting.

But when it comes to most areas of my life, planning has often become a source of stress and anxiety.

I’ll be the first to admit it—I have a control problem.

Like many others, it was born out of necessity. It became a survival mechanism. Never wanting to be caught off guard and always having a plan for everything made me feel safe. There were so many things in life that were beyond my control that having perceived control over one small corner of my life felt comforting.

The key word is perceived.

The reality is that there isn’t much we can actually control. And when we try, we’re taking the pen from the Author and Master Planner of our lives and saying, “I’ll take it from here.”

It’s no wonder the Bible reminds us:

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.” — Proverbs 3:5–6

I don’t know about you, but my understanding always tells me that control is the safest option. God’s Word tells me that trust is.

It sounds ridiculous when you think of it that way.

But putting it into practice feels terrifying.

I’ve realized that no matter how much we try to control, there will always be something else demanding our attention. We never arrive at a place where every aspect of life is finally under control.

The truth is, trying to control every outcome is exhausting.

Even when we appear to be resting, our minds are busy calculating, analyzing, and preparing for every possible scenario.

Then I hear Jesus ask a question that completely disarms me:

“Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” (Matthew 6:27)

The answer, of course, is no. My worrying has never changed an outcome. It has only robbed me of today’s peace.

So how do we stop?

And once we do, what do we fill that space with?

I won’t pretend that I’ve figured it out. Surrender is still a daily struggle for me. It doesn’t feel natural. If anything, it feels uncomfortable.

Multiple times each day, I ask Jesus to help me surrender control and yield to Him. It’s not something I can simply will away. I’m learning to trust God with my future instead of constantly trying to intervene.

I’ve also realized something else.

Sometimes we try to control things because we’re trying to prove something to God.

We’re trying to prove that we’ve changed.

That we’ve grown.

That we’re worthy.

That we’re following Him well.

For those of us who carry regrets and know we’ve grieved the heart of God, this can become a subtle trap.

When I rededicated my life to Jesus, I was deeply grieved by how my choices must have hurt Him. Honestly, I still am.

Without realizing it, I began trying to arrange outcomes and control circumstances as if I could somehow make God proud of me—as if I could make up for my past.

Looking back, I can see that this was one of the enemy’s schemes.

He will even weaponize our love for Jesus against us, convincing us that we have to earn back what Christ has already given us through grace.

But the truth is this:

There is nothing I can do to make God love me more than He loves me right now.

He loved me just as fiercely when He found me in my mess as He does today.

Reconciling my heart to that truth has been harder than I expected. It requires daily—sometimes hourly—surrender.

I don’t have all the answers.

But I do know this:

We were never meant to be the authors or directors of our own lives.

And honestly, we shouldn’t want to be.

The pursuit of complete control is impossible. We’ll never achieve it. Isn’t that just like the enemy? To convince us to spend our lives chasing something we were never meant to possess?

So how do we overcome it?

Every time I catch myself grasping for control, I acknowledge it, bring it to Jesus, and surrender it again.

I’ve found that recognizing the problem is more than half the battle.

God is faithful to do the rest.

Every time I find myself reaching for the pen again, I have a choice. I can keep trying to rewrite a story that was never mine to author, or I can place the pen back into the hands of the One who sees the beginning, the middle, and the end.

And every day, by His grace, I’m learning to let Him write.

I lost both of my parents within four months of each other.

Nothing really prepares you for that.

Even if you’ve imagined the worst-case scenario, the reality is something entirely different. One day, life is familiar. The next, you’re learning how to live in a world that no longer looks the same.

For ten years before they died, I lived next door to my parents.

At the time, it simply felt like one of those things that had worked out well. Morning coffee together and dinner every evening became our normal. Holiday meals, while special, weren’t all that different from an average Tuesday.

Looking back now, I see it differently.

I see how carefully God was weaving together one of the greatest blessings He would ever give me.

I had been a school nurse for several years, and I loved my job. It allowed me to be home with my children after school and every weekend.

Then one day, a work-from-home position appeared in my inbox.

I wasn’t looking for another job.

There was simply something drawing me toward it.

Looking back, I believe it was the Holy Spirit.

I applied, interviewed, and was offered the position. I analyzed the decision from every possible angle, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was where God wanted me.

So I said yes.

Not long afterward, both of my parents’ health began to decline far more quickly than anyone expected.

Because I worked from home, I was there.

I was there for every ambulance call.

Every fall.

Every new diagnosis.

Every hospital admission.

I balanced two households, two aging parents, and four children.

The only reason I made it through was because God carried me.

When I was younger, I’d occasionally let myself imagine what it would be like to lose my parents.

I never stayed there long.

The thought was too painful.

So I tucked it away.

Until the day I couldn’t anymore.

During those months, God held me in ways I never expected.

Quietly, He impressed one truth on my heart:

The only way was through.

There wasn’t another path around the grief.

But He promised He wouldn’t leave me.

He kept that promise when my mom died in November 2023.

He kept it again when my dad died in March 2024.

And He kept it in the months that followed, when grief settled over everything.

There were days I wasn’t sure my children were enough to keep me moving forward.

Days when heartbreak felt so physical I wondered if I would survive it.

I didn’t have much to offer God during that season.

Some days the only prayer I could manage was His name.

Jesus.

That was enough.

God never asked me to have the right words.

He never asked me to have unwavering faith.

He simply asked me to come.

So I came.

I came angry.

I came heartbroken.

I came confused.

I came afraid.

I felt like I was sinking somewhere I might never return from.

But little by little, the days became brighter.

One day I caught myself smiling.

Another day I laughed with my children.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but putting one foot in front of the other slowly became less difficult.

Looking back, I realize God never expected me to fix myself before coming to Him.

He only asked me to show up.

Not happy.

Not strong.

Not put together.

Just willing to come exactly as I was.

Each time I did, I left a little more of my burden at His feet.

And somehow, over time, the weight became lighter.

I won’t pretend to have everything figured out.

If I’m honest, I still feel like I’m living in the middle.

The middle of healing.

The middle of waiting.

The middle of grief.

The middle of becoming.

And I’ve discovered that the middle is often where faith feels the hardest.

That’s why I’m writing these letters.

Not because I’ve arrived.

Not because I have all the answers.

But because I know what it’s like to wonder if your faith is enough.

If you’ve ever felt overlooked...

If you’ve ever carried grief that no one else could see...

If you’ve ever loved Jesus while also wrestling with heartbreak, shame, loneliness, or disappointment...

Every week, I'll share honest stories from ordinary life, rooted in Scripture and written for anyone who's learning to keep reaching for Christ. I'm grateful you're here, and I hope you'll join me for the journey.