The Holy Undoing

Why this space exists.

I keep a journal nobody reads but is full of my prayers. One night, years ago, I wrote a sentence in it that scared me enough that I closed the cover fast, like someone might be standing behind me. I wrote, “I had never felt free to just be me. And I had no idea who me even was.”

That is a strange thing to write when your life looks like mine did. I held roles in ministry. I served on a church staff and learned how to keep big, complicated ministries humming. People handed me hard things because they knew I would carry them well, and I did. I could walk into almost any room, read it in just a few seconds, and become exactly what it needed me to be. I called that faithfulness for a long time, and I was proud of it.

What I could not have told you, that night with the journal, was the cost of being so fluent in everyone else. Somewhere under all the competence, the actual woman God made had gone quiet. Not gone. Quiet. She had been edited so many times, for so many spaces, that I could not find the original draft.

Maybe you know the feeling. You are the one everyone counts on. You keep the people around you okay. And on an ordinary Tuesday, washing a dish or driving a road you have driven a thousand times, a small voice asks where you went, and you do not have an answer ready, and that frightens you more than you let on.

What I have learned since is the reason this space exists.

The coming apart I was so afraid of turned out to be the kindest thing God has ever done for me. I had it backward. I thought faithfulness meant holding the constructed self together at any cost, and He was after something underneath it. In Genesis, before God speaks a single word over the chaos, before there is light or order or anything to manage, the text says His Spirit was hovering over the waters. He does not flinch at the formlessness. He hovers over it. Then He speaks, and the churning water becomes a place where things can live.

He has not changed His method. He hovers over the part of you that feels like wreckage, and He is not in a hurry, and He is not disappointed by what He finds. The undoing was rescue for me. It was Him loosening every knot I had tied to survive, and handing me back to myself.

There is a verse I keep close from Galatians 5:1, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” For freedom. That freedom is received, never earned, which is good news for someone who has spent years trying to earn everything else.

Here is what surprised me most. The freedom did not turn me inward. It turned me out. The same unraveling that gave me back my own face also pointed me toward Northeast Africa, toward people whose courage has remade what I think faith even is. Christ sets a person free, and then she becomes useful to the world in a way the polished version of her never could be.

So this is the space. Every Saturday morning I will send you one essay. Some come straight from my regular West Texas days, the dirt road, a conversation, something I noticed in my day that undid me a little. Others dig into the old Hebrew words that carry what English cannot quite reach. A few will bring you into the work in Northeast Africa that my own unraveling led me toward. I write for the capable, faithful, and sometimes weary person who has edited herself for so long she has half forgotten the original. I was her. Some mornings I still am.

I am not here to hand you one more thing to manage. I am here because the freedom is real, it is for you, and the God who hovers over your chaos has been there longer than you know.

He is already speaking light over it. Come see.