An Honest Prayer While the Dust Is Still Settling

If I’m being perfectly honest, divorce did feel like loss at first.

Loss of the life I thought I was building.
Loss of the future I had carefully imagined.
Loss of the stability I believed I had worked so hard to protect.
Loss of everything I thought I was.

There were days when it felt like everything had been knocked out from under me and out of me all at once.

The plans.
The identity.
The roles I thought I was supposed to carry for the rest of my life.
The literal air in my lungs.

And for a while, all I could see was the jagged mess of it all.

I kept wondering how something that once felt so solid could collapse so completely.

And maybe even more confusing than the collapse was what came after.

Because without any warning or fanfare, things began falling away that I didn’t even realize I had been carrying.

Habits I thought were virtues.

Roles I believed were holy.

Ways of loving that I had been taught were maturity, sacrifice, faithfulness.

But when the structure of my carefully curated life broke open, those things just didn’t hold. They couldn’t.

Some of them simply… sloughed off. Like dead skin from a wound.

And if I’m honest, part of me still doesn’t know what to do with that.

Because if those things weren’t wisdom, what were they?

If they weren’t holiness, what were they?

If they weren’t the faithful way to live, then what was all that god forsaken effort for?

You know the years I spent trying to be careful.

Trying to be patient.
Trying to be gentle.
Trying to be the kind of woman who held everything together for everyone else.
The help meet.

And sometimes I still wonder if I misunderstood what You were asking of me in the first place.

Or if I just learned to carry things You never placed in my hands.

So here I am now.

Standing in the aftermath of a life that didn’t unfold the way I thought it would.

Watching pieces of my old self fall away one by one.

Some of them painfully.

Some of them with a surprising amount of relief.

And I’m asking You to help me understand the difference.

Help me recognize what was truly wisdom and what was simply survival.

Help me see which habits were rooted in love and which ones grew out of fear.

And as these layers continue to fall away, give me the courage to let them go without trying to glue them back onto the life I’m rebuilding.

Because if I’m honest, rebuilding from a pile of rubble is strange work.

It’s slow.

It’s uncertain.

Sometimes it feels like I’m just standing in the dust, holding pieces of things I thought I needed.

But somewhere in the middle of all of this, I’m beginning to see something I couldn’t see before.

Not everything that falls apart is meant to be rebuilt.

Some things need to fall away so something more honest and good and true can finally grow.

So if this new life I’m building looks smaller in some ways, or quieter, or less certain than the one I imagined before -

help me trust that honesty is still holy ground.

Even when it looks like a big pile of rubble.