Despair. It can live quietly in the corners of my being. It can go unnoticed for years. Even decades. Until one day it is no longer quiet.

It is loud….

Despair is a painful gnawing within.

An aching emptiness.

A lonely tomb.

It feels like it eats up my bones. My heart. My stomach. It turns my food bitter. My hands cold.

It drains my energy. Turns my strength into ashes. The sunlight into darkness.

It draws out all of my blood leaving me with nothing as I hear over and over again, “What you most desired in this life. Will never. Come to pass.”

I first met Despair as a little child going back and forth between my parents and orphanages.

One day in a season of deep loss, I finally broke.

I shattered.

My heart. My mind. My spirit.….All in pieces.

It was from this place of absolute decimation, with sharp shards of broken life and broken heart everywhere that I began to very slowly, examine the painful lies I had believed about me, my life, and my future.

I began to pay visits to my past to take a closer look at my story. I needed to go back to ground zero where it had all started for me. Here is where I began to uncover from underneath the rubble…

• bloody wounds from my childhood,

• compound fractures from soul-crushing religious systems,

• and tender bruises from the ways I had unknowingly continued generational trauma threads in my own life.

In this exploration, I also unearthed something else underneath the rubble, something completely unexpected…

I began to uncover qualities about myself that had been buried underneath the harmful words and traumatic experiences I had lived through. As I examined my life stories, I started to see not only the buried wounds that needed healing, but also the flowers deep within me that could help me begin to heal.

In the span of our lives there have been specific moments which have formed us, marked us, and sometimes shattered us in deep places of our hearts. Most of the time we are too busy, too numb, too distracted or too afraid to pause to notice the bruised, fractured, or wounded places in our hearts.