Long before any of the chapters in this book, I was cast in a play as a woman considering an abortion. I remember my first thought, clear and certain: I would never do that. I said as much to my director. She didn't argue with me. She just said, "Your job isn't to agree with her. Your job is to understand her." I have never forgotten that sentence, mostly because it turned out to be annoyingly useful advice for nearly every uncomfortable situation I've been in since, including several arguments with my husband where I was extremely sure I was right.
I didn't need to become her. I needed to see her. That distinction cracked something open in me that I didn't have a name for yet. My certainty softened. Not because I changed my mind about anything. Because I realized I'd been judging a life I didn't understand. That was the first real broken heart I remember having. Not tragedy. Just the quiet collapse of my own certainty in the face of someone else's actual life, which is a humbling way to spend a Tuesday rehearsal.
I bring this up because years later, I was the one inside a story I hadn't chosen. Pregnant, hopeful, and then a diagnosis that changed everything. And here is the part I didn't expect: it was never really about whether I would keep the pregnancy. We had already decided that, clearly, immediately, without hesitation. What I was white-knuckling was something else entirely. Control.
I remember the exact shape of the panic. Not what if I make the wrong choice, but what if I have no choices left at all. Once the option itself was gone, the whole situation felt suffocating in a way I hadn't braced for. I was, in my own words at the time, "that crazy person," gripping a steering wheel with no road left to steer, and deeply offended that nobody had warned me there's no support group for "furious about a decision I already agreed with."
What I forgot was that God has control. My reality didn't change. But my need to be in control of it did.
There's a phrase that shows up again and again in scripture that I didn't understand until I lived inside it: a broken heart and a contrite spirit. I used to think those were the same thing, or that one simply followed the other automatically. They're not, and it doesn't. A broken heart is what happens to you. The moment your certainty, your plan, your grip on the outcome, gets pried open whether you consent to it or not. A contrite spirit is what you choose to do next. One is inflicted. The other is yielded.
I did not yield gracefully. I want to be honest about that. If surrender were a sport, I would have been disqualified in the first round for excessive negotiating. I fought for control the way you'd expect someone to fight for the one thing standing between her and free fall. But somewhere in the fighting, I ran out of grip strength, and what was left underneath it wasn't defeat. It was quiet. The kind of quiet that shows up after you've finally stopped negotiating with a God who was never asking you to negotiate in the first place. He just wanted me to trust Him. That's it. That was always it.
I still look at the world with slightly different eyes because of it. Not because my circumstances resolved into something easier. They didn't, not for a long time. But I stopped needing to manage the story in order to survive being inside it. That's the part nobody tells you about surrender: it isn't losing. It's setting down a weight you were never strong enough to carry alone, and discovering your hands were free the whole time to hold something else instead. A daughter. A prayer. A single ordinary morning you actually get to be present for, which honestly counts for more than I used to think.
My broken heart taught me empathy, for a woman in a role I once played and for myself, standing in my own unscripted version of an impossible scene. My contrite spirit is still teaching me trust. Most days, I'm still practicing.
This one's from chapter three. There's more where it came from. Or leave your email below and I'll tell you the day you can read all of it.