This is my story

For most of my life, I knew how to read a room, how to perform, how to be whatever was needed to stay safe. Survival, it turned out, had strings attached. Then one week at D-School, someone gave me the strangest prophetic picture — Pinocchio — and four small words I still cannot shake: "End of the strings." What was the Father asking me to hand over, and what did He want to give me in return?🤔

There's a lie I've carried my whole life — so old, so familiar, that I stopped questioning whether it was even a lie at all. It settled into the broken places and furnished a whole room in my heart, and I called it truth. I'm replaceable. I'm not quite enough. But what happens when God speaks one gentle word in a prayer room — and then sends someone to say it back to you, over and over, until shame has nowhere left to hide?🤔

I have carried healing like an assignment for longer than I care to admit — one more thing I was failing at, one more place I wasn't trying hard enough. Then a single sentence I'd heard countless times over the past six years suddenly stopped me this morning, as if I were hearing it for the very first time. What if the striving itself was the very thing hollowing me out?🤔 What if healing was never meant to be my job at all?🤔 I'm still learning what that means.

There are some goodbyes we are made to say twice — once to distance, and once to death. For years I kept the gates locked, terrified that if the tears came, they would never stop.

There are three graves now. Three losses stacked on top of one another in less than a year, and I've been bending under all of them at once. The hardest part?🤔 Learning who to trust with my rawness whilst managing my own grief — telling myself I'm being wise, protecting the people I love from my sorrow, but I'm starting to wonder: what am I really protecting?🤔 There's a difference between wise discernment and self-imposed isolation and in this season, I'm learning that difference the hard way. What if asking for presence isn't weakness?🤔 What if it's exactly what Jesus modelled in Gethsemane?🤔

Grief has a way of hitting hardest when I least expect it — usually whilst driving, where I can't run or bury it in busyness. This morning the tears I'd swallowed on Sunday finally came.

I was broken in 1999, and hope felt like something other people got to keep. Then a man with steady blue eyes and a wife opened their door — and simply stayed. At 1h30 this morning, on 26 July, a man who was steady, spiritually safe, and deeply faithful went home. Oom Leon — spiritual father, baptiser of my faith, opener of doors when despair had sealed them shut — has finished his race. This is the story of what it means to be fathered when you never thought you'd know that tenderness. It's published now, and it's for everyone who's ever been touched by faithful presence.

Forty moves, three countries, and a little girl who never quite finished unpacking before it was time to leave again. I had learned to hold every place loosely — until the day everything I was clinging to came undone.

There was a season when the darkness wasn't just around me — it was in me. I opened the door just a crack, hoping for light, and the words I heard sent me back into silence for far too long.

There are words that land differently. "You've got some very big shoes to fill." Then came the others, offered just as warmly: "Have you heard her laugh?" And: "She always answers the phone when I call." Each one a kindness. Each one, without knowing it, another inch of ground beneath my feet quietly disappearing. I shrunk. And sitting at my desk in that shared workspace, holding the quiet weight of a new beginning, I felt it — the familiar pull of a very old story. Not good enough. Not equipped. Behind, before you've even begun.

For decades I believed I had to be perfect enough for someone to stay — that my every imperfection was proof I was a mistake. Then, in a quiet conference room, something began to shift.

For decades I kept going — serving, smiling, breathing shallow and shrinking small — while something deep inside quietly ran out of breath. I didn't sit under a broom tree, yet God found me there all the same.