A few Sundays ago, I almost didn’t go to church.

I was looking for every reason not to go.

The weather was unpredictable. We were originally supposed to have a picnic, but because storms were expected, service was moved back inside the church with the meal afterward.

I told myself I’d at least go to service.

But I wasn’t staying to eat.

We’d hear the Word, get home before the weather got bad, and that would be that.

Except my husband and I went.

And we stayed.

I’m glad we did.

The sermon that morning was called “Get Back Up.”

I’m someone who believes there is something to learn from every sermon, but I don’t necessarily believe every sermon is God specifically speaking to me.

Sometimes the message is simply a message.

And sometimes you sit there and something inside of you says:

Pay attention.

That Sunday, I paid attention.

Because somewhere between everything that had happened over the last several months and everything I was still trying to process, I realized something.

I had been knocked down.

And it was time to get back up.

I Didn’t Realize How Much I Was Grieving

The last several months have contained some of the biggest changes of my adult life.

I went to esthetician school while working full-time.

I graduated.

My job closed.

I lost the structure that had organized my life for years.

I experienced loss.

I watched relationships and routines change.

I grieved people.

I grieved familiarity.

I grieved security.

I even grieved versions of myself.

And when you’re moving constantly, sometimes you don’t realize how much you’re carrying.

You just keep going.

There is somewhere to be tomorrow.

An alarm that needs to be set.

A shift to work.

A class to attend.

An assignment to finish.

A responsibility that doesn’t care whether you’re exhausted.

So you keep moving.

And then one day, everything stops.

That’s what happened to me.

For the first time in a long time, I had nowhere I had to be.

And I thought freedom would feel amazing.

Instead, I crashed.

Hard.

I Thought I Would Handle This Differently

I imagined what life after graduation would look like so many times.

I’d finally have time.

Time to create.

Time to write.

Time to build my business.

Time to work toward becoming a full-time content creator.

Time to take care of myself.

Time to figure out what I actually wanted my life to become.

I had prayed for time like this.

So when I finally received it, I thought I’d hit the ground running.

Instead, some days I barely moved.

And then came the guilt.

You prayed for this.

You’re wasting time.

You should be doing more.

Everybody else is moving forward.

What are you doing?

The more overwhelmed I became, the less I did.

And the less I did, the worse I felt about myself.

It became a cycle.

Eventually, the darkness started creeping in.

I stopped answering phone calls.

Texts sat unanswered.

I withdrew.

There were days when basic things felt much bigger than they should have.

At one point, I realized I hadn’t showered in five days.

Five.

And that’s when I knew:

I’m not okay.

Not in the cute, “I need a self-care day” kind of way.

I genuinely wasn’t okay.

Sometimes the Darkness Is Comfortable

There’s something about struggling emotionally that I don’t think we talk about enough.

Sometimes the darkness becomes comfortable.

Not because you want to hurt.

Not because you don’t want things to get better.

But because the darkness doesn’t ask much from you.

When you’re hiding from the world, you don’t have to explain yourself.

You don’t have to figure out your career.

You don’t have to answer the question, “So, what’s next?”

You don’t have to create.

You don’t have to be productive.

You don’t have to pretend you’re excited about your future when you can’t even figure out what you’re doing tomorrow.

You can just disappear for a while.

And when your mind has been fighting itself every day, disappearing can feel a lot like rest.

Until you realize you’ve started getting comfortable there.

That’s where I found myself.

I knew there had to be light somewhere.

I just couldn’t see it.

And Then I Started Reaching

Nothing dramatic happened.

There wasn’t some movie moment where inspirational music started playing and suddenly I decided to change my entire life.

I took a shower.

That was it.

I showered.

I lit some incense.

I made myself breakfast.

Eventually, I emailed my therapist.

I answered a message from one of my closest friends.

I didn’t tell her everything.

I simply told her the truth:

I’m not okay.

And she reminded me that I didn’t have to be okay alone.

Little by little, I started reaching outside of myself again.

And that’s when I started understanding that sermon differently.

Getting Back Up Doesn’t Always Look Like Getting Back Up

When I first heard “Get Back Up,” I imagined a comeback.

I know myself.

One thing about me?

My bounce-back game has always been strong.

Life knocks me down, and eventually I come back.

Usually a little wiser.

A little stronger.

A little more certain of myself.

So I thought this would be the same.

I’d decide I was done feeling sorry for myself, get motivated, create a plan and become unstoppable again.

Except that isn’t what happened.

I got back up.

