Author Archives: Unpolished Truth

9/7/26

Settling into our new home, finding a new routine, and sitting with a lot of unknowns.

I’m exploring new opportunities and praying for direction about what comes next. And for now, I’ve realized I need to take a pause and focus on what is right in front of me.

I’ll be back. I still have so much I want to share, and I look forward to continuing to write about both the past and the present.

If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that sometimes you have to be willing to put things on the back burner, trusting they’ll still be there waiting for you when you have the bandwidth to return to them. Trying to do too much, all at once, isn’t good for anyone.

I want to write from a place of peace and quiet—not chaos or fear. I want my words to come because I’m ready to share them, not because I feel like I have to.

So, I’m not quitting.

I’m just giving myself permission to pause. To settle in. To listen. To pray. And to take care of myself mentally and emotionally.

Sometimes taking a pause is exactly what we need before we’re ready for whatever comes next.

Until then. ❤️

8/29/26

We are on day five of our cross-country road trip, headed toward our soon-to-be new home and a new life.

We’re down to the final six hours of a 36-hour journey.

Six hours until we pull into our new home.

Six hours until we begin the next chapter of this adventure.

And truly, that’s what our life has been—a series of adventures. Some amazing. Some not so amazing. Some we would gladly live all over again, and others we never would have chosen.

But isn’t that what life is?

We go through all of it—the best, the worst, and everything in between.

I haven’t really talked much about my marriage in all of this, but let me tell you—we have been through a lot in the twenty-one-plus years we’ve been married.

There were moments over the years when I honestly didn’t know if we would make it.

Our life together has not been easy. We have walked through things that tested us individually and tested our marriage in ways I never could have imagined when we first said, “I do.”

And yet, by the grace of God, here we are.

Still together.

Still choosing each other.

Still fighting for each other and for our marriage.

When I think about everything we have faced together—all the challenges, losses, changes, and major life transitions—I realize just how much we have survived.

Not because we’ve done everything right.

We haven’t.

We are far from perfect.

We have simply chosen to keep doing the hard work. To work on ourselves individually and to keep working on us as a couple.

And we’re still doing it.

We still face challenges. We still get things wrong. We still have places that need healing and areas where we need to grow.

Thankfully, we don’t have to do any of it alone.

We have the Lord walking alongside us through it all.

We still have work to do. After everything we have been through, how could we not?

Maybe we always will.

But each morning we wake up and make a choice.

We choose to love each other.

We choose to keep showing up.

We choose to keep trying to love one another the way Jesus loves us—with grace, forgiveness, patience, and a willingness to begin again.

As we drive these final miles toward a new home and a new chapter, I can’t help but think about where all of this is leading.

If we keep the Lord first and continue relying on Him to guide us, I have faith that someday life might become a little simpler.

And maybe one day we’ll get the opportunity to sit together on our porch in a couple of old rocking chairs and look back over this life we built together.

The beautiful parts.

The painful parts.

The things we overcame.

The lessons we learned.

The memories we made.

And maybe, looking back from that porch, we’ll finally be able to see how God used all of it.

And we’ll know that none of it was wasted.

That somehow, through every adventure, every heartbreak, every new beginning, and every time we chose not to give up, it all had a purpose.

“I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go.”
— Song of Solomon 3:4

August 21, 2026

A lot has happened in the past ten days.

We flew across the country, closed on our new house, moved our son into college, and headed back to finish packing and getting ready to leave in just a few days.

The trailer was dropped off yesterday. It’s locked and loaded with the things we are taking with us.

And I feel so ready.

Ready to move on. Ready to start over in a place that already feels like home.

Yet leaving the house that has been our family home for the past ten years feels so hard.

There are a lot of good memories here.

And a lot of really painful ones, too.

Being at the new house felt so fresh. Clean. Light. Almost like a blank canvas, just waiting for memories to be made.

I’m not naive. I know moving to a new house and a new state doesn’t mean life will suddenly be perfect. There will be new challenges and new struggles mixed in with new opportunities and, hopefully, some really wonderful moments with family and friends.

But even knowing, without a doubt, that this move is the best decision for us, leaving this place and this house is not easy.

