This is my story

Today wasn't a great day. I phoned a friend hoping to carry her burden, and instead she gently turned the conversation towards me and asked how I was really doing. I've been holding a tightness I can't quite name, like a clay jar carrying more water than it was ever shaped to hold. For so long I'd stayed in management mode — appointments kept, everyone carried, the cracks quietly glazed over. But what happens to a heart that has been holding its breath for far too long?🤔

It was meant to be Queenstown. Mountain views, a slow breakfast, thirty-four years of us wrapped up in a getaway Clive had lovingly planned. I'd been carrying that day in my heart like a little gift, waiting for the moment to open it. Instead, I watched him collapse. How do you celebrate an anniversary when the celebration has been stolen, and you feel robbed yet achingly grateful at the very same time?🤔

It began with a photo of macramé lampshades and my brother's teasing question: Are you still alive? I didn't expect a simple string of knotted cord to loosen something I'd kept sealed away decades. For so long, large parts of my childhood sat behind a high wall I'd built for protection, and I remembered almost nothing. But what happens when the Lord begins to hand those memories back, one thread at a time?🤔

The suitcases were packed, our flights to Queenstown booked, and my heart had already flown on ahead of us. Then, the night before we were due to leave, Clive collapsed into his chair, his eyes rolled upwards, and for a few terrifying moments I genuinely thought I had lost him. Thirty-four years of marriage, and suddenly Queenstown meant nothing at all. What does love do when the plans you've held so carefully unravel in a single night?🤔 Pull up a chair, my friend, and let me pour us a cup of tea.

By now we should have been in the air, watching the land fall away beneath us on our way to celebrate 34 years together. Instead, I'm on a hard chair in A&E, my suitcase still half-packed on the bed at home. Clive hasn't been well for a few weeks now. Last night the hot and cold shivers came over him in waves, and around ten o'clock he came out of the office after speaking with his brother, sank into the La-Z-Boy, and passed out. His eyes rolled back. I called his name, and he didn't answer. For one long, suspended moment, I thought we'd lost him. 😪 For a long while after we went to bed, I kept listening for his breathing, and for the first time in 34 years of marriage, his snoring brought a sense of peace. It told me he was still alive. I had no eloquent prayers — only his name, and the Name of Jesus. How do you lay down the holiday you'd dreamed of, and trust that God is just as present in a waiting room?🤔

There's a question that has been sitting quietly beneath all the applause, even while the rooms were full and the feedback warm: at what cost?🤔 The convention was a roaring success. And here I am, curled on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and a tiredness that has settled into my bones like winter damp, discovering once again that I am made of clay. I've been here before. Part of me whispers I should have known better. So why did I keep pouring long after the jug ran dry?🤔

I woke this morning to a word I didn't go looking for. Uncle Rodney had simply shared it, no explanation, no comment, and before I'd even reached the end something in me gave way. Not sadness, exactly, more like a dam wall that had held for a very long time finally deciding it no longer needed to. I've been strong for so many years, smiling through the holding patterns and calling it trust. So why, with my tea gone cold beside me, can't the tears quite stop?🤔

Pull up a chair, friend, and sit with me a while. There are two canvases that sat in my studio cupboard for five long years, coming out only on the hardest days, when one of us hit a wall of overwhelm and needed the other. In and out they went, season after season, never quite finished. Have you ever wondered whether the unfinished things in your heart will ever be complete?🤔 What happened on Friday left me breathless.

The tears came before I could even remember the teachers. I was on the job, slides rolling, and there I was swallowing something that wouldn't stay down. Later that night I sat with the Lord and let the water find its lowest place — all the way back to a primary school classroom where a measuring stick was held over me every single day. Why did getting something wrong feel like it proved something terrible about who I was?🤔

He carried my boxes in, then paused at my door to read the magnet aloud. *Healing hearts. Changing the world one broken heart at a time.* Then he added three words I'd never written there, got into his car, and drove away. For months I'd carried that mission around Auckland, parked it outside churches and the homes of the grieving, yet somewhere along the road I'd quietly stopped counting my own heart among the ones it was written for. What were those three words he spoke?🤔

This afternoon I sat with two pictures side by side on my screen: an empty room, and the same room filled in answer to one simple question. What came back made me catch my breath. It wasn't the velvet or the gold that undid me, but one quiet line at the end. How often have I set the table for everyone else and forgotten to pull out a chair for myself?🤔 Three invitations to rest arrived in as many days, and I don't believe that's a coincidence.

My body remembered before my mind had caught up. We'd been invited to close our eyes and travel back to a moment of rejection, and in an instant my chest tightened and the tears welled. But I was on the job, with a Convention unfolding all around me and people depending on me — so I quickly opened my eyes, put the lid back on and kept the slides rolling. Yet is there a difference between putting a lid on something for a moment and keeping it sealed for a lifetime?🤔