Friday, June 20, 2025 my Mom ended her life.

Friday, February 20, 2026… eight months later.

What a disastrous fallout plagued us since then, as my sweet “Auntie” wrote:

❤️‍🩹 We were just going through a normal day… and then everything changed in an instant.

Nothing prepares you for how quickly life can shift.

This hurts more than words can say. Missing her.

It was a normal day. A normal summer day with brilliant blue skies and tropical Florida heat. Scott and I went to the pool that day and enjoyed our new pool floaties… it was a glorious afternoon.

Until it wasn’t.

Now, we bear the fallout. This hell she condemned us to because she couldn’t speak of the hell that was within her mind. How tragic, to be trapped in a mental delusion of hopelessness. How cruel, to deny the expression of that hopelessness into words. How ghastly, to use hopelessness as a weapon. How dismal, to survive the consequence of another’s hopelessness.

Being alive means having hope. Being alive means having opportunity. Being alive means change is possible. Death, now death robs everyone of that possibility.

We weren’t meant to live our lives out of hopelessness. God didn’t create man simply to die, and Jesus didn’t come to earth to show us death is better than life — It was we forlorn and lost creatures that killed him.

Interestingly enough, the biblical [Greek] word for “salvation” [sozo] is the same word for “healing.” Think of it this way: instead of Christ coming to “seek and save the lost,” think about him coming to “seek and heal the lost” (Luke 19:10).

What if this life is about so much more than salvation? What if it’s really about healing? What if God really did come to earth, filled with compassion, to heal the broken hearted and bind up their wounds?

What if salvation actually doesn’t have anything to do with death?

Jesus’ earthly wounds didn’t disappear after he died (John 20). Perhaps our lives are far more significant than we realize, not because we have to earn our ways into “heaven” (which, by the way, literally translates to “the skies, the expanse”) and to stay out of “hell” (translates “the land of the dead” and, metaphorically, “Gehenna,” which was an actual literal place on earth).

Maybe God came to heal us, and maybe that should be our focus.

We all have our defining moments; these ominous moments of our lives marked with so much pain that they pinpoint and define the rest of our lives. We’ve all been to Gehenna, and the only way out of it is through it.

“Even when I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me…

… Only goodness and faithful love will pursue me all the days of my life,  and I will dwell in the house of the  Lord as long as I live.
‭‭Psalms‬ ‭23‬:‭6‬

Being alive is never hopeless. Having a hard life isn’t hopeless.

Now is the time to mourn, to heal, to change. The time to plant seeds of sorrow and anguish and healing, and these seeds will bring new life. Hope will guard them and guide them as they grow into the most beautifully wild flowers.

Abundance may come after decimation, but it may only come after healing.