This morning, I stopped by a friend’s house to drop off some pantry and freezer items we didn’t use up and couldn’t take with us.

I sat with her for a minute, and I just started to cry.

My emotions got the best of me.

I told her that she and her family are really the only people who live here full-time who truly care that we are leaving.

We have a few seasonal neighbors who have been huge supports over the years. And yes, we have friends we can have fun with.

But we haven’t had a community of people surrounding us. People we can count on when life gets hard.

Honestly, we haven’t had that since we moved here more than a decade ago.

Over the past several months, going back and forth between the two states and getting ready for this move, I’ve realized just how lonely I have been.

And how much I need to be part of something.

I need people who will share our burdens and be there when life gets hard—and people whose burdens we can help carry, too.

We were never meant to do life alone.

Galatians 6:2

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

The funny thing is, I’m a homebody. I’m pretty shy. I’m introverted.

But I still need community.

I don’t think I realized just how much I needed it until I didn’t have it anymore.

So, in two days, we will hit the road.

We will make the move and keep our hearts open to whatever the Lord has in store for us.

I’m scared.

Uncomfortable.

Sad.

Happy.

Excited.

Hopeful.

All of it at once.

And maybe that’s okay.

I don’t need to choose one emotion over another. I can be grateful for where we are going and still grieve what we are leaving behind.

So for now, I’m holding space for all of it—the sadness of closing this chapter and the hope of beginning a new one.

And trusting that the Lord is already there, preparing what comes next.

This is a question my youngest daughter and I have wrestled with for quite some time.

She has been through more in her short life than many people experience in decades. As she’s gotten older, she’s begun asking hard questions about the goodness of God, faith, and what she truly believes. While my own faith has grown stronger through life’s hardships—including the recent struggles with my son, her biological brother—she has experienced those same circumstances very differently.

She feels as though God has abandoned her. She tells me that no matter how much she prays, nothing changes. “Sometimes it just gets worse,” she says.

As her mother, those words break my heart.

More than anything, I want her to experience the peace that comes from knowing God is in control. I want her to understand that not every question will be answered this side of heaven, but that God is still present, even when He feels silent.

But I’ve also come to realize that this is her journey.

She can’t borrow my faith. She has to discover God for herself.

All I can do is live my faith as authentically as I know how, love her well, and do my best to answer the questions she asks—even when I feel completely unqualified. And believe me, there are many times I don’t have the answers.

What I do know is this: God isn’t intimidated by our questions.

He can handle our doubts.

He can handle our anger.

He can handle our disappointment.

He can handle all of it.

There is no shame in wrestling with faith. In fact, throughout Scripture we see people who questioned God, cried out to Him, and struggled to understand His ways. Their questions didn’t push God away—they often drew them closer.

I’ve had my own seasons of doubt. Seasons where I wondered why God allowed certain things to happen. Seasons where I couldn’t see His hand at work. Looking back, I can now see that He never abandoned me, even when I couldn’t feel His presence.

My prayer for my daughter isn’t that she’ll never question. It’s that she’ll never stop seeking.

I pray that one day her faith will be even stronger than mine—not because life became easier, but because she discovered that God remained faithful in the middle of it.

We may never receive all the answers we’re looking for in this life. Some questions will remain unanswered until we stand before Him face to face.

Until then, we have a choice.

We can allow our pain to make us bitter, or we can allow it to draw us closer to the One who promises to never leave us nor forsake us. We can let our suffering isolate us, or we can use it to comfort others who are walking through their own valleys.

I don’t know why bad things happen to good people.

But I do know this:

God is still good when life is not.

And sometimes, faith isn’t having all the answers. It’s choosing to trust the One who does.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.“

Romans 15:13

This afternoon, while I was doing my daily meditation, I suddenly started to cry.

In my mind, memories of T began to roll through my thoughts. But this time, they were the good ones—his laugh, his big smile, his larger-than-life personality. Those are the moments I want so desperately to hold onto.

And yet, as those memories lingered, a quiet ache followed close behind. My heart breaks because it feels like that part of him is gone. Sometimes I find myself wondering if that boy was ever really there, or if it was all just another role he learned to play.

