What is healing?
What does that even mean? Is it possible? Where do I start? How do I start? Is it painful? Will it work?
All of these questions are valid when starting any new path, especially one that asks you to invest not only financially but also with something far more valuable—your time and your willingness to look inward.
I set out on my own personal journey of healing and understanding almost six years ago, but if I’m being honest, I didn’t fully accept the responsibility of doing the deeper, authentic work until a little over two years ago. It came after a personal crisis in my life—one that was largely self-induced and forced me to confront truths of my life I had long avoided.
Since then, I have become deeply passionate about embracing all of who we are. Not just the polished parts we easily share with the world, but also the scars that quietly tell the stories of lessons learned at a great cost. Those scars are not simply reminders of pain; they are evidence of life lived, experiences endured, and wisdom gained.
And yet, life has a way of teaching us lessons in the most unexpected ways.
For me, one of those moments came during a simple morning in the kitchen before the start of a school day.
One morning I was making my daughter breakfast. Like many children, she has her routines—favorite rands, favorite foods, and even the specific way things should be placed on her plate. That morning, I realized we were out of the butter she always uses for her homemade waffles. I had let the grocery shopping slip by in the busyness of life and kept telling myself I would run to the store tomorrow.
My first thought was immediate panic: She’s not going to eat breakfast.
So what does every loving, slightly frantic mom do when she wants her child to eat? I tried to quietly substitute a different butter without her noticing. Completely reasonable logic in my mind. If she never knows, she’ll eat, be happy, and have the energy she needs for the day.
Well…that plan could not have gone more wrong.
She quietly walked downstairs and immediately noticed. As she saw me spreading the organic butter out of a different container onto her waffle. Tears followed, along with a question that stopped me in my tracks.
“Mom, why are you lying to me and hiding the butter?”
I felt awful. I tried to calm her and explain, but she just kept repeating one simple question:
“Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?”
And if I’m honest, there was another layer to that morning that I couldn’t ignore either.
The truth was, we were out of butter because I had continued putting off going to the store. I had told myself for several days that I would run out quickly—after work, tomorrow morning, later in the week. Life felt busy, and it seemed easier to delay one small errand. But that small delay created a disruption that didn’t need to happen.
In many ways, healing can look very similar.
We often know there are things in our lives that deserve our attention—pain that needs to be processed, patterns that need to be understood, conversations that need to be had. Yet it can be tempting to delay the work. We make excuses, convince ourselves it can wait, or tell ourselves we’ll deal with it when life slows down.
The problem is that when we delay what we know needs our attention, the unresolved pieces don’t disappear. They often show up later in ways that create more confusion, more hurt, and sometimes even more denial.
And much like that morning in the kitchen, when we avoid addressing what needs to be handled, we can find ourselves trying to cover up, explain away, or manipulate situations simply to manage the consequences of what we postponed.
As mothers, we become very good at juggling a thousand small responsibilities at once. It’s easy to tell ourselves we’ll handle something tomorrow—after the laundry, after work, after practice, after everyone else’s needs are met.
Had I simply taken care of what needed to be done earlier—or been honest in the moment—I wouldn’t have needed to hide anything at all.
After she calmed down and ate a little breakfast, it hit me in a way I didn’t expect. In such a small moment, my daughter had illustrated something profound about healing.
Healing often begins with honesty.
Not with perfection.
Not with having everything figured out.
But with being honest about what is real.
So often in life we try to cover, hide, or smooth over the broken, misdirected, and confusing parts of our stories. Sometimes we do this because we’re afraid of rejection. Sometimes we believe we’re protecting someone else. And sometimes we convince ourselves it’s simply easier.
But the truth is that withholding reality—whether from others or from ourselves—can create far more damage in the long run than we realize.
When we withhold truth, fear quietly takes control of the story. Fear convinces us that honesty will lead to rejection, disappointment, or loss. So we give fear more authority over our lives than the truth itself. And before long, that fear can hold us captive.
One of the most profound reminders of how beautifully we were created can be found at the very beginning of time. In the book of Genesis, we read how God created Adam and Eve and gave them everything they needed, forming them intricately to fulfill His purpose and plan.
And in Psalm 139 we are reminded again that the ultimate Creator made us carefully in our mother’s womb and knows our thoughts from afar.
That realization can feel both deeply affirming and, at times, a little frightening depending on where we are in our lives.
More than anything, it reminds us that we are image bearers of God Himself. Our emotions, our feelings, our fears—these are part of what it means to be human and part of what it means to reflect the One who created us.
Yet while our Savior is perfect, we are not. We are broken, flawed, and fallible human beings. But the story doesn’t end there.
As we grow, heal, and begin to understand ourselves more deeply, we start to experience the freedom Christ offers—not just spiritually, but emotionally as well. We begin to receive the love, compassion, and grace that were woven into our lives from the very beginning.
Still, understanding our lives is not always easy. Sometimes we feel like pieces of our story are missing. Sometimes denial quietly protects us from truths we’re not yet ready to face. And sometimes the pain we carry feels so large that hope seems almost impossible.
However, healing asks something different of us.
It invites us to lean into our stories with honesty—even when the details are messy or uncomfortable. It asks us to look at the circumstances of our lives and gently bring them into the light rather than hiding them in the shadows.
Because when truth is acknowledged, something powerful happens. We create space for understanding, growth, and freedom.
Healing is rarely quick, tidy, or predictable. It often begins with small moments of awareness—moments where we choose honesty over hiding, curiosity over fear, and compassion over judgment toward ourselves.
I know this personally because my own healing journey didn’t begin in a therapy office—it began in quiet, uncomfortable moments of realizing I had been avoiding parts of my own story for far too long. Parts that felt confusing, painful, or easier to keep moving past rather than slowing down long enough to understand them.
For a long time, like many women, I had learned how to stay busy, stay strong, and keep moving forward without fully allowing myself to sit with the emotions, the unanswered questions, and the pieces of my life that still needed care.
But healing has a way of gently inviting us back to those places—not to shame us or reopen wounds unnecessarily, but to help us understand ourselves more fully. Because when we continually sacrifice our own emotions, ignore the missing pieces of our story, or push unresolved pain further into the background, those parts of our lives don’t simply disappear.
They quietly wait for our attention.
And sometimes the first step in that process is simply allowing yourself the courage to begin.