Still Breathing in the Tension

My living room table looks a bit like a map of my heart right now. On one side, there is a tiny, beautifully folded baby onsie. On the other side, a quiet, empty space where Pepper’s dog bed used to sit.

My hands are still completely full of both immense joy and profound heartache.

This past Saturday, I had the absolute privilege of sitting down with a group of women to talk about exactly this. We unpacked the beautiful, messy, and often exhausting reality of what it means to hold heartache and hope in the very same hand. Sitting in that sacred circle of sisterhood, I realized all over again that faith isn’t a straight line that bypasses the hard stuff—it’s the anchor that holds us steady right in the middle of it.

If you’ve been following along with my stories lately, you know my calendar has felt like a literal emotional roller coaster. On the peak of the mountain, Theo made his grand arrival into the world! And on top of that, our family is expanding yet again this December when Jackson and Ash welcome their new little one. Life is blooming, and it is beautiful. Honestly, it is such a beautiful season.

But right alongside that light, the shadow has been real. We have been living in a Limbo-Land where we have walked away from one thing, and God has not yet revealed what is next for us. And right in the thick of that transition, I lost my wee Pepper.

The silence she left behind has felt like a physical ache. I confessed to the ladies on Saturday that I’ve spent weeks caught in a brutal tug-of-war between a head that says, “Move on, she was just a dog,” and a heart that says, “She was my constant shadow when everything else was shifting.”

What a relief it was to sit together and realize that we don’t have to choose between our grief and our gratitude.

We talked about the fact that heartache and hope are not enemies fighting for control of your soul; they are roommates designed by God to live there together. We looked at Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 6:10 about being “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing,” and we looked at Jesus, who wept bitterly at the tomb of His friend Lazarus even though He knew a miracle was coming in the very next breath.

Your tears for what you’ve lost don’t cancel out God’s goodness, and your excitement for what’s coming doesn’t mean you didn’t love what you left behind. God is big enough to hold both with you.

To the beautiful women who joined me: thank you for bringing your raw, real selves to the circle. Thank you for taking off your crowns of expectation and allowing the Holy Spirit to move in our quiet spaces. And to the woman reading this from afar who is currently stuck in the blurry middle of an unchosen transition: take a deep breath. You are fully known, fiercely loved, and entirely safe. Open both hands and trust God. He has you right where you need to be.

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