I flew to South Korea with a newborn, two large dogs, eight bags of luggage, and some deeply misplaced confidence that I was going to be fine. Reader, I was not fine. What became obvious later, though not to me, not yet, was that I had severe postpartum depression. I couldn't see it from the inside, that's the cruel part about it. All I knew was that I had gone somewhere deep inside myself and couldn't find my way back out. I sincerely did not care whether I lived or died. I don't say that for effect. I say it because it's true, and because I know I'm not the only woman who has sat in that particular darkness, even if nobody around her knew it at the time.
If that is anywhere near where you are right now, I need you to know how much you matter. Stay with me a minute longer.
What got me through that season, in the smallest and strangest way, was nursing. I couldn't do much of anything. But I could nurse that baby, and if she was nursing, she wasn't crying. That was the whole thread, honestly, one small thing I could still do, just enough to keep me tethered when nothing else could. My husband, being the man he is, found out the base had a theater and emailed the director before I could talk myself out of it. I was mortified. It also meant I couldn't back out, which, in hindsight, was the point.
I thought I needed theater. What I needed, what God already knew I needed, was a community. And He'd placed one around me before I ever thought to ask for it.
There was a fourteen-year-old girl in that community who adored my baby and asked to hold her every chance she got. Within weeks she'd become my permanent babysitter, showing up without being asked, giving me room to breathe without ever making me feel judged for needing it. She had no title. No training. No formal role. And she led me through the hardest season of my life so completely that I cried the day we left Korea two years later. We stayed in touch for years after that. She'll probably never know, unless she reads this, that what she offered a desperate, numb, barely surviving mother was nothing short of divine.
Christ in you, reaching toward whoever He puts in front of you. That is divine purpose in ordinary clothes.
There was another woman in that season who showed me I didn't have to mother the way the world expected. That the version of motherhood that fit me didn't have to look like anyone else's, and that wasn't failure, it was just design. And a mentor, from a different faith background entirely, who became one of my anchors in Christ and honestly still is today. None of them thought of themselves as leading me. Most women doing this kind of thing never do, that's sort of the whole tragedy and the whole beauty of it at once.
Here's what I've come to believe, underneath all of it: service and leadership are not quite the same thing, but they're close enough to trade places when nobody's looking. Service notices a gap and fills it. Leadership shapes what happens next. That fourteen-year-old girl was doing both, and she would have laughed if you'd told her so. She was just a kid who liked babies, showing up on a Tuesday. And she was leading with divine purpose more fully than plenty of people who have the title and the strategy and the plan.
You are a leader because you are divine. So was she. So is whoever has shown up for you without being asked, without a title, without ever calling it what it was.
There are more women like her waiting in the book, women who never once called it leadership either. Or leave your email below and I'll tell you when you can meet them.