He was an incredible actor on stage, but I believe he carried that performance into real life too—until one day, he simply couldn’t carry it anymore.

Still, beneath all of that, I hold onto what I believe to be true. Deep down, I still believe he wanted to be part of our family. I believe he wanted to belong. I believe he wanted to be loved.

But wanting something and being able to receive it are not always the same. He just wasn’t able to receive it.

He came to us with a plan—to get what he needed and then leave on his own—or at least that’s what he told us. Yet even now, I wonder if, underneath all the walls he built, there was a little boy who desperately wanted what every child wants: a place to belong and people who would love him unconditionally.

And perhaps that is what made it so frightening. When that love became real, I think it terrified him.

He didn’t believe he was worthy of it. Allowing himself to be loved meant becoming vulnerable, and vulnerability felt far more dangerous than pushing people away.

When I think about it this way, I’m reminded of how much he carried long before he ever came to us. Before he ever entered our home, he had already experienced more pain, loss, abuse, and abandonment than most people could imagine. Those wounds ran deep.

And so my thoughts inevitably turn inward. Even now, I still wrestle with the question every mother asks: What more could I have done?

It’s a question I have to surrender to God over and over again.

In that surrender, something shifts. So when the tears come, I let them.

I don’t push them away or pretend I’m okay. Sometimes healing looks like sitting quietly in my room, allowing myself to feel the weight of the grief instead of running from it.

And in that quiet space, my heart turns to prayer.

I pray for his protection.

I pray for his peace.

I pray that one day he will know he is worthy of love—not because of anything he has done, but because he is a child created in the image of God.

I pray that when he is ready, he will find the help and healing he needs.

These are the prayers of a mother for her son.

And today, they are enough.

“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace.” — Numbers 6:24–26

One of my biggest struggles through everything I have experienced has been not allowing my anger and fear to turn into hatred. I haven’t always done this well. In many ways, it is still a battle I fight today.

Romans 12:14 says:

“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.”

If I’m honest, this has been one of the hardest commands in Scripture for me to obey.

Today, I am mostly on the other side of the persecution my husband and I experienced—persecution I never could have imagined. Before all of this happened, I had spent my life trying to be someone others could trust and respect. At least I thought I had.

And if I’m being completely honest, that mattered to me.

I wanted to be known as a good wife, a good mother, and someone who treated people with kindness. I’ve never been overly extroverted. In fact, I’m pretty shy, and it takes me a while to really get to know people. I’ve never wanted to be the center of attention or well known. I actually prefer the opposite. But I hoped that those who did know me would see someone who was compassionate, genuine, and cared deeply for others.

So when the first article was published about my husband and me—filled with things that were so far from the truth—it was gut-wrenching.

Then it went viral.

The story spread across the country and even around the world. Local news stations picked it up. Tabloid reporters waited outside our home hoping to get pictures or a statement. Our small town’s Facebook page exploded with hatred, assumptions, and judgment toward our family—especially my husband and me. I received threatening text messages from people I had never met. I no longer felt safe in my own home or even in my own community.

It felt like I was living in a movie. I couldn’t believe this was actually my life. Everywhere I looked, it seemed there was darkness, and I couldn’t see any light at the end of it.

How could this be happening?

It all began because one woman manipulated the truth to serve her own agenda. She preyed on our son when he was vulnerable, twisting reality until he believed she cared more about him than the people who had loved him his entire life.

But she wasn’t rescuing him.

She was pulling him further away from the people who loved him most.

In the process, she wasn’t only trying to destroy us—she was destroying our son too.

So how do you bless someone like that?

I have never felt hatred toward another person the way I did during that season. Looking back, that realization still grieves me.

And yet, almost every day, I prayed.

I prayed that God would soften my heart.

I prayed that I could forgive her.

I prayed that somehow she would recognize the damage she had caused—not only to us, but to our son.

Then there were the people who knew us. Or at least, I thought they did.

Some turned against us. Others fueled the fire, adding their voices to the accusations, eager for their own moment in the spotlight. Very few of them were actually interested in helping our son. They believed the lies, but when his life began to spiral because of the very lack of boundaries they encouraged, they quietly disappeared.

None of them stayed.

None of them walked through the hardest days with him.

