Reflection

You’ve become so used to being the one others count on that it can feel unfamiliar, and at times even unsafe, to let yourself fall apart. Strength became your default, not out of pride, but out of necessity. You adapted. You stayed steady. You kept going because, at the time, softening didn’t feel like an option in your life, and in some ways – you’re proud of that. You made it through silent battles no one even knew you were fighting, you held yourself together in the dark. You survived.

Still, there comes a point in every single healing journey when survival is no longer enough, when holding it all together stops feeling like strength or grace, and starts feeling like loneliness, like self abandonment, like a wound that won’t close.

God never asked you to earn love by being okay. He doesn’t meet you through your composure. He doesn’t equate faith with emotional control. He invites you into refuge — not in theory, not in concept, but in the real, lived experience of being held when you no longer want to be the one doing all the holding. Strength in God has always looked different. It’s not the person with the most channeled voice or the neatly organized life — it is the human being who is willing to fall into grace before they fall apart.

There is holiness in unraveling before God. Not because he needs to witness your breaking to believe in your pain, but because you need to experience what it feels like to be fully seen and still completely safe. To be fully known and still completely loved.

Let yourself admit what is heavy. Call it by its name. Let yourself ask to be carried. 

You don’t have to stay composed to be worthy of love. Your strength was never meant to become your identity. It was meant to serve your journey, not become your cage. You are allowed to let go. You are allowed to be tired. You are allowed to fall, to release, because you will always be held in his faithfulness, you will always find your back home.

Prayer

God, life has taught me how to be strong — sometimes too strong. I’ve worn my strength like armor, thinking that it would keep me safe. But I’m tired, and I want to know what it means to find refuge in you instead of in control. Teach me how to come to you without my mask, without my performance, without the pressure to hold it all together. Help me to believe that I am no less loved when I let myself fall apart. 

Amen.