And then I fell again.

And that’s when I learned something I desperately needed to learn:

Sometimes getting back up isn’t one decision.

Sometimes you get back up on Sunday and life knocks you down again on Wednesday.

Sometimes getting back up means taking a shower.

Sometimes it means eating breakfast.

Sometimes it means answering one text after ignoring your phone for weeks.

Sometimes it means telling someone, “I’m not okay.”

Sometimes it means praying when you don’t have beautiful words.

Sometimes it means doing absolutely nothing impressive except deciding that you are going to try again tomorrow.

And maybe that counts too.

Maybe it counts more than we realize.

I Can Grieve Without Living There

For a while, I thought moving forward meant I needed to stop grieving.

I don’t believe that anymore.

There are things from this season that still hurt.

There are people I miss.

There are things I wish had happened differently.

There are moments when grief catches me completely off guard.

I don’t think getting back up requires pretending none of that exists.

I can grieve without building a home inside my grief.

I can visit it.

I can acknowledge it.

I can cry.

I can honor what something meant to me.

I can miss who I was before everything changed.

And then I can keep going.

Moving forward doesn’t mean something didn’t matter.

Laughing again doesn’t mean you weren’t devastated.

Dreaming again doesn’t erase your grief.

Wanting something new doesn’t make you ungrateful for what you had.

And healing doesn’t require forgetting.

Sometimes healing simply means deciding grief doesn’t get to make every decision about what happens next.

Looking Back, I See God Everywhere

One of the reasons this season has affected me so deeply is because when I look backward, I have a hard time believing the timing of everything was random.

Maybe someone else would call it coincidence.

That’s okay.

I don’t.

Long before my job announced that it was closing, I felt like something was changing.

I couldn’t prove it.

I didn’t know when.

I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen.

I just felt it.

Then I started therapy.

Eventually, I became curious about esthetics.

I started researching it.

My therapist encouraged me to look into it further.

And somehow that curiosity became a decision that terrified me:

I enrolled in esthetician school.

I worried about the money.

I worried that I had made a mistake.

I worried about balancing full-time school with full-time work.

I wondered whether I could physically and mentally handle it.

But I went.

And somehow, I did it.

During school, I remember telling myself that after graduation, I could finally leave my job.

But truthfully?

I probably wouldn’t have.

That job was my safety net.

It was familiar.

It was reliable.

It represented security.

I would’ve convinced myself to stay a little longer.

Just until I had more money.

Just until something else was guaranteed.

Just until I felt safe.

Then the decision was made for me.

The job closed.

And my last day of work and my graduation happened less than 24 hours apart.

One chapter closed.

Another officially began.

Less than a day apart.

I can’t look at that timeline without thinking about God.

Because months before the door behind me closed, I had already started preparing for something on the other side of it.

I just didn’t know that’s what I was doing.

Faith Looks Different From the Other Side

Faith is interesting because sometimes while you’re living through something, nothing makes sense.

You pray.

You question.

You worry.

You wonder whether you’ve made a mistake.

You ask God what He’s doing.

And sometimes you don’t get an answer.

At least not one you immediately understand.

Then enough time passes.

You turn around.

And suddenly you can see pieces of the path that were invisible while you were walking it.

I can see preparation now.

I can see growth.

I can see timing.

I can see a woman who was terrified and kept moving anyway.

Most importantly, I can see that through every ending, every question, every long day and every moment when I didn’t know what was coming next—

I wasn’t walking alone.

My faith carried me through a season I wasn’t sure I could handle.

And maybe faith isn’t always knowing where God is taking you.

Sometimes faith is simply taking the next step while asking:

“God…what are we doing?”

And trusting Him enough to keep walking.

I Learned Something From Finishing the Bible

Recently, I finished reading every book of the Bible.

I started a little over a year ago.

And I want to be clear:

I did not read perfectly.

There were stretches when I didn’t read for a week.

There were times when even more time passed.

Life happened.

I got distracted.

I got tired.

I fell out of routine.

But every time I came back, I did something incredibly simple.

I picked up where I left off.

Eventually, I finished.

And when I realized that, something clicked.

I didn’t finish because I never stopped.

I finished because I kept coming back.

Maybe I’ve been defining consistency wrong.

Maybe consistency isn’t never missing a day.

Maybe consistency is refusing to let a missed day convince you to abandon something that matters to you.

Maybe you don’t need to start over every time life interrupts you.

Maybe you just need to remember where you left off.

I’ve spent so much time criticizing myself for starting and stopping.

