The Journey Home

This year my hope was to write more. This blog is mostly for myself. With all that has felt chaotic and rambled inside me, I had hope I could start to unpack by writing and gaining clarity along the way. As my word for this year has been listening, I realize, maybe, I’ve been listening more on the outside and not enough inside. I’ve been hoping to fix the angst and chaos externally, going internal is scary and hard for me. The last few weeks I have taken a pause in places I am able. I have paused from filling my mind with more and more words, from books I’m reading, podcasts I’m consuming, and several small groups I’m leading at church. I have paused from listening to external noise and voices, and trying to turn inward and listen to my soul. I have been taking longer walks outside with my dogs as the season is changing. I’ve been admiring, and at times, stopping in awe of the beauty of nature changing, dying and falling away. As the dying falls to the ground to be consumed by the earth, I’ve been in awe of the purpose of what was once living and thriving is now nourishing the new life that is stirring underneath surface allowing the roots grow deeper and new life to stir. During this time of pause, I’ve realized remarkable truths.

The greatest truth for me during this time is concluding I’ve been in a prolonged season of lament. This roughly began towards the end of 2019 when I made the choice to cut out several things from my life including social media and select relationships. I began a journey with sobriety the year before, and I was also deeply into an education program that was pushing me to face myself and ways I needed to grow and change. I began a journey with deep anger towards God, resentments and began to be honest with myself. In significant relationships and my relationship with God, I had taken on a victim role and allowed myself to blame others and external circumstances for my misery and despair. I have journeyed with honesty, authenticity, and reality, engaging a journey of healing, mind-body-soul. To heal, in my experience, things had to get ugly, messy, and many times I wanted to run and deny this journey that needed to take place. Most of this journey through darkness, deep lament and change happened on the inside. This prolonged season of dying to self, ideals, and ego has been nourishing what is now growing out of and becoming beautiful. My understanding of seasons of lament were only in the context of mourning a loss (whatever that loss may be) and the Lenten season leading up to Jesus’ death and resurrection. I never conceptualized the season of lament lasting longer than a few months, maybe a little longer. To think of myself having been in a season of lament for almost 6 years is a daunting thought. Now, it has also never felt more true.

2020 brought around COVID-19 and my world changed dramatically within that year, along with the whole nation and world. I wrote in this blog about that time and the resilience I have gained, personally, going through it. It was a difficult time full of extremes, desperation, exhaustion and great collegiality among the interdisciplinary teams across the board as we faced something so devastating together. We were faced with something we originally didn’t know and the precautions taken to keep myself, others and our loved ones safe de-humanized existence and taught many of us a new way of caring and ministry to others. When I thought things were beginning to settle in late 2021, several of my friends and longtime colleagues were laid off. This was deeply heartbreaking. I also faced a health crisis due to overextension and exhaustion. In 2022, we continued to struggle with my daughter’s lack of eating and immense stress and in early 2023 she was diagnosed with ARFID and a tongue tie that kept her from building muscles in her mouth. She literally could not chew anything besides sometime soft and/or crunchy and easy. September of 2023, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and my journey through cancer and my daughter’s struggles spurred this blog into a life of it’s own and an outlet for me to process my thoughts and journey. 2024 was a year of recovery and an awakening to vocational discernment moving forward in my life. This year (2025) was another unexpected surgery. I engaged in a collaborative spiritual discernment around vocation, experienced a complete surrender while leading a Women’s Ministry Bible Study around the Beatitudes, and made a whole hearted and intentional decision to remain in my work (this journey through discernment is also documented mostly in this blog).

I have experienced an overwhelming sense of heaviness and awareness that I, today, discern to be a time of lament for these last 6 years, maybe even a dark night of the soul. I have sat with this idea through the years, but felt it didn’t fit because it wasn’t a complete extreme. I envisioned a dark night of the soul as dramatic, fantastical in a sense where there was nothing but darkness and complete isolation. There were times of this for me, but only moments and then there were glimmers of light. I had several life altering events, the greatest of these being cancer. In the midst though, God has never felt far away. Maybe that was the gift. At times God felt quiet, but never fully silent. My intention of reaching out to those I knew could sit and hold me during that time maybe the life lines I needed that let me know I wasn’t alone and God was there within them. The ways in which I imagined my life to go and the ways in which I have felt whiplash from the pivots and the losses and re-imagining have come to light most recently. The last 6 years have been dark, agonizing, exhausting and hard when I am honest. So yes, maybe a dark night of the soul is part of the experience. Lament, however, sounds more true and solid for me.

A truth I hold today is the deep joy and gratitude I feel going through in these last 6 years and even years before that. The lessons I have learned and the resilience I acknowledge have shaped an even greater me, to my core. I have new, profound ways in which I parent, I mother, I love and I live. An incredible intimacy has deepened within and beyond, a wholeness not only within myself, but with those closest to me. Reconciliations I never thought possible have in turn blessed my soul beyond any words I can find. I am coming out of lament and into a new day full of hope and renewal. I have been longing for this dawn, trying to find it out beyond me in someone else’s words, someone else’s experiences, someone else’s clarity. I had to quiet the noise to find it within myself, ready to blossom. Strangely, I found myself needing my own permission to move forward. In my experience, it is so comfortable to stay in something you know, something that may not be right, that’s complacent, maybe even harmful, than to move into uncertainty, even if that uncertainty is good. It’s new, and that’s scary. However, here I go. I am stepping into the uncertainty of rich and good things to come, this second half of my life. Rich, good and greater things, that is my hope and that is my prayer…