None of them were there when the cameras left and the headlines faded.

So how do I bless them?

The truth is, I don’t have a perfect answer.

I wish I could tell you I have completely forgiven everyone involved and that none of this hurts anymore. But that wouldn’t be true.

Forgiveness is still something I am walking through.

So, I am still a work in progress. I am still learning what forgiveness looks like. I pray for those who have hurt me, and I ask God daily to soften my heart so I can love them the way He calls me to. Some days I do that better than others.

But I refuse to let hatred have the final say.

My heart sank, my body felt weak, and all I could do was listen and pray.

It was Super Bowl Sunday. Government offices were closed. There was nobody to call for help or more information on a Sunday afternoon. If what my son was saying was true, I couldn’t even contact the director of the program for answers. I felt helpless, not knowing what was happening or who to turn to.

Sadly, because of everything we had already been through with our son—the lies that had been told over the years about us and others—I didn’t know what to believe. Was he telling the truth?

As a parent, all you want to do is protect your children, believe them, and keep them safe. That was all we had ever wanted for T. We were doing everything we possibly could to protect him from himself and the path he was on—a path of self-destruction and self-harm.

And if I am completely honest, we also had to protect our family and our other children.

He was on a mission to destroy us, no matter what it took. The hatred and anger inside him had taken over, and he would stop at nothing to get what he thought he wanted: to be placed in foster care and no longer be part of our family.

That day, I was dying inside at the thought of him being hurt by the very people we trusted to help and care for him.

He could not live in our home. No program or facility within the United States would take him because of his escalating and erratic behavior. We had exhausted every resource available to us, and the court system would not help us—unless he actually tried to kill someone.

We were not willing to take that risk.

We had children to protect. We had to protect ourselves. Yet we loved our son deeply and desperately wanted him to get help, holding on to the hope that one day he would be able to come home.

All of these thoughts raced through my mind.

What now?

First and foremost, we had to somehow get to the bottom of what was happening and find the truth.

In the days that followed, that became harder than I could have imagined.

Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, it did.

The next eight months became a battle.

A battle to protect our son.

A battle to protect our children.

A battle to protect our rights as parents.

A battle to keep our sanity.

When I think back to that Super Bowl Sunday, I had no idea what was about to unfold in my life or in the life of my family.

The story is long. It is complicated. At times, it feels almost impossible to tell.

But if you’ll stay with me, I will do my best to share it.

I will share the details in a way that is appropriate. In a way that protects my son and honors his story. In a way that helps explain how my life was spun completely out of control and how it ultimately led me to where I am today.

The truth is, I could start at the beginning, but somehow that feels even harder.

So this story may come out in pieces.

It may be sporadic.

It may not always be in chronological order.

But I will share what is on my heart when I feel led to share it.

One thing you should know before I share this story: it isn’t over.

We are still walking through parts of it. Some chapters have closed, but others are still being written. There are still wounds healing, questions without answers, and days when faith is still required moment by moment.

I don’t know how every part of this story will end, but I know God has been faithful through every page so far.

My greatest hope is that through every part of this story, you will see that I was never alone.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my Lord and Savior was walking beside me through every brutal day and every heartbreaking moment.

He never left my side.

I know this because, on paper, there is no reason I should have been able to keep getting up every morning.

My marriage should not have survived.

My children should not have been able to continue living their lives under the scrutiny of our community and the weight of everything that happened.

Yet somehow, we did.

And I can give you only one explanation:

Jesus.

He has been my Fourth Man in the fire time and time again.

“It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; He will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.” — Deuteronomy 31:8

There are days when I find myself asking, Why, God, why?

I don’t know how much more pain and heartbreak I can take. I’m desperately trying to hold on, one day at a time, but some days I wonder how much more I can carry.

The truth is, I feel everything deeply. I carry the weight of my family—the burdens of my husband, my children, and the struggles they face. Sometimes it all feels overwhelming.

I hear people say all the time, “God will never give you more than you can handle.”

If I’m honest, I question that daily.

Because there have been many moments in my life when what I was carrying felt far beyond what I could handle on my own.

Yet I also know this: we live in a broken world. Pain, suffering, disappointment