I’ve signed hundreds of permission slips in my mothering life. Usually at the kitchen counter, pressing the wrinkles out of a paper someone had fished from the bottom of a backpack. Searching for a pen while a child stood beside me with one shoe on, explaining why they needed my signature right now.

I’d sign my name, and a little more of the world would open to them.

I didn’t understand how much of motherhood would come down to that small motion: opening my hand when everything in me wanted to hold on.

Now my kids are grown. The permission slips have stopped coming home. But some part of me is still standing at that counter, waiting to find out what someone needs before I decide what I’m allowed to do with my day.

Nobody told me that finding yourself after the kids are grown could feel like walking into your own house after someone’s rearranged the furniture. You recognize your life, but you keep reaching for things where they used to be. For years, motherhood gave my days their shape. Now there’s room, and sometimes I don’t know how to enter it.

I can sit down to write and remember a chore that suddenly seems urgent. I can have an afternoon to myself and spend half of it wondering whether I should check on someone. Even when nobody’s asked anything of me, I can find a way to put myself last.

I know how to be needed.

I’m still learning how to want something without immediately explaining why it’s reasonable. Maybe you know that feeling. You’ve spent years helping the people you love become themselves, and now the question turns toward you.

What would you like?

And you need a minute. Because somewhere along the way, you stopped asking.

My children have grown. I’m allowed to have a life that keeps growing, too.

I’m writing that down because I need to believe it where guilt actually finds me. At my desk, with a sentence beginning to unfold. In the middle of making a plan I’m excited about, just before I offer to rearrange it.

These are the permission slips I’m learning to sign. This time, I’m signing for me.

Parenting adult children: I’m allowed to stop anticipating every emergency.

When my kids were little, my body learned to listen through sleep.

A change in a cough could pull me awake. I knew the sound of feet approaching the bedroom before a hand touched my shoulder. Being ready became a way of loving them.

It’s hard to tell a heart trained by years of motherhood that every quiet moment doesn’t need a lookout. Especially now, when my children have lives I can’t see from the kitchen window.

They carry things I only know about when they choose to tell me. Sometimes I hear something in a voice and spend the evening trying to solve a problem I haven’t been invited into. A short reply can become a whole story in my head.

By bedtime, I’m exhausted by something that may never have happened.

I’m learning to pause long enough to ask: Do they need me right now, or am I frightened by how much I can’t control?

That question can sting.

Because worry gives my hands something to do when I can’t reach them. It lets me feel involved. Necessary, even.

But lying awake doesn’t make me more capable of protecting them.

I can love my grown children with my whole heart without making their every possible hurt my permanent address.

There will be times they need help. I want to listen well enough to recognize those times and respond with care.

There will also be decisions they need to make and feelings they need room to work through. Learning about emotional boundaries in parenting gives me language for the difference between being present and taking over. The shape of that support changes as our children grow.

Sometimes love means staying on the phone. Sometimes it means trusting the conversation we’ve already had and going to bed.

Lysa TerKeurst’s reflection on a mother’s fragile identity touches something I still recognize: how quickly a difficult moment with a child can become a verdict about the woman who raised them.

I’m learning to leave room between those things. My children deserve a mother who can hear what they’re living without immediately putting herself on trial. And I’m allowed to put my phone on the counter and step outside. To feel the wind against my face without carrying an imagined emergency into the yard. My peace doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten them.

Finding myself again: I’m allowed to want something for me.

This is the permission slip I’m most likely to leave unsigned.

I can make a convincing case for what everyone else needs. I know how to move things around when something matters to someone I love. But when the desire belongs to me, I begin negotiating it down.

I could take that trip, but maybe later.

I could spend the afternoon writing, once I’ve finished everything else.

I could try something new, if I’m sure I’ll be good enough at it to justify the time.

It’s startling to realize how often I’ve asked my own life to wait politely outside the door.

And how quickly “later” can become a habit.

There are still pages I want to write. Places I want to stand beneath a sky so wide it loosens something in my chest. I want to have experiences I don’t immediately turn into something useful.

I want to remember what it feels like to follow an interest because it’s mine.

My children’s adulthood doesn’t have to become the waiting room for the rest of my life.

That sentence holds grief for the years I’ve spent postponing myself. It holds hope, too.

I can begin with the afternoon in front of me. I don’t have to make a dramatic announcement or know where every new choice will lead. I can close the door and write while the laundry waits. I can make a plan without apologizing for being excited.

For so long, I measured a good day by how much I’d done for somebody else. I’m learning to notice the days when I feel a little more at home inside my own life.

If you’re rediscovering your purpose in midlife, maybe the first question doesn’t have to be What am I supposed to accomplish?

Maybe you start smaller.

What have I missed doing?

Stay with the answer long enough to hear yourself.

Life after the kids are grown: I can miss yesterday and welcome today.

Some of the things I miss are things I once wished would stop.

The refrigerator opening just after I’d cleaned the kitchen.

The bedroom light left on.

Someone calling my name the moment I sat down.

I couldn’t see, while I was living it, how a sound could become part of the architecture of a home. How its absence could change the feeling of a hallway.

Now a familiar voice at the door can turn my whole body toward it.

I’m glad my kids are growing into their lives. I want that for them.

I can still miss the ordinary closeness of knowing who’s upstairs.

There’s no betrayal in admitting it. And there’s no betrayal in enjoying a quiet house, either.

Missing the life I had doesn’t mean I have to refuse the life I have.

I’m allowed to feel that ache without giving it every room.

I can make something good in this season. Something that belongs to the woman I am now.

Maybe that means cooking a meal I love without considering anyone else’s preferences, then sitting down to eat it while it’s hot.

Maybe it means admitting I’m lonely and inviting a friend over instead of waiting for my children to fill the evening.

I want relationships that have room for the person I am beyond being a mother. Conversations where someone asks what I’m working on and waits for the long answer.

I want to bring something to a call with my kids besides questions about whether they’re okay.

I want to say, Let me tell you what I’ve been doing.

And hear myself sound glad.

Letting go of mom guilt: I can make amends without living in the past.

When your children are grown, you have enough distance to see things you couldn’t see while you were surviving the days.

You remember the afternoon you lost your temper.

The conversation you wish you’d stayed in longer.

Sometimes a memory catches me while I’m doing something ordinary, and suddenly I’m back there, wishing I could walk into the room with everything I understand now.

There are things I’d do differently.

There are apologies worth making.

