I want to start opening up a space in this community for testimonies. I’ll be honest with you ladies though. I’m not ready to share my full testimony yet. It’s something I’m still praying through and processing. I believe one day it will probably come out as one full video or written story when the Lord and I finish working through it together. And I want to honor that process. But even though I’m not ready to share everything yet, I do want to start sharing pieces of the journey as the Lord finishes those chapters in my heart. Little stories. Small breakthroughs. Moments where God showed up. Because sometimes we spend so much time talking about the wilderness that we forget to pause and recognize the places where the Lord already carried us through. So this space is for that. Not for processing wounds in the middle of them. We can do that in prayer, counseling, journaling, and with the Lord. But here I want us to share the hidden gems. The moments where we can look back and say: “God really did bring me through that.” The small finished works. The quiet victories. The things only the Lord could have done. As I process things in my own life, I’ll start sharing some of those stories too. And if you feel ready, I invite you to do the same. Not pressure. Not performance. Just honesty, when the Lord has completed something in you and you can look back and give Him the glory for it. Because our testimonies are not about us. They’re about what the Lord has done. And those stories might be exactly what another woman here needs to hear. 🤍

Today I had a conversation with my brother that reminded me of something powerful about PTSD. For context, my brother has lived a life most people cannot imagine. He joined the military at 17. By 19 he had already completed two tours. By 23 he had gone through divorce and carried a lifetime of trauma from childhood as well. We grew up watching men abuse our mother. My father and his father were different, but the chaos and violence around us was real. Today my brother is a detective. A very good one, if I may say so. He has worked in homicide, special victims, and he is a hostage negotiator. He has seen more dead bodies than the average person ever will. He has seen the worst things done to children. He has sat across from men who committed unspeakable acts and negotiated with them. He also struggles with PTSD. But today he told me something that stayed with me. He said, “It’s not post-traumatic depression. It’s post-traumatic growth.” And he explained that many times we struggle with PTSD because we don’t want to process what happened. We resist feeling it. We resist releasing it. We try to push it away or distract ourselves from it. And when we do that, we can become stuck in it. Instead of moving through it. I share that because I still struggle with PTSD too. I still have panic attacks. Certain things trigger fear in me. Leaving the house with my four children can feel overwhelming sometimes. One of my sons elopes and another physically depends on me for mobility support getting in and out of the car. He is also nonverbal. So much of my life happens inside my home. In many ways, creating content and building this community has been my anchor to the outside world. It is the way I stand in the gap and use my voice. But every time I hit “post,” there is still a very real battle in my mind. Fear. Doubt. The memories of things that once made me feel unsafe. Recently, after my ex was served legal papers, I had a panic attack. The police had told me he was angry, and my body immediately went into fear because it remembered what anger used to mean.