20h • General discussion
The Children I Left Behind
How do I trust myself again…
when survival meant shutting parts of me down?
When silence was safety,
numbness was wisdom,
and the parts of me that felt
were liabilities I couldn’t afford.
What do you do…
when your body adapted to war,
but your soul is begging for peace?
I don’t remember when I stopped trusting myself.
Only that one day, silence felt safer than speaking.
Stillness felt smarter than wanting.
And disappearing…well,
that felt like strategy, not surrender.
See, when survival becomes the goal,
your body learns to cut costs.
Hope? Too expensive.
Desire? Dangerous.
Emotion? A luxury for the safe.
So I split.
I severed.
I simplified.
I became efficient.
Sharp.
Unreachable.
And it worked.
I stayed alive.
But now?
Now I’m trying to live.
And the things I once buried are knocking.
Not like ghosts
More like children I left behind in the storm.
Still waiting for me to come back.
Still believing I will.
Here’s the hard part:
They don’t want an apology.
They want reintegration.
They want me to feel again.
Risk again.
Trust again.
But how do I trust
the very instincts I once had to betray
in order to survive?
And how do I bring those parts of me
to a God I was afraid of trusting too?
Because sometimes I thought Jesus only loved
the version of me that looked holy,
not the one that hid in the corner
just trying to breathe.
But I’m learning something new.
Maybe He didn’t just wait for me at the finish line.
Maybe He walked with me through the splitting.
Sat with me in the silence.
Whispered to the parts I abandoned,
“You’re still Mine.”
Maybe the answer isn’t to go back
to the self I was.
Maybe it’s to honor the one who adapted,
thank the one who endured,
and invite Jesus to sit with the one
who’s still whispering beneath the armor.
I don’t have it figured out.
But I think trust begins in the quiet.
When I stop asking myself to be perfect
and start asking if I’m willing to be present.
And maybe that’s enough, for now.
Maybe that’s where He begins too.
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The Children I Left Behind
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