But I can spend so much time judging the mother I was that I stop paying attention to the woman standing here, still able to love and learn.

Regret can show me where repair is needed. It doesn’t get to decide whether I’m allowed a future.

Letting go of mom guilt doesn’t mean pretending I got everything right. It means listening when something needs to be heard. Taking responsibility without asking my children to comfort me for it. Then allowing change to become something I practice, instead of turning sorrow into a sentence I serve forever.

There’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, Romans 8:1 tells us. I need that truth when I’m tempted to believe that continuing to punish myself is somehow proof of love. Sometimes making things right means having a conversation I’d rather avoid. Sometimes it means learning how to stay loving without agreeing to everything.

For the woman who needs help finding those words, Proverbs 31 Ministries offers guidance on having hard conversations with healthy boundaries, developed by Lysa TerKeurst and counselor Jim Cress.

I’m learning that I can come to a conversation willing to hear where I’ve caused hurt and still remember that my heart needs care, too.

I’m allowed to seek repair with my dignity intact.

I’m allowed to receive forgiveness without looking for another way to pay.

Trusting God in a new season: I’m allowed to keep becoming.

I think I expected to feel more settled by now.

As though enough birthdays would eventually make me certain of who I am and what I’m doing.

Instead, I’m here with a life I’m grateful for and questions I can’t answer yet. I can miss being needed in the old ways while feeling a small, surprising excitement about what might come next.

I don’t have to hide either feeling from God.

Pour out your heart before Him, Psalm 62:8 invites us.

I think about the generosity of that invitation.

He doesn’t ask me to arrive with a clear explanation for why I’m crying. I can sit with Him before I know whether the tears are grief or relief.

I can tell Him I’m afraid of becoming less important.

I can admit that part of me wants to be free enough to find out what I love now.

And I can ask Him to help me enter this season without dragging every old expectation behind me.

I don’t have to become less of a mother to become more fully myself.

The woman who raised my children is still here. She has more to learn. There are things she wants to try with the time she has. I’m beginning to believe God’s care extends to her becoming, too.

This time, I’m signing for me.

I picture one of those old permission slips on the kitchen counter.

The paper softened at the folds. A blank line beneath the words.

For years, I signed so my children could step into a place they hadn’t been before. I trusted there was something worth discovering beyond the familiar.

I’d like to offer myself that same tenderness.

Permission to make room for a desire before it becomes a regret.

Permission to spend an afternoon in my own life without mentally preparing an explanation for it.

I’ll always be their mother. A familiar voice on the phone will still reach places in me nothing else can.

But I want to meet this woman I’m becoming with something gentler than another demand.

Maybe today I’ll sit down with a blank page and stay long enough to hear what I want to say.

Maybe you’ll make the plan you keep putting off.

We can love our grown children and open the door to our own lives.

I’ve signed so many permission slips for the people I love. I’m allowed to put my own name on one.

Signed, a mother who’s still becoming.

What would you give yourself permission to do in this season? I’d love to hear what you’re making room for.

You’re welcome here, too.

If you’re learning who you are beyond being needed, I’d love for you to stay.

Sign up for my emails, and I’ll send you my free book, Known and Named.

You don’t have to have this season figured out before you join me. I’m still finding my way through it, too. There’s room here for the woman who loves her family and is learning to include herself in that love.

Sign up below to receive your free copy of Known and Named.

The post Permission Slips: Finding Yourself After the Kids Are Grown appeared first on Growing Boldly.

It feels almost rebellious to say that out loud.

Women aren’t exactly taught to look forward to middle age (I just turned 45 by the way, I still feel 22). We’re taught to brace for it, prepare for it, fight it. There are creams for the lines gathering around our eyes, supplements for the hormones shifting beneath our skin, diets for the waistlines softening despite eating the same things we’ve eaten for twenty years. Somewhere around forty, it feels as though an entire industry pulls up a chair, studies our faces and bodies, and whispers, You should probably do something about that.

As though aging is something happening to us instead of something we are privileged to live through.

But lately, I don’t feel like something is being taken from me. I feel like something is being handed back.

I couldn’t name it at first. I only knew there was a loosening happening inside me. I’m more at home in my own skin, even as that skin changes. I’m less apologetic. More curious. I have zero tolerance for baloney and, instead of sitting there with a pinched expression on my face, I’m finally willing to say so. I’m also more willing to be terrible at something long enough to discover whether I love it.

I want to write books and learn Hebrew words that send me digging through commentaries for hours. I want to smear watercolor across thick white paper and watch one color bleed unexpectedly into another. I want to get stronger, fill notebooks and wander library aisles with no particular book in mind. I pick up pennies because copper looks beautiful piled inside the teal bowl I found, and apparently finding a penny in a parking lot has become a tiny treasure hunt.

I want to stand beside oceans and notice what grows along Nebraska roadsides. I want to take the long way home when the western sky catches fire. I want to make things simply because something inside me wants to create them, without needing every action to accomplish something.

I don’t feel like I’m winding down.

I feel like I’m waking up.

A Name for What I Was Feeling

Then TikTok, because apparently it occasionally gives me something besides another water bottle I absolutely do not need, handed me two words: Second Spring.

I stopped scrolling.

The phrase is often used today in conversations about traditional Chinese medicine and menopause. Instead of viewing this transition solely through what a woman’s body loses, Second Spring offers another way to imagine it: a crossing into a season of renewed vitality, wisdom and possibility.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

We have so much language for what disappears from a woman as she ages. Fertility. Collagen. Hormones. Metabolism. Smooth skin. Youth. We have an entire vocabulary for loss and hardly any language for what arrives.

And something does arrive.

You reach an age when you’ve lived long enough to know which things deserve your worry and which absolutely do not. You’ve made enough mistakes to know another probably won’t kill you. You’ve survived enough opinions to realize they aren’t all worth carrying. After years spent becoming what everyone needed, you finally begin asking what God put inside you.

I don’t want to be twenty-five again. Dear Lord, absolutely not.

I don’t want the insecurity back or the frantic need to be liked. I don’t want to stare at a text message wondering whether a period instead of an exclamation point means someone is mad at me. I don’t want to lie awake replaying conversations or relearn lessons life has already taught me the expensive way.

I don’t want to relive every season simply because it was beautiful, either. There were years when motherhood required nearly every fiber of me. I poured myself into it. There was staggering beauty there, but there was exhaustion too. Both things can be true.

