Healing Begins When We Discover Who God Is and Who We Are
There is a moment in every healing journey when the truth finally breaks through.
Not a truth we have heard before.
Not a truth someone else has told us.
A truth that becomes real enough to change the way we live.
For much of my life, I didn’t truly know who God was.
I knew about Him.
I knew what others said about Him.
I knew the verses and the stories.
But I often viewed Him through the lens of my wounds, my fears, my disappointments, and the messages I had absorbed from the world around me.
And because I didn’t fully understand who He was, I struggled to understand who I was.
I looked for my value in what I accomplished, how well I performed, who needed me, and what others thought of me.
Like so many women, I spent years trying to find my identity rather than receiving it.
Healing began when God slowly revealed His true character to me.
A God who was not distant, disappointed, or impossible to please.
A God who was loving, faithful, present, and trustworthy.
And as I began to discover who He truly was, I began to discover who I truly was.
His daughter.
Created with purpose.
Deeply loved.
Not because of what I do.
Not because of who needs me.
But because I belong to Him.
And then life tested what I had learned.
Lately, life has been testing me.
My family is changing.
My son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren are moving away. The rhythms that have shaped my life for more than a decade are shifting. Weekly visits, school pickups, spontaneous moments, familiar routines—all changing.
There are moments when I can feel the ache of what I wrote about in The Disappearing Mother.
The season when a woman who once stood at the center of her family’s daily life suddenly finds herself standing a little farther from the frame.
Not because she is unloved.
Not because she is unnecessary.
Simply because life moves forward.
Children grow.
Families expand.
Roles change.
And if we are not careful, we can begin believing that because our role is changing, our value is changing too.
But that isn’t true.
At the same time, I have also been writing about The Emerging Woman.
The woman who is discovering that God never intended her story to end when her children grew up.
The woman who realizes she is still becoming.
Still growing.
Still called.
Still deeply loved.
Still necessary.
And perhaps that is where the struggle lives.
Because healing is not the absence of struggle.
Healing is learning how to walk through struggle without losing yourself.
Many people think that once we understand our identity, the struggle disappears.
It doesn’t.
Even Jesus, fully secure in who He was, experienced sorrow, grief, rejection, loneliness, and pain.
Knowing who you are does not remove the storm.
It changes how you move through it.
The question is not whether we will struggle.
The question is where we will end up because of the struggle.
Will we become lost?
Or will we become REAL?
When life hurts, we often drift toward old identities.
The abandoned woman.
The forgotten woman.
The rejected woman.
The not-enough woman.
The woman who believes her best years are behind her.
The woman who measures her worth by who still needs her.
The woman who confuses her role with her identity.
Those identities may feel familiar, but they are not true.
The truth is that our identity was never meant to be built on our circumstances.
It was meant to be built on God’s character.
When we truly discover who God is, everything changes.
If God is faithful, then I can trust Him when life changes.
If God is good, then I can trust Him when I don’t understand.
If God is present, then I am never abandoned.
If God is love, then I remain loved even when I feel unseen.
And when I discover who I am because of who He is, everything changes again.
I am not rooted in my role.
I am Rooted in Him.
I am not empowered by how much control I have over my circumstances.
I am Empowered by His Spirit.
I do not have to pretend I am unaffected by loss.
I can be Authentic about my grief.
And I remain Loved whether I am standing in the center of the frame or somewhere near the edge.
That is what healing looks like.
Not perfection.
Not constant happiness.
Not pretending.
Healing is returning to the truth again and again until it becomes stronger than the lie.
Some days I still feel the ache.
Some days I still wrestle with the changing seasons of motherhood.
Some days I still wonder what this next chapter will look like.
But I am learning something beautiful.
The disappearing mother is not disappearing at all.
She is emerging.
She is becoming.
She is discovering that her identity was never tied to being needed.
It was tied to being known by God.
And perhaps that is the invitation for all of us.
Not to avoid the struggle.
Not to deny the grief.
Not to rush the healing.
But to allow every struggle to lead us back to the truth.
To discover again who God is.
To discover again who we are.
And in the process, to become more REAL than we have ever been before.
Rooted.
Empowered.
Authentic.
Loved.
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