This is my story

I've been sitting with one question all morning, and it's undone me in the most tender way: who does He say I am? Not who the church said. Not who my wounds convinced me to become. Just this — what does God actually say about me? For years I dimmed myself to fit, hollowed myself out to keep the peace, and let shame speak in a voice I mistook for His. But what happens when I finally stop searching the rubble for another defect and turn my face towards Him instead?🤔

There was a small girl dancing in a Technicolour Dreamcoat, and the seats that mattered most sat empty. In their silence she learned an arithmetic so simple it was devastating: no one came, therefore this must not matter, therefore perhaps I do not matter. Yesterday I sat with all seven keys — singing, drawing, dancing, writing — and a thread became visible I can no longer pretend not to see. What if they were never seven separate wounds at all?🤔 What if you're still staring at an empty row of your own?🤔

Some vows are made so young we forget we ever spoke them — until a question about love languages cracks the ground open and there they are, still echoing. In a dream I found myself at a place built for joy, surrounded by people who love me, and yet I stayed back while they rode. Then I jumped, and a song rose up in me, and I began to dance like nobody was watching. But what happens the moment I realise someone is?🤔

The words felt heavier than usual that morning — heavier than I knew how to carry. Then a book found me, and it didn't offer me the tidy comfort I'd come to expect. Instead it whispered something I almost couldn't believe I was allowed to hear: that some things aren't meant to be fixed at all. For so long I thought my job in ministry was to make the pain disappear — but what if I've had it backwards all along?🤔

A dear friend asked me a simple question today, and it cracked something open I'd kept sealed for most of my life. To a child, love is spelt T.I.M.E. — and long ago I learned to stop asking for it, learned that needing it got me punished. So I became the one who serves, the one who gives, the one whose own hunger folded smaller and smaller. But what happens when someone finally offers you the very language your soul is starving for?🤔

There's something I've carried for so long, worn smooth from handling — the whisper "Wait, there's more…" and my certainty that it meant more broken, more to fix, more evidence I'm not yet healed enough to be trusted. Then a friend asked me a question that has stayed with me ever since: what's the acid-test for self-hatred?🤔 I sat with it far longer than I expected. And what I found had me recognising something I'm almost afraid to say aloud.

I learned early that suffering happens in silence — the kind where hard things unfold behind closed doors and you learn to keep your breaking private. Then I spent thirty years in church, surrounded by hundreds who knew my name, and discovered something that still catches me off guard: the silence followed me. It just wore a different dress. Three deaths in less than a year taught me who actually stays when the room empties. But did they ever really see me?🤔

There's a smallholding in Vanderbijlpark I can still see clearly — my brother and me home from school, the winter light fading fast, the house dark and quiet because Mama was working and Papa hadn't come home yet. We learned young that we were inconvenient to our own parents' lives. What I didn't know, until my seven-year-old son said seven small words that cut straight through me, was that I'd been handing him the very same lesson. Do we ever really see the torch we're passing before it's too late?🤔

Seven years ago, I held a brand-new Bible in trembling hands, its pages crisp and untouched. Weeks later the world locked down, and I locked down with it — the darkness whispering that this time I wouldn't survive. Then the Holy Spirit said something so unexpected I could hardly believe it: mark them, colour them, show Me which verses are saving your life. Could a handful of markers really become the thing that held me above the water?🤔

There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a heart when someone moves towards you with gentleness. This week I found myself there again — someone was kind to me, simply and without fanfare — and immediately my old protective voice began its familiar work. What do they want?🤔 Where will this cost me?🤔 The voice isn't wrong, exactly. Life has been a thorough teacher. Yet I'm finally old enough to see what I was too wounded to receive.

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?🤔