Now my youngest stands on the edge of high school graduation, and I find myself savoring these moments differently. I don’t have to claw backward toward the beginning to prove I loved it. I can love where we are. I can love where I am.

I don’t want to become the woman I used to be.

I’m curious about the woman I haven’t become yet.

What If Our Lives Are Supposed to Get Bigger?

Christian author and business coach Alli Worthington talks about one of the dangers of midlife being the temptation to let our worlds become smaller. We stop going, trying and risking. We decide we’re too old, too tired or too late, and stay safely inside the borders of what we already know.

Her challenge to women is simple: “Expand your territory.”

Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that expansion belongs to the young. Twenty-five is for starting businesses. Thirty is for chasing dreams. Forty-five is for being responsible. Fifty-five is for settling down.

Who decided that?

What if forty-five is when you start the company because now you know how you want to run one? What if fifty is when you write the book because you’ve finally lived enough to know what you want to say? What if sixty is when you learn to paint and seventy is when you board the plane?

Perhaps the years we’ve been taught to view as evidence that we’re too old are precisely the years that equip us for what comes next.

Alli Worthigton describes women as builders (Definitely go listen to her podcast), and I love the idea that a builder expects to encounter things she doesn’t know yet. She assumes she can learn. She enters rooms before she feels completely ready. When she encounters something difficult, she doesn’t decide, Not me.

She thinks, Not yet.

Not me closes a door.

Not yet leaves your hand on the knob.

Maybe this is a season for opening doors again for you as much as it is for me.

When Familiar Starts Looking Ordinary

For much of adulthood, we build. Relationships, careers, homes, families, businesses, routines and retirement accounts. We make dinners and appointments and plans. We remember birthdays, passwords and where someone left the thing they swear they already looked for.

We become extraordinarily good at carrying a life. Somewhere in all that carrying, though, we can begin to believe the building is finished.

This is the house. The work. The body. The marriage. The town.

This is my life.

The danger isn’t the ordinary life. It’s that familiarity has a sneaky way of making abundance look ordinary. We stop seeing what is in front of us because we’ve seen it a thousand times before. Wonder begins to feel like something that happens somewhere else, to somebody else.

I know something about that.

I live in Nebraska and still manage to look for the ocean everywhere.

Give me a body of water and something inside me exhales. I love the sound of waves folding themselves onto shore and a horizon so wide my eyes cannot find its ending. There is a strange comfort in standing beside something enormous enough to remind me how small I am and, somehow, how alive.

I’ve looked at Nebraska plenty of times and wished for somewhere else. But Nebraska keeps teaching me to look again.

There is an hour in the evening when the light falls sideways across the fields and everything turns gold. Tall grasses catch it first. Cottonwood leaves flip their silver bellies toward an approaching storm. Dust rises behind a truck on a gravel road and hangs suspended in the light. Some nights the horizon burns orange, softens into pink and finally gives way to violet, and the ordinary field across the road becomes something almost too beautiful to explain.

It was there yesterday. And the day before that.

I simply wasn’t always looking.

Friend, you don’t need a different life. You need eyes to see the wonder and grace in this one.

The Roots We Couldn’t See Growing

For years, I thought a beautiful life was something you constructed correctly. Make good choices. Work hard. Love your people. Keep the plates spinning. Get through this hard season and eventually you’ll arrive at the good part.

But what if this is the good part?

Not because everything is good. It isn’t. By this age, most of us have lived enough life to stop pretending otherwise.

We’ve stood beneath fluorescent hospital lights waiting for someone to tell us what happens next. We’ve sat in funeral homes where the air smells faintly of flowers and coffee. We’ve watched relationships change shape. We’ve carried prayers answered beautifully and others that seemed to disappear into the ceiling. We’ve watched plans unravel. We’ve lived inside bodies that have surprised us, disappointed us, changed beneath us and carried us anyway.

We’ve survived some heat.

Jeremiah describes the one who trusts in God as a tree planted beside water, sending its roots toward the stream.

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
    whose confidence is in him.
 They will be like a tree planted by the water
    that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
    its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
    and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7-8).

Heat comes. Drought comes. But somewhere beneath the dirt, where nobody can see, its roots know where the water is. I understand that differently now.

When I was younger, I knew a lot of things about God. Now there are things I know because I’ve lived long enough to need Him to be who He says He is.

There are things you learn about God after the thing you were certain would never happen, happens. Things you learn in the silence after a prayer you begged Him to answer differently. Things you learn when your strength finally gives out and you discover something is still holding you.

Perhaps that’s what has been happening beneath us while we thought we were merely getting older.

Roots.

Invisible and uncelebrated, pushing through dark earth toward water.

The first spring is tender. The second has roots.

Carolyn Castleberry Hux points out that a woman arriving at this crossroads in her forties or fifties could still have decades ahead of her. But now she enters them carrying what her younger self couldn’t possibly possess: experience, perspective, scars, stories and proof that God has met her before.

Perhaps we haven’t missed our chance.

Perhaps we’ve been gathering what we’ll need for it.

Becoming a Beginner Again

Maybe that’s why I’m finding so much delight in being a beginner.

I bought watercolors, and I am absolutely terrible at them.

I love them anyway.

I love watching pigment bloom when it touches wet paper. I love discovering that something can turn out entirely different from what I intended and still be beautiful. I pull weeds from the tall grasses in front of the house with dirt beneath my fingernails and remember how good it feels to touch the earth. I wander the library as though someone has handed me a hundred doors and said I can open whichever one I want.

I buy Lisa Frank cards and stationery because apparently the little girl in me still believes rainbow-colored everything is magnificent. I pick up pennies because there is something ridiculous and wonderful about being delighted by one cent. I find the funniest post cards and get excited about sending them to friends and family. Who does that now days?

On quiet evenings, when the Nebraska wind finally stops trying to relocate everything we own to Kansas, I practice archery in the field and channel my inner Merida. Sometimes the Brave soundtrack follows me into the car afterward because being a grown woman means nobody gets to tell me I can’t.

These things aren’t important.

Except I think they are.

Delight is a form of paying attention.

I spent a lot of years paying attention to what everybody else needed. There is something holy about discovering God did not create us merely to be useful. We are allowed to be curious. To play. To make something that never becomes a product. To love something without being good at it.

And we’re still allowed to be ambitious.

Not the frantic ambition that needs everyone to notice. I mean the quieter kind that wakes you at three in the morning with an idea. The kind that makes you wonder whether you could actually write the book, start the business, launch the ministry, earn the degree or make the art you’ve been carrying around inside you.

