MY STORY This is not the end of the story. I survived, but survival was never the destination. Victory is not pretending life never hurt. It is learning how to rise when it did. It is not about never falling down. It is learning how to wipe your feet and keep walking. It is not getting everything right. It is learning. Growing. Becoming mature. Returning again and again to who God created me to be before life marked me. Still Rising is not denial of struggle. Some seasons hur

MY STORY There are moments in life where God does not just comfort you. He redefines you. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But through a quiet, undeniable shift where the way you see yourself, God, and life itself begins to change. This was one of those seasons for me. About three years ago, something shifted deeply in my relationship with God. It was not the beginning of my faith. But it was the breaking of limitations I did not even realize I was still living under. For a long

MY STORY There are seasons in life that do not just test your faith. They remove every other thing you thought you could stand on. This was one of those seasons. When my daughter was diagnosed with cancer, something in me shifted immediately. Not into strength. Not into clarity. Into dependence. Because in that moment, nothing in me felt capable of carrying what was happening. All the things I had learned to rely on my ability to function, manage, push through, and hold ever

MY STORY Everything began to shift when my relationship with God stopped being occasional and started becoming daily. Not because I suddenly became disciplined in a religious sense, but because I began to realize I could not keep living the same way internally and expect anything in my life to change. Something in me needed more than survival. It needed presence. I had experienced moments with God before, but not like this. Not daily. Not from desperation. Not from dependency

MY STORY Long before I understood the secret place, I was drawn to prayer. I always loved prayer. I attended prayer meetings. I prayed at home. I wanted to be someone who knew how to pray with depth, authority, and relationship with God. But for a long time, I thought prayer was mostly something you attended or something you did. I didn’t yet understand that prayer was also abiding. Intercession. Burden. Persistence. Prevailing. Fire. Continual communion with God. I had seen

MY STORY After that encounter, I knew I needed church. But more than that, I needed to be taught. I needed discipleship. I needed someone to help me understand how to actually walk with the God who had just met me so powerfully. I had known what it was to attend church. I had known what it was to believe. I had known what it was to have moments with God. But I had not truly known what it meant to be discipled. One night, I was home watching a minister on TV. That was not some

MY STORY There are some encounters with God that become impossible to deny. You may not know how to explain them to everyone. But you know what happened inside of you. And once you know, you know. When I was twenty-three, my life came to a crossroads. My marriage was in a difficult place. I was slipping back into patterns I knew could destroy me. And deep down, I knew I had a choice to make. I could keep going down a path that would cost me more than I wanted to lose, or I co

MY STORY There was always something in me that wanted God. Even when I didn’t know how to live for Him. Even when I was confused. Even when I was one foot in and one foot out. Even when my life did not look surrendered. The desire was still there. When I was young and my oldest daughter was a baby, my dad would talk to me often about taking her to church and raising her in church. I remember saying something like, “If church is so great, why don’t you take her?” At the time,

MY STORY After that season, life didn’t pause to make sense of anything. It just kept moving. And I learned how to move with it. There is a kind of survival that doesn’t look dramatic on the outside. Sometimes it looks like responsibility. Sometimes it looks like getting up every day, showing up where you’re needed, and doing what has to be done without fully processing what you’re carrying inside. That became my life. I didn’t step into adulthood as someone whole who was bui

MY STORY There are moments in life you do not fully understand while you are living them. This was one of those moments for me. At fifteen, I attempted suicide. Even now, those words feel heavy to write because when most people picture someone struggling that deeply, they imagine visible chaos. They imagine someone obviously falling apart. But that was not me. On the outside, I still functioned. I still showed up. I still smiled when I needed to smile. Most people would have

MY STORY Before I fully understood faith, I saw it lived out before me. My earliest understanding of God didn’t come through a sermon, a book, or even a church service I fully understood at the time. It came through my grandparents. And I didn’t realize then that what I was witnessing wasn’t just devotion. It was a foundation being quietly laid in my life. I can still remember being in their presence and sensing something different about how they lived. Prayer wasn’t introduc

MY STORY There are parts of my life that looked completely fine from the outside. I was the person who could show up, smile, hold a conversation, and make things feel normal. I learned how to read a room quickly. I knew how to adjust my tone, my expression, even my energy depending on what was needed. People would have described me as Confident. Outgoing. Secure. But what they didn’t see was that I learned all of that because I didn’t feel safe being fully seen. I don’t remem