The sun is setting on a year of change, loss, heartbreak, division, and depression as well as a year of resiliency, gratitude, healing, unity, and hope!

Individuals and communities pivoted, created, innovated, and grew through cancellations and restrictions.

I cried a little as we visited with friends on new year’s eve last year because I didn't have a ‘word’ for 2020 but mostly because I didn't know what I needed or what God had for the next year!

Last month as I engaged in our church’s commissioning prayer at the end of the online service and cried “here I am Lord” on the hotel room floor, I began to grieve for those unconscious on the battlefield—asleep to their purpose, drunk with addiction, dead to life, without vision.

Some of the very children who shone the brightest are under a dark cloud of deception.

Curveballs fly on the news, triggering fear but when one hits home we learn a new level of surrender.

Control is illusive—stringing us along until something snaps.

One year ago this Sunday, my husband Benj hit the pavement in the golden hour of the Costco parking lot and our son Gavin broke his femur. This is how Gavin (4) retells what happened:

"Daddy was running too fast with the shopping cart and it fell over.  I got hurt but Hudsy didn't.  I had a big cast on, that's all."

That's all and then that’s not all.

A decade ago, I left a short-lived teaching career and welcomed my first baby. Making a home-based life didn’t feel natural in those early months.

I struggled to grasp at elusive forms of control—a jail of my own making.

I anticipated birth would be a challenge I could conquer; yet, twenty hours of intense back labor and over three hours of pushing left me reeling (the hardest of six deliveries and the catalyst to midwifery care and home birthing).

After our trip, we started the process of unloading our travel trailer and I ran wild throwing kids in the bath, starting the laundry, ordering the dishwasher cleared, plants watered, grass cut, van vacuumed and everything put away NOW—anything to help me feel a sense of control after a season of change!

My inner baggage busted out with each new item thrown into the house. I was a mess and rather than accepting where my mind, body, and soul was at, and taking a pause, I kept pushing.

I used to be self-conscious of the scar by my eye from a childhood accident. I suppose it looks like a deep smile line as I creep closer to 40.

From surgeries, injuries, self-harm and accidents to c-sections, stretch marks and age spots; we adapt, cover-up, rehabilitate, and carry on as wounded warriors.

Some may appear to make it through life unscathed on the outside but none of us do on the inside.