Dawn Barton calls midlife a “pivot point.” I like that because a pivot isn’t an ending. One foot remains planted while you turn toward another direction.

You aren’t beginning from nothing. You’re beginning with everything you’ve gathered. At twenty-five, I had energy. Now I have evidence.

I know failure isn’t fatal. Embarrassment passes. Plans change. God redirects. There are worse things than looking foolish, and I’m beginning to believe one of them is reaching the end of my life with something still buried inside me because I decided I was too old to try.

So the question has changed.

I’m no longer asking, How do I hold on to who I was?

I’m asking, What has God placed in my hands now?

Spring Never Arrives All at Once

Maybe you don’t know the answer yet.

That’s okay. Spring doesn’t arrive all at once.

I know this because I live in Nebraska, where spring has the emotional stability of a toddler. One afternoon it’s seventy degrees and we’re dragging patio furniture outside. Forty-eight hours later we’re scraping ice from the windshield, personally offended by the betrayal.

But beneath all that weather, the earth knows what it’s doing.

The frost loosens its grip. Soil softens. Tiny green shoots shoulder their way through dirt that looked dead a week ago. Buds swell along branches that spent months looking like bones against a gray sky. The grasses return so quietly that one morning you look outside and realize the whole ditch has changed.

Nothing announces itself.

It simply begins.

I wonder how many seasons I called barren because I couldn’t see what was happening beneath the surface. Perhaps some of the years I thought were taking things from me were actually putting things into me: wisdom hard won, tenderness that survived disappointment, discernment born from getting things wrong, courage that didn’t arrive until after fear, a sense of humor I absolutely earned and a little holy stubbornness about how I want to spend the years ahead.

Scripture is full of women whose lives refuse to cooperate with the world’s preferred timeline. Sarah. Elizabeth. Anna.

God has never seemed particularly interested in our obsession with being early.

Why would I assume He is finished creating in me?

I Will Not Ask September to Become June

That is what I want from this Second Spring.

I don’t want to spend it preserving the first one. I don’t want to stand in September demanding June back.

Have you ever really looked at a Nebraska field near harvest?

By then, almost everything has changed. The soft green is gone. The stalks have toughened beneath months of sun and wind. The grasses have turned the color of honey. Seed heads bow toward the earth, heavy with what they’ve carried into being. The fields rustle differently now, dry and papery, whispering against one another when the wind moves through.

The landscape looks older because it is older.

And it is breathtaking.

The field doesn’t apologize for becoming September. It doesn’t look back toward June and wonder where its green went. It doesn’t mistake ripening for ruin.

It stands beneath that enormous Nebraska sky, golden and weathered, carrying seed.

I keep coming back to that image.

Carrying seed.

Everything changes. Our faces, bodies, dreams and the lives surrounding us will keep changing no matter how tightly we try to hold them still.

But changing is not disappearing.

Aging is not becoming empty.

Some things grow only after we’ve lived long enough to carry them.

So I want books stacked beside my bed and dirt beneath my fingernails. I want watercolor stains and copper pennies and notebooks filled with words I almost didn’t write. I want oceans whenever I can reach them and Nebraska sunsets when I cannot. I want to laugh loudly, keep asking questions about God and remain willing to be terrible at new things.

I want to build things too. Another book. Another business. Maybe something I haven’t imagined yet.

I want to enter rooms where I don’t know everything. Learn technology that makes me mutter under my breath. Meet women who know things I don’t. Ask questions. Take chances. Fail at something and discover the earth still turns the next morning.

I want my territory to expand, not shrink.

Because perhaps a Second Spring isn’t another chance to be young.

Perhaps it is something far better.

It is the chance to be fully here, with enough years behind us to know what matters and enough life ahead of us to do something about it.

Friend, you don’t need a different life.

Look again.

The ground beneath your feet isn’t empty. The years behind you weren’t wasted. Your roots have been growing in places nobody could see, and there are still seeds in your hands.

So let June be June.

Let September turn gold.

Let the lines around your eyes deepen from all the years you were here to witness.

And when the world tells you your spring has passed, don’t waste your breath arguing.

Start the business. Write the book. Take the class. Buy the paints. Board the plane. Open the door.

Plant something.

There is still time for an entire field to grow.

Still Becoming: 30 Journal Prompts for an Honest Life.

If this one hit home, my free devotional Still Becoming: 30 Journal Prompts for an Honest Life was made for seasons exactly like this — honest questions for women learning to unbecome. Grab it here: https://mailchi.mp/1c3cbd7a2313/pgbjupvnpd

And if you haven’t joined us yet, I send one free weekly devotional to women of faith every week — grace and grit for the trenches of ordinary life. Subscribe on the blog so you never miss one.

The post You Don’t Need a Different Life. You Need New Eyes for This One appeared first on Growing Boldly.

I used to believe exhaustion was a spiritual gift.

Somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that a godly woman is a busy woman. That “no” is a four-letter word. That rest is what lazy people do while the rest of us are out here changing the world one committee meeting at a time. So I hustled. I volunteered, I over-functioned, I said yes to things I resented and then resented the people I said yes to, which is a terrible witness and an even worse way to live.

Here is what I have learned in the trenches: hustle is not holiness. It is just fear in a nicer outfit.

Fear that if I stop, I will fall behind. Fear that if I say no, I will be replaced, forgotten, or — worst of all — thought unkind. So I keep performing for worth that was already given to me at the cross, like a woman still paying on a bill that says PAID IN FULL across the top in red letters.

But then there is Jesus. And Jesus, bless Him, keeps messing with my theology of busy.
“But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” (Luke 5:16, NIV)

Read that again. The Son of God — with crowds pressing in, with needs everywhere, with people who genuinely needed healing — withdrew. He walked away from legitimate, urgent, God-honoring work to be alone with the Father. He let needs go unmet so He could stay connected. If Jesus could say “not now” to hurting people, I can say “not now” to the church potluck sign-up sheet.

This is what I mean by unbecoming.
We don’t need to become someone else. We need to unbecome — to peel off the layers of performing and pleasing and proving — and discover who we are in His hands. Unbecome the woman who measures her worth by her output. Unbecome the one who apologizes for existing. Unbecome the human doing and remember you were made a human being.

And can we talk about the Sabbath for a minute? “Remember the Sabbath day” sits in the Ten Commandments right between adultery and murder. God put rest in the same list as the big ones, and we treat it like a suggestion. We would never say, “Well, I steal a little, but only on weekdays.” But rest? Rest we skip with a clear conscience and a full calendar.