But now I have an entire highlighted Bible sitting in front of me as evidence that stopping temporarily doesn’t mean I’ve failed.

I can come back.

I know how.

I’ve already done it.

Maybe You Need to Come Back Too

Maybe your ending looks nothing like mine.

Maybe you didn’t lose a job.

Maybe your relationship ended.

Maybe someone died.

Maybe your children grew up.

Maybe a friendship changed.

Maybe your body changed.

Maybe your plans fell apart.

Maybe you’re grieving a version of your life you thought you’d have by now.

Or maybe nothing catastrophic happened at all.

Maybe you’re simply tired.

Maybe somewhere along the way, you stopped doing the things that made you feel like yourself.

You stopped creating.

You stopped dreaming.

You stopped getting dressed.

You stopped calling people.

You stopped going places.

You stopped believing you could actually have the life you’ve spent years imagining.

And now you’ve been away from yourself for so long that you don’t know how to come back.

Here’s what I’m learning:

You don’t have to come back all at once.

Come back in pieces.

Take the shower.

Make breakfast.

Answer the text.

Open the curtains.

Say the prayer.

Take the walk.

Write the paragraph.

Record the video.

Make the appointment.

Pick the dream back up.

Do one thing that reminds you that you’re still in here.

And tomorrow?

Come back a little more.

Participate in Your Beginning

For months, I’ve been paying attention to everything that ended.

But lately I’ve been asking myself a different question:

What’s beginning?

I’m entering a completely new career.

I have dreams I’ve barely touched.

I have things I want to create.

I have stories I want to tell.

I have a life I want to build.

And I have time that I once prayed desperately to have.

I don’t know exactly what happens next.

For once, I think I’m okay with that.

Because participating in my beginning doesn’t require knowing how the story ends.

It just requires participation.

I can wake up.

I can pray.

I can create something.

I can take care of myself.

I can work toward my goals.

I can rest.

I can laugh.

I can grieve when grief comes knocking.

And when I fall?

I can get back up again.

I don’t have to transform my entire life tomorrow.

I don’t need the perfect morning routine.

I don’t need a flawless plan.

I don’t need to become a completely different woman before I’m allowed to start living again.

I just need to stop waiting for my life to begin while I’m already standing inside the beginning.

This Time Is a Gift

I prayed for time.

And through circumstances I never would’ve chosen for myself, I received it.

For a while, I thought being grateful for that meant I needed to make every second productive.

I don’t anymore.

Being a good steward of this season doesn’t mean squeezing productivity out of every waking hour.

Maybe stewardship looks like creating.

Learning.

Healing.

Trying.

Resting.

Taking care of my body.

Strengthening my relationship with God.

Loving the people around me.

Building something I’m proud of.

Allowing myself to be a beginner.

Allowing myself to enjoy my life again.

And trusting that I don’t need to have every detail figured out before I take the next step.

I spent so much time wanting certainty.

Now I think I’d rather have faith.

I Survived the Ending

There was a moment when I couldn’t imagine what life would look like on the other side of everything changing.

And now I’m here.

Not completely healed.

Not completely organized.

Not completely fearless.

Not completely certain.

But here.

I’ve survived every ending that brought me to this moment.

And after everything?

I still want things.

I still dream.

I still create.

I still believe God has more for me.

I still believe there are versions of myself I haven’t met yet.

I still believe my life can surprise me.

And maybe most importantly:

I’m still willing to try.

So I’m getting back up.

Slowly, if I have to.

Messily, if I have to.

Scared, if I have to.

And if I fall again?

I’ll get back up again.

Because now I understand something I didn’t understand before.

The goal was never to become a woman who never falls.

The goal is to become a woman who knows she can always come home to herself.

A woman who knows how to return to God.

A woman who knows how to pick up where she left off.

A woman who understands that a pause is not the same thing as quitting.

So if you’re somewhere in your own darkness right now, I won’t tell you to fix your entire life.

I won’t tell you to stop grieving.

I won’t tell you tomorrow is magically going to feel better.

I’ll just tell you what I’m learning myself:

Come back in pieces.

Do the next small thing.

And when you’re ready, do another.

You don’t have to see the entire light at the end of the tunnel to take one step toward it.

Eventually, the ending ends.

And when it does, there is something waiting on the other side that grief, fear and exhaustion can make easy to miss:

A beginning.

I survived the ending.

Now I get to participate in the beginning.

And this time, I know:

I don’t have to do it perfectly. I just have to keep coming back.