I Didn't Know I Was Coming Home

Healing has surprised me.

Not because it happened quickly. It didn't.

Not because it was easy. It wasn't.

It's surprised me because I thought healing meant becoming someone new.

Instead, it has felt like coming home.

There was a season when I genuinely thought I had lost myself. I used to say those words all the time. I don't think I even realized how often they came out of my mouth. "I don't know who I am anymore." It felt true. Somewhere between loving, grieving, hoping, forgiving, surviving, and trying to hold everything together, I became convinced that the woman I used to be had disappeared.

Now I wonder if she was never gone.

Maybe she was just buried.

Buried under fear. Under chronic stress. Under disappointment. Under the exhausting work of trying to make sense of something that never really made sense. Buried under the weight of carrying questions that were never mine to answer.

God didn't create a new person.

He started uncovering the one He had created all along.

I've noticed little pieces of myself returning in the most ordinary ways. I'll laugh at something completely ridiculous and think, There you are. I'll spend an afternoon reading and completely lose track of time. I'll find myself asking a question just because I'm curious, not because I'm trying to solve my life. I'll walk by the ocean and realize I've been looking at the waves instead of living inside my own head.

Those moments don't seem extraordinary.

But they are.

Because they remind me that peace doesn't always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it slips quietly back into your life until one day you realize it has been sitting beside you all along.

I'm also learning that becoming whole doesn't mean becoming fearless.

I still have days when I overthink.

I still have moments when grief catches me off guard.

I still carry questions that don't have answers.

The difference is that those things no longer introduce me.

They're visitors.

They aren't my identity.

For a long time I thought I was rebuilding my life from the ground up.

Now I think God has been restoring the foundation.

Those are very different things.

Rebuilding suggests that everything was lost.

Restoration suggests that something precious was always there, waiting to be uncovered.

Maybe that's what grace does.

It doesn't erase who we are.

It removes everything that convinced us we were someone else.

I don't know who I'll become ten years from now.

I hope I'm wiser.

I hope I'm gentler.

I hope I laugh more easily.

I hope I love with greater freedom.

But more than anything, I hope I never stop becoming more like the woman God imagined when He first thought of me.

Because if these past months have taught me anything, it's this:

Sometimes the journey forward looks remarkably like the journey home.

And I think...

I'm finally beginning to recognize the place.

💜