Unbecoming looks like this on an ordinary Tuesday:

• Saying no without the five-paragraph apology email.
• Leaving the laundry unfolded, the kitchen less than perfect, and calling it enough.
• Taking a nap in the middle of the day like Yoshi in a sunbeam, who has never once felt guilty about it in his entire cat life.
• Letting someone be disappointed in you and not sprinting to fix it.
• Trading “I’ll rest when it’s done” for “it will never be done, so I will rest now.”
• I know the objection, because I have made it myself: but what will they think?

Friend, people-pleasing is just control wearing a cardigan. It is the belief that if I manage everyone’s opinion of me, I will be safe. But you cannot manage your way into being loved. You are already loved — wildly, completely, before you lifted a finger today. The cross settled your worth. Everything else is just commentary.
So here is my benediction for you, fellow recovering hustler: May you learn the holy art of the unhurried yes and the guilt-free no. May you rest like it is a commandment, because it is. May you stop auditioning for a role you already have — beloved daughter, full stop. And may you discover that when you stop hustling for worth, you finally have the energy to enjoy the life God actually gave you.

What is one thing you need to unbecome this week — one yes to turn into a no, one load to set down? Tell me in the comments. I will be cheering you on from my kitchen table, where the list is still there, but it no longer gets the final word.

If this one hit home, my free devotional Still Becoming: 30 Journal Prompts for an Honest Life was made for seasons exactly like this — honest questions for women learning to unbecome. Grab it here: 30 Journal Prompts For Women Who Are Still Becoming

And if you haven’t joined us yet, I send one free weekly devotional to women of faith every week — grace and grit for the trenches of ordinary life. Subscribe on the blog so you never miss one.

The post Unbecoming: What Happens When You Stop Hustling for Your Worth appeared first on Growing Boldly.

“New life starts in the dark. Whether it’s a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, new life starts in the dark.” ~Barbara Brown Taylor

It’s late summer in Nebraska, and the season is turning if you’re paying attention. The corn has lost its tender green. Goldenrod is showing off along the roadsides, and the grasses have grown tall and unruly.

Soon, combines will run after dark, trailing harvest dust over the fields and across town. Nebraska knows what is coming. The whole earth is changing, and none of it seems worried about getting back to June. It is moving toward fall, leaving summer as surely as it left spring. Nothing out here is scrambling toward an earlier version of itself.

So why are women so convinced we need to get back to ours?

I spent most of spring trying to return to the old me. It began with a run and plans to grow stronger, rebuild endurance, write more, expand my business, renew old friendships and finally do the things I had delayed.

I had so many plans.

Then, one cool April day, somewhere between one step and the next, the world disappeared. I woke on the ground, bleary-eyed and disoriented, staring through tree branches into an April sky so blue it felt rude.

Tiny buds had begun to open above me. Cool air pressed against my face. Hard earth held me. Spring kept pushing toward new life while I lay there, realizing my body had brought me to a stop.

My body stopped me before my mind got the message.

Almost at once, I began thinking about getting back. Recover. Regroup. Make a better plan. Get back to the old me.

If I couldn’t get back into shape as intended, I would get back to the me I had been before the fall. Back to strong. Back to trusting my legs. Back to waking without wondering whether my body would cooperate with the calendar.

I wanted normal, whatever normal meant. I didn’t see how much of my hope pointed behind me. I wasn’t asking what my body needed now or what this season required. I was asking how quickly I could make myself behave like the woman I remembered.

When I couldn’t, I called it a setback.

There seemed to be many. If it wasn’t another fall or syncope episode, something emotional caught me off guard. A conversation or memory would reach backward and press a finger against an old bruise.

There were things I thought I had prayed through, written through, cried through, forgiven and surrendered. I had filed them away under things I thought I was finished with. Then something happened, and there they were again, tender where I was certain I had healed.

I wanted healing and getting back to the old me to behave like a checklist:

Face the thing.

Learn the lesson.

Forgive.

Heal.

Move on.

No circling back.

Instead, I kept returning to places I thought I had already crossed. Why did this still hurt? Why couldn’t my body do what it once had? How could something bring me to my knees after I had fought so hard to stand?

Beneath every question lived one I could not stop asking: Why can’t I get back?

Getting Back had become the measuring stick for my life. If my body wasn’t where it had been, I was behind. If an old wound hurt again, I had gone backward. If I needed more rest, I was losing progress. I measured today’s Heather against a woman who belonged to yesterday.

Eventually, I asked a better question: What if back isn’t where I’m meant to go?

The woman I kept trying to return to no longer exists, but I don’t mean that sadly. She is here, folded into me. She lived a whole life on her way to becoming this woman.

She loved fiercely and got things wrong. She carried babies against her chest, raised children who grew beyond the reach of her arms, buried dreams, found new ones and survived days she thought would undo her.

She left pieces of herself in hospital rooms, kitchens, school parking lots, church pews, along highways and inside houses we once called home. She learned some things gently and others because life offered no gentler way. Through it all, God gathered every version of her into the woman standing here.

I don’t need to go back and find her. I am what became of her through the seasons just as surely as April spend it’s way into June and even now how summer is fading into Fall.

Life happened to her. God met her there. Of course she changed.

So why had I decided getting back to the old way of things was the was to go forward?

The question loosened something in me. A setback did not mean I was moving backward. Old grief did not erase the healing God had done. A body asking for something different was not betraying me.

Healing is not returning to who we were before life happened. Healing is learning to live whole and honest after it changed us.

Beneath every interruption, this truth kept rising: I don’t need to get back to the old me. I need to care for the woman who is here.

I don’t need rigid routines built for the body I had five years ago or expectations borrowed from a season already gone. I need sacred practices willing to change as I do.

Practices with room for a body that alters the plan, grief that circles back and questions still unanswered. Room for joy that looks different and rest I do not have to earn.

I need honest prayer, movement without punishment and journals filled with words I do not clean up first. I need Scripture I do not rush through for the satisfaction of a checkmark. I need long conversations, handwritten letters, good books, Nebraska sunsets, laughter and enough quiet to notice God.

Perhaps this is what sacred rhythms are for. They do not keep us frozen in place or lead us back to who we were. They keep us close to God while we change.

I spent spring chasing an old version of myself. Now late summer leans toward harvest, and I see her differently. I can thank her for what she carried. Grieve what she lost. Honor what she survived. Then let her belong to the season God gave her and turn toward the woman standing here.

