GRACE.

Life can be messy, difficult, and stressful for anyone. Most people will struggle at some point in their life, but those difficulties and struggles have a completely different implication for a survivor of abuse. Life is not just messy, difficult, or stressful…Life feels impossible.

I know what it feels like to be completely lost, consumed with paralyzing fear, hopeless, indescribably exhausted, and entirely uncertain how to put one foot in front of the other. I have experienced an overwhelming number of days when I wanted to give up, I have prayed repeatedly night after night that God would take me home, and moments when I genuinely could not see a way forward. Yet through the hardest days of my life, God gave me the strength to endure...even when I did not have the ability to open my eyes.

God never promised that I would be spared pain, He promised that I would never be alone in it. “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

There were days, even months when I felt I could no longer hear or feel God’s presence in my life and just when I believed I could not continue forward, He made His presence unmistakably known in the most incredible way.

In January 2020, as I sat in the room all alone with tears gently flowing down my face, I placed my hand on top of my bible (a special Women’s edition) and spoke to God as I always have…a conversation between a daughter and her father. I told Him how much I missed him and how this distance between us was excruciating. Then I asked Him to guide me as I opened my bible to the exact scripture he wanted me to read.

I opened my bible to the first page of the Book of Esther but on the left side of my special Women’s edition bible, there was an introduction that read:

“SILENCE. UTTER, COMPLETE SILENCE. We read the pages of Scripture expecting to hear God’s voice, but when we turn to the book of Esther, we find only silence. Nowhere in these pages is God’s name mentioned. No direct words. No prophecies. No prayers. The nation of Israel was in exile, living in subjection to a pagan king. GOD WAS SILENT, BUT HE WAS NOT ABSENT.

It is there, in heaven’s stillness, that a young woman enters the scene. Esther is a Jew, but she finds herself upon the stage of the Persian court with all its foreign customs and intrigues. And God has a purpose for her, right where she is. As Esther’s story unfolds, WATCH FOR GOD’S PROVIDENCE. You will not see his hands, but you can see his fingerprints all over the situation.”

My father had just confirmed that he had always been with me and had never left me, even if I felt alone and distant, he was always with me. This excruciating weight had been lifted, it was indescribable.

God carried me when I could not carry myself and gave me the strength for each day, sometimes only enough for the next hour or the next moment but it was always enough.

GRACE is not weakness. Forgiveness does not erase accountability. Healing does not happen all at once. Extending GRACE to yourself does not excuse what happened to you. It simply allows you to stop punishing yourself for surviving it. GRACE is permission to be human while you heal.

BRUTAL TRUTH... I am still navigating how to offer myself GRACE, and I am not yet able to forgive the man who tried to destroy me. The man I once believed was the love of my life. The man I trusted with my heart, my future, our family, and the most vulnerable parts of who I was. The man who told me he loved me yet repeatedly lied and betrayed me. The man who cheated on me repeatedly. The man whose choices shattered the family and life we had built and destroyed the future I believed we were creating together. The man who stood before God and promised to love, honor, and cherish me until death do us part, then broke those vows one by one, and over and over until there was nothing left of the marriage I thought was sacred.

He did not simply break my heart. He slowly dismantled the woman I had always known myself to be…Brave, Confident, Independent, Strong, Capable, Certain of my instincts and secure in my own voice but over time, the constant manipulation, gaslighting, betrayal, lies, emotional, verbal, and psychological abuse, and the constant distortion of my reality left me questioning everything, including myself. I stopped trusting my own thoughts. I questioned what I saw, what I heard, what I remembered, what I felt, and eventually, who I was.

The educated, empathetic, loving, strong, independent woman who had once walked confidently became a shell of herself, desperately trying to understand how the person she loved most could make her feel so worthless, so unloved, so unattractive, so disgusting, so confused, so alone, and so completely lost. Perhaps the most painful truth of all

...it wasn't just my heart he knowingly, willingly, and intentionally broke, I truly believed he had broken me.

Although this man absolutely wounded me so deeply, changed me forever, and emotionally took me to places I never imagined I would survive…I SURVIVED and HE DOES NOT GET TO WRITE MY ENDING and maybe that is where RESILIENCE began for me.