Reset and Revival

Coming Back to the Things You Love

Aug 31, 2022

Hi, and welcome to Notes from the Field, a new newsletter where I’ll be sharing on a biweekly basis inspiration and insights from the ordinary days on my life. It’s been a few years since I’ve written anything of significance publicly, so I appreciate you being here and being part of my revival!

Wondering what prompted my exit and reentry into public writing? Good, because I’d love to tell you more.

In case you didn’t know, a few years ago, my life completely imploded. I moved from the mission field back to the US, uprooting my family and landing in a city where we’d never lived before and had only a handful of connections. I went to work outside the home full-time for the first time since I had my first child 20 years earlier. And I got divorced. Yes, you read that right. My marriage of 21 years ended, and suffice it to say, it did not go easily into that good night. While all these radical changes and the decisions surrounding them were unequivocally the right things for me and my kids, you can imagine the toll it took on us. Starting a new life is some pretty heavy lifting emotionally. We were all rocked to our cores.

I backed away from writing during this time partly because it was too soon to tell the story. I don’t really know how to write any other way than to tell my own story and this story just wasn’t ready for public consumption. But the bigger reason was that my voice was broken by all that I had experienced. I realized pretty quickly I needed to dig in and deal with the trauma of my own life, and that it needed to be a quiet process. I needed to dive deep, commit to my healing journey, and wait until I resurfaced.

How did that healing journey take shape? Well, mostly through the guidance and expertise of my trusted therapist. She has walked with me through these long years and lent her full knowledge of trauma and healing to my story. We outlined my lifetime of trauma and then entered into a period of intense EMDR therapy. (If you are not familiar, you can read more about EMDR here.) It was a process that took a lot of hard work and willingness to look at things I had long buried, to feel all my feelings. I needed to step away from sharing much publicly then, because it was just too raw to give away. The stakes were high for my healing, and I wanted to guard it to be sure I was doing it for the right reasons, for myself and not for the approval of an audience.

The journey to heal from my trauma was a long one. It took a couple of years. As I started to emerge from the fog and feel the positive effects of the work I’d done, I started to rediscover myself. In that rediscovery, I realized there were parts of me I was ready to let go of, things I had hung my identity on that were no longer part of who I was. I had to take the time to grieve the loss of those roles and learn to let go gracefully. I had to trust the process of my own becoming. In that process, as I sifted through what I actually claimed as parts of myself and what I was ready to let go of, I found a longing, and that longing was to be a writer again. I missed words, story-telling, and sharing with a community. I leaned into that longing and let it guide me back to myself, and here I am now, back to waking up in the quiet darkness, putting fingers to keys, and giving words away.

A major life reset can be a tricky thing to maneuver, but done right, it can become a process of such hope, a point in life where you are able to unburden yourself from the things that no longer serve you and define and fully embrace the things that give you life. The reset leads to a revival. There likely won’t be crowds clapping their hands and singing praises to the Lord over you, but you will feel it deep in your bones. A new you rising to the surface, or maybe the old you coming back to life. Likely some of both.

Your life doesn’t have to completely blow up like mine did for you to have a revival moment. You can hit the reset button all on your own. If you are feeling burdened by the weight of all the things you are carrying and find little joy in life, if you feel like you have lost yourself, if who you are at your core has become muddied and indistinct from the roles you are obliged to play, perhaps it’s time to reset. If some of what you are carrying are habits or behavior patterns related to experiencing trauma, I heartily recommend finding a professional to guide you through that process, a licensed therapist or counselor. I also recommend a good journal to walk you through the process. Working my way through Glennon Doyle’s Get Untamed has been eye-opening and life-changing for me. As I near finishing it, I am looking for what comes next, I am eyeing this, Journal of Radical Permission, as my next step deeper into myself.

These were my path to revival. Maybe yours will look different than mine. That’s okay. What’s important is that you take that deep dive so you can come up carrying your whole heart right there in your chest, beating once again with hope, that you embrace a new becoming, one that leads you back to yourself and forward into new worlds of wonder at all you can be. I hope you will give yourself this gift if you need it. My greatest joy is the thought of a world full of women who know themselves and their worth deeply and are rooted in the Spirit’s grand and great purpose for them. I want you to be that woman, I want to be that woman, and I want us to invite other women to join us on that path.

I am grateful you have chosen to witness my revival. I hope I’ll be here to see yours.

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Reset and Revival

Coming Back to the Things You Love

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