Perhaps you need permission to do the same.

Finding yourself again is not about going back. It is learning to live faithfully in the life beneath your feet while staying open to who God is forming you to become. Forward does not have to mean faster. Sometimes it means growing roots deep enough to change without losing yourself in the changing.

For me, that has meant replacing the frantic pursuit of getting back with sacred practices for moving forward. Practices that keep me close to God, teach me to listen to my changing body, give me somewhere to put what hurts and leave room for whatever He grows next.

I don’t want to build my life around getting back anymore. I want to build one rooted deeply enough in God to keep becoming moving forward.

These are five practices helping me do that.

5 Sacred Practices for Finding Yourself Again

Learn to Listen to Your Body and Name What You Feel

One of the first things I learned was to separate what my body was experiencing from the story my mind immediately attached to it. A racing heart, tight chest, trembling or sudden exhaustion didn’t automatically mean something terrible was happening, so I started asking simpler questions first: Where do I feel this? Is it pressure, heat, tightness, pain, heaviness or fatigue? Then, what am I feeling emotionally?

There’s a reason similar skills are taught in Navy SEAL mental-toughness training. One of their “Big Four” strategies is arousal control: pause, breathe, think, then act, giving the thinking part of the brain time to catch up with the body’s stress response. I wasn’t training for anything remotely resembling BUD/S, but I was learning something I desperately needed: not every sensation needs an immediate story.

Sometimes my body needs care. Sometimes my heart needs tending. Sometimes they both do, but learning to notice the difference has helped me stop treating my body like a problem to solve and start learning its language.

Start Dreaming Again and Make Plans for Your Future

When did we start putting on experiation date on dreams? Becoming a midlife woman is the best time to dream. You’re old enough to have gleaned wisdom and apply it to your dreams. I still want to write books, start a side business, make plans to travel to Iceland and create retreats where the woman I love can gather around together in person.

You are allowed to have plans for the future you haven’t live yet. Remember that. The woman dreaming now knows more about grief, God, motherhood, disappointment, courage, bodies, love, and how quickly a decade can disappear.

Dreaming again is an act of hope. I make plans knowing life might rearrange them but I make them anyway because I refuse to believe becoming and dreaming have an expiration date.

Try Something New and Let Yourself Be a Beginner Again

I started watercolor.

I’m not telling you this because I’ve secretly become an accomplished watercolor artist. My incredibly gifted artist of a daughter takes one look at whatever I’ve painted when she gets home from school and says, “It’s good for a five-year-old.” Then she proceeds to explain everything wrong with the lighting, color, angles and approximately seventeen other things I haven’t learned yet.

One day she asked me why I had suddenly decided to start painting. I told her I think there was a time when I didn’t believe I had room for anything frivolous or time-consuming. When I was raising babies and little kids, free time came with guilt attached to it, and somewhere along the way I stopped giving myself permission to spend time on something simply because I wanted to.

She stared at me and said, “That is the STUPIDEST thing I’ve ever heard.”

Fair.

But she was right.

Somewhere in motherhood, I had confused giving my life to the people I loved with believing every piece of my life had to be useful to someone else. If something took time away from kids or work or whatever else needed me, guilt was waiting nearby to remind me there were more responsible things I could be doing.

I had forgotten that joy doesn’t have to earn its place in my life.

So now I paint badly. I mix colors I probably shouldn’t, get the shadows wrong and occasionally produce something my daughter generously ranks somewhere around kindergarten art class. And I love it.

We’re allowed to be beginners. We are allowed to have hobbies and dreams that aren’t practical and don’t produce anything measurable. It’s about finding the whimsy that’s tucked inside your heart. And for the record, I’ve also taken back up cycling, archery, knitting and, sending letters and cards all handwritten.

Start Journaling in a Way that Works for You

The day I held my first journal was the day my soul was born. I had so many of them but I couldn’t seem to find a way to work for me other than having 5 half used notebooks all over the house. Then I stumbled onto The Traveler’s Journal by Paper Republic. It’s a fillable system that you can design in a way that works for you. Mine is NOT from the Paper Republic due to budgets but I found a great one off of Amazon and filled with several composition books and one large journal. Together they have a monthly calendar, a placed for dedicated notes, lists, another for sermon notes, another for work notes, and another for Bible Study. The last is dedicated for daily field notes of life.

I gave my inner life a physical place to live.

There’s something about handwriting that slows me down enough to hear myself think and hush the fussiness in my soul. Allison Fallon writes in The Power of Writing It Down, “We all have infinite strategies to keep us from hearing our own voices.”

Maybe that’s why I’ve always needed pen and paper. Writing slows all the noise down long enough for me to hear what I’m actually thinking.

And research suggests something is happening beyond the page itself. Studies of handwriting have found richer patterns of brain connectivity while writing by hand compared with typing. For me, though, the evidence is much simpler: when I write things down, I notice things I didn’t know were there.

My journal has become a place where I meet myself on paper.

Break Big Goals Into Small Steps You Can Actually Begin

I’ve learned one of the quickest ways to keep myself from starting is to make the goal enormous in my head. I don’t need to write today, I need to finish the book. I don’t need to move my body for ten minutes, I need to get back into shape. I don’t need to take one step toward a dream, I need to know exactly how I’m going to make the whole thing happen.

No wonder we get overwhelmed.

Alli Worthington writes, “Tiny steps will make a huge difference over time.” She recommends taking those big goals and breaking them into smaller, manageable pieces so we can focus on the next step instead of being overwhelmed by the whole thing.

That’s what I’ve started doing. Ten minutes of movement. One page written. One email sent. One drawer cleaned. One phone call made. One small step toward something I’ve been putting off because the whole thing felt too big.

I stopped asking what I could finish and started asking what I could begin.

I don’t need to know every step between where I am and where I want to be. I need to know the next one. And when the next one still feels too big, I make it smaller.

The post The Woman You’re Becoming: How to Find Yourself Again without Going Back appeared first on Growing Boldly.

She sits at the kitchen table long after the hum of the house has quieted, fingers wrapped around a mug that’s gone cold. Outside, winter presses its face against the windows—the world wrapped in white, streetlights glowing like softened halos, the hush of snow settling over everything. It should feel peaceful. It should feel holy. It should feel like light.

But inside her chest?

It’s December, and she feels anything but bright.

