Five Days and Surrendered Heart

Five days from now, I will stand on a stage — and I am finally learning that trembling and trusting can occupy the same moment

🕯️ ✍️ 📖 🕊️

Five days.

I keep counting them, the way you count the steps to a diving board you’ve committed to jumping from. You’ve already said yes. You’ve already climbed the ladder. There’s no graceful way down except through the air.

This morning I sat with my tea going cold beside me, my journal open on the table, and I found myself just staring at the blank page. Not because I had nothing to say, but because so much wanted to be said at once — and I wasn’t sure my words were large enough to carry it all.

🕯️ In five days, I will stand at the Mini-TENx Speakers event at Te Pou Theatre and I will open my mouth and offer what God has spent years carefully, tenderly restoring in me.

I will talk about seven keys.

Seven moments when creativity became a holy language.

Seven places where healing was hiding, waiting to be found.

It sounds so tidy when I put it that way — numbered, structured, purposeful. A neat little bow on a very long, untidy story.

The truth is, I didn’t choose this message. The message chose me. It found me in the places I’d rather have kept private — in the years of depression I didn’t have language for, in the grief I swallowed so others wouldn’t worry, in the identity wounds I carried like stones I thought were simply part of who I was.

✍️ For the longest time, I thought writing in my journal was an indulgence. I thought painting was a luxury. I thought singing when no one was listening was just a quirk. I didn’t understand that God was teaching me a language — that every brushstroke was a prayer, every lyric an act of surrender, every blank page an invitation into His presence.

I didn’t understand until much later that He was not just giving me a creative gift.

He was giving me a key.

🪨 The Word of God has always been clear about this. The psalmists wept onto parchment. Miriam danced on the shores of the Red Sea. David sang in the wilderness between danger and deliverance. Creativity, for them, wasn’t performance — it was response. It was the overflow of a heart that had encountered God and couldn’t stay silent.

📖 “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; many will see and fear, and will trust in the Lord.” — Psalm 40:3 (NKJV)

A new song. Not a polished song. Not a perfect song. A new one — one that could only have been written after the old silence was broken.

That is what God has been doing in me.

🌱 For years, I carried chapters of my story as though they were shameful — chapters of loss, of confusion, of searching for belonging in all the wrong places. Migration has its own particular grief: the grief of leaving a version of yourself behind, of arriving somewhere new with all your familiar language and none of your familiar ground. I remember the season when New Zealand was still a foreign land to me, when I hadn’t yet found my footing, when the loneliness sat like a stone in my chest that I didn’t know how to name.

I painted in that season.

Not because I knew it would help. Not because someone prescribed creativity as therapy. I painted because something in me needed to move — needed to take the formless ache and give it shape, give it colour, give it somewhere to go outside of myself.

And quietly, without announcing itself, God met me at the canvas.

🕊️ I’ve been thinking this week about what it actually means to use your voice. We tend to think of voice as something vocal — words, sound, projection. We think of voice as the thing that fills a room. Yet I’m beginning to wonder if God thinks of it far more broadly than that. Perhaps your voice is the testimony you’ve been carrying, longing to be released. Perhaps it’s the song you’ve been humming under your breath for years, not yet sure it belongs in the open air. Perhaps it’s the journal entry you’ve written a hundred times and never shared. Perhaps it’s the painting you made in private grief that somebody, somewhere, desperately needs to see.

Perhaps finding your voice isn’t about becoming loud.

Perhaps it’s about becoming free.

📖 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” — 2 Timothy 1:7 (NKJV)

A sound mind. A steady spirit. A love that casts out fear, not because the fear was never real, but because love is simply larger.

🪨 I’ve learned that courage doesn’t wait until the trembling stops. Courage is the decision to step forward whilst the trembling is still very much present. I have trembled my way through every significant thing God has ever asked me to do — and not once has His presence failed to meet me on the other side of the step.

Twenty June is coming.

My notes are ready.

My heart is open.

My knees may well be shaking.

🌱 Yet something has shifted in the last few days — some quiet, internal settling that feels less like confidence and more like surrender. I am not walking onto that stage to impress anyone. I am walking on because God asked me to, and I have long since learned that obedience, however imperfect, is always better than a polished excuse.

The story I’m telling on that stage belongs to Him.

Every scar it carries is a testament to His faithfulness.

Every moment of restoration points back to His love.

If I can give even one person in that room permission to believe that their story is not over — that God is still writing, still redeeming, still turning ashes into something unexpectedly beautiful — then every trembling step will have been more than worth it.

🕯️ You don’t need a finished story to have a voice worth hearing.

You only need a God who hasn’t finished the story yet.

💡 Reflection:

What area of your life have you been quietly waiting to feel “ready” before you stepped forward — and what might God be saying to you in that waiting? 🤔

Is there a creative expression — painting, writing, singing, dancing, speaking — that God has used to meet you in a tender or difficult season? What happened when you surrendered it to Him? 🤔

What does “finding your voice” mean to you personally — and do you believe your voice, your story, carries something someone else needs? 🤔

Is there a fear you’ve been allowing to stand between you and a step of obedience God has been inviting you to take? 🤔

If your healed scars could speak to someone who is still in the middle of the wound, what would they say? 🤔

🎺 Affirmation:

My story is not a liability — it is a testimony. God has been writing it with intention, with love, and with redemptive purpose since before I drew my first breath. I don’t need to be finished to be used. I don’t need to be fearless to be faithful. The voice He placed within me was formed for such a time as this, and I choose today to offer it back to Him — trembling, open, and wholly surrendered.

🙌 Prayer:

Father, You know every page of this story — the chapters I’m proud of and the ones I’ve tried to quietly close. You know the words I have held back, the gifts I’ve kept hidden, the seasons when silence felt safer than truth. Thank You that You have never once given up on bringing me into greater freedom. As I stand on the edge of something that both thrills and frightens me, I choose to trust You more than I trust my own readiness. Still my trembling with Your presence. Anoint my words with Your love. Use this story — imperfect, ongoing, and entirely Yours — to bring hope to a heart that needs to know You are faithful. May every word I speak point not to me, but to You. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

🕯️ The stage is just a room. God’s presence makes it holy. Go.