There’s a certain kind of woman who knows how to smile through the ache. Who knows how to hang the garland, frost the cookies, wrap the gifts, and talk about the beauty of the season… while holding a whole storm inside her ribs. She wants everything to feel normal, steady, calm—for the sake of the home, for the sake of the kids, for the sake of the story she’s trying so hard to write with her life.

But this season holds a different kind of weight when addiction lives in the house with you.

You learn the signs.
You learn the shifts.
You learn the way the air changes before the words do.

You can tell before anyone else.
You can tell before he even admits anything to himself.

There’s a tone in the voice.
A dullness in the eyes.
A heaviness in the way the door closes.
A hollowness behind the laugh.

And suddenly the room feels smaller, the lights feel harsher, the holidays feel dimmer—like the bulbs on the tree lost their shine without warning.

She tries to make it all look beautiful anyway.
She tries to stir hope into the atmosphere like cinnamon into a pot of simmering apples.
She tries to hold her breath and hold the peace and hold everyone together.

And she is tired.
So very tired.

Because addiction doesn’t just weigh on the one who drinks.
It presses its fingerprints on the hearts of everyone who loves him.
It rearranges the emotional furniture of the home.
It changes the choreography of the days.

She feels the pressure to make things calm.
She feels the pressure to smooth out the edges.
She feels the pressure to keep the world steady even when hers is tipping.

And when the holidays come—when the world around her sparkles and sings and tells her to be merry—something inside her grows quiet. Something inside her bends low under the weight of pretending everything is fine. Something inside her wonders if anyone else sees how heavy it all is.

But she keeps moving.
Keeps lighting the candles.
Keeps whispering prayers over the sink.
Keeps carrying hope like a cracked lantern through the dark.

Some days it doesn’t matter how gentle she walks or how brave she tries to be—
the chaos in her soul just sits there.

Not because she’s broken beyond repair.
Not because she’s failed.
Not because she isn’t strong or faithful or enough.

But because she’s human.
Because loving someone in the throes of addiction is its own form of heartbreak.
Because carrying peace for everyone eventually becomes too much for one heart to bear.

And yet…

Even here, even in this unraveling, God doesn’t step away.
He steps closer.

Not with loud answers.
Not with instant fixes.
Not with platitudes that land hollow.

But with presence.
With nearness.
With a kind of quiet strength that slips beneath the cracks and holds the parts of her she can’t hold on her own.

In the soft hours of early morning when she can’t sleep, He sits with her.
In the ache of wondering how to make things better when she can’t, He wraps her in mercy.
In the moments when she feels unseen, He bends low and whispers, I see you. I am here. You do not carry this alone.

She doesn’t need to pretend with Him.
She doesn’t need to hide the tiredness or force joy when her heart feels threadbare.
She doesn’t need to be the strong one in His presence.

He already knows the weight she carries.
He already knows the fear she doesn’t say aloud.
He already knows the courage it takes to keep loving, keep hoping, keep breathing in a home marked by someone else’s battle.

And He calls her beloved anyway.
Treasured anyway.
Held anyway.

Even if December feels heavy instead of holy.
Even if the tree lights feel dim instead of bright.
Even if her soul feels more like winter than wonder.

He is the God who steps into the cold places.
The God who comes close to the brokenhearted.
The God who puts His hands on the shaking edges of her life and whispers a promise:

I am with you in this.
I am not waiting for things to be beautiful before I come.
I meet you in the mess, in the ache, in the quiet rooms where tears fall silently.

And maybe—just maybe—
this kind of presence is its own kind of Christmas miracle.

Because the miracle was never about lights or glitter or perfect moments or families that get it all right.
The miracle was a God who came down into the dark.
A God who stepped into a world fractured and weary.
A God who chose a messy manger instead of a throne—
to show her, thousands of years later, that He is not afraid of her mess either.

So she breathes.
She lifts her tired eyes.
She lets herself believe that God is not disappointed in her weariness.
She lets herself rest in the truth that she doesn’t have to hold the whole world together.

And maybe the holidays will still feel tender.
Maybe the lights will still flicker in ways that ache.
Maybe the weight won’t disappear overnight.

But she knows this now:

She is not alone.
Not forsaken.
Not forgotten in the shadows of someone else’s struggle.

God is here in the depths of it—
in the burnout,
in the pressure,
in the trembling hope,
in the quiet courage of a woman who keeps choosing love,
even when life feels like winter.

And He holds what she cannot.

The post Even Here, In The Quiet Ache of December appeared first on Growing Boldly.

I wish you knew.

I wish you could step into this body for a day—to feel the tremors that come when your heart forgets how to beat right, the pain that splinters through joints that can’t hold you up, the exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix.

I wish you could see the notes I keep with every medication—what helps, what hurts, what makes the nightmares come.

The long list of:

“this one didn’t work,”

“that one caused night terrors,”

“this new one made me hallucinate.”

I wish you could hear the weariness in my doctor’s voice as we try again, hoping maybe this time, it will help me stay upright, stay human, stay me.

So when I came today—after you called to say my prescriptions were ready—I came with hope.

Hope that maybe tonight, I might rest.

That maybe this new combination will make it easier to breathe through the chaos my body creates.

But then, I heard it.

The whisper.

“Pill seeker.”

And I froze. Because for a moment, I wasn’t a woman fighting invisible wars inside her body.

I was a label.

A suspicion.

A problem.

I saw how you looked at the bags under my eyes.

I saw how you took in the bruises & scratches on my hands.

I saw how you noticed the shakiness on my feet.

I wanted to tell you about my teenage daughter—how we roughhoused in the kitchen last night and how her laughter left small bruises & some scratches where she grabbed my hands to twirl me.

I wanted to tell you how hard it is to show up here, again and again, and not feel shame for needing the very things that make life livable.

But I didn’t.

Especially after you told me my scripts weren’t ready.

I just smiled, pulled my sleeves down, picked up my purse, thanked you, and walked away.

Here’s the truth: your job matters deeply.

You are the bridge between pain and relief, between despair and hope.

You hold the power to help or to harm—not through your hands, but through your words.

So, please—see the person before the prescription.

See the person before the problem.

See the mother, the wife, the human who is just trying to make it through another day.

See the person living several autoimmune conditions and a pacemaker.

See the person who is ill, WANTING to be well.

And even if I was seeking pills—see the humanity anyway.

Because kindness can heal more than medicine ever could.

The post To the Pharmacy Techs Who Whispered: appeared first on Growing Boldly.

And yet, the light still spills slow across the kitchen floor.

The coffee brews. The child laughs.

Hope hums quiet between the cracks.

You stand at the sink and whisper it — half-prayer, half-plea — God is still good.

Not because the world feels steady, but because His heart never wavers.

Because even when everything shakes, mercy still rises — soft as dawn, sure as breath.

Maybe this is the gospel we pass down when the world feels hard —not that faith makes life easy, but that love makes it possible to keep showing up anyway.

We can tell our children that God’s goodness isn’t something fragile that breaks under the weight of the world.

It’s the goodness that kneels — hands muddy, heart open — to bind up wounds, to share bread, to hold on to one another when the wind howls through what’s left.

Maybe we show them that being the hands and feet of Jesus isn’t grand or loud —it’s the casserole dropped off at the neighbor’s door, the whispered prayer in the grocery aisle, the quiet giving when no one sees.

Because this is what it means to live like we believe —that goodness still grows in the soil of sorrow, that grace still seeps through the cracks, that light still leaks through every broken thing.

So when the world quakes and questions rise, we gather them close and say:

“Even here, even now — God is still good. And we can still be His love.”

The post Even Here, Even Now – God Is Still Good appeared first on Growing Boldly.

Not to keep the peace.
Not to make others comfortable.
Not to fit back into a life you already outgrew.

You’re allowed to take up space.
To change your mind.
To protect your peace.
To redefine “family.”
To heal what hurt you.
To stop apologizing for being someone God is proud of.

Growth isn’t loud.
Sometimes it just sounds like one quiet “no.”
Or a shaky “yes.”
Or the sound of your own feet walking away.

But heaven hears it.
And heaven cheers for every bold inch forward.

Keep going, friend.

You’re growing boldly — even if no one sees it yet.

What’s one thing you’re no longer shrinking for? Comment below — I’ll be cheering for you. 

The post The Courage to Take Up Space: Embracing Your True Self appeared first on Growing Boldly.

The post What Does Gratitude Look Like This Thanksgiving? appeared first on Growing Boldly.

“So, are you in?”

I stared at the words, my stomach twisting. The idea of flying to Florida to spend four days in a house with 13 complete strangers? Hard pass. That was a firm nope in my book. Surely, my husband would back me up on this.

As I paced back and forth, phone in hand, I fired off a text. It might be good for networking, might even help build better practices for my business, I reasoned. But also, let’s be real—I hate peopling.

Because here’s the thing: I’d lost faith in people.

Giving up my journalist badge had felt like losing a piece of my identity, and with it, I’d lost what I thought was my community. People I had called friends—people who had been in my corner—suddenly disappeared when I no longer had the title. I wasn’t useful to them anymore, and their absence left me wary, and guarded.

Despite years as a journalist and serving as the executive director of the chamber of commerce—where networking was part of my actual job—I loathed small talk. The endless chatter about the weather, obligatory questions about my kids, and the inevitable, “So, what do you do?” made my skin crawl. Surface-level conversations exhausted me.

So why, exactly, would I voluntarily throw myself into a house full of strangers?

I wasn’t expecting Chris to text back so quickly.

“I’ll book your flights tonight.”

Wait, what?

Later that evening, as he clicked away on his laptop, my 16-year-old daughter casually looked up from her phone and added her own unsolicited commentary.

“You need to go. You don’t have a social life and, like, no friends. And no—your best friend Liz doesn’t count. That’s like, one friend, Mom.”

Well. Alrighty then.

And that’s how I found myself boarding a plane to Florida, second-guessing my life choices and silently rehearsing excuses to back out last-minute. I probably drove Ashley, Alli Worthington’s assistant, crazy with my endless what-ifs and contingency questions. I’m sure she regretted inviting me at least a dozen times.

But here’s what I didn’t see coming.

The Unexpected Gift of Finding Your Home Team
Almost a year later, that same group of women—those 13 strangers I was so hesitant to meet? They are my people. My home team.

These are the women who keep me accountable to my goals, my dreams, and the calling God has placed on my life. These are the women I can talk shop with—who get the world of writing, business-building, and balancing it all with motherhood.

They have prayed for me through my husband’s sobriety journey. They have covered me in love and encouragement through surgery after surgery, through hard days and holy ones.

They are the ones I can show up to online, in my pajamas, with no makeup and messy hair, and feel completely seen and safe.

They are the ones I can show up to online, in my pajamas, with no makeup and messy hair, and feel completely seen and safe. (Heather Riggleman quote on friendship for Begin Within: A Gratitude Series)
I never expected to find a community like this. But I’ve learned something invaluable along the way: We all need a home team.

Even if we have to go out of our way to build it.

Why You Need to Find Your People
God never designed us to do life alone.

We know friendship is vital. We know we are wired for connection, created to live in relationship with one another. But here’s the part we sometimes forget: Community doesn’t just happen. It takes intentionality.

We have to be willing to put in the time and effort to find our people—to invest in relationships that aren’t just convenient, but deeply meaningful.

Because when life hits hard—and it will—you need a circle that will rally around you, pray for you, fight for you, and remind you who you are when you forget.

How to Build Your Home Team
So maybe you’re reading this and thinking, That’s great for you, but I don’t have that kind of community.

I get it.

I spent years convincing myself that I didn’t need close friendships—that I was just too busy, too introverted, or too burned out to put in the effort. And honestly? It felt safer that way.

I spent years convincing myself that I didn’t need close friendships—that I was just too busy, too introverted, or too burned out to put in the effort.
Because building meaningful friendships requires vulnerability. It means risking rejection. It means opening your heart to people who may not always show up the way you hoped.

But here’s the truth: The right people are worth the risk.

You don’t have to keep carrying it all, love. You don’t have to tuck it away, pressing it down deep, pretending the weight isn’t pulling on the sinews of your soul.

Because when you let someone in—when you let your heart crack open just a little, just enough to whisper the thing you were willing to keep hidden—you don’t just share the weight, you let someone else help you see. They stand beside you, their presence painting a different version of the landscape, their love turning the sharp edges into something softer, more whole.

And maybe this is the gift: we were never meant to carry the heavy things alone. We were meant to sit knee to knee, heart to heart, hands open—sorting through what can stay, what must be let go, what needs to be lifted into the light and surrendered to the mending mercy of God.

So go ahead—let a friend help you with the heavy lifting. Let them gather up what feels like too much. Let them help you hold it up to the light, up to Love. Always, always up to Love.

The post Grateful for My Hometeam appeared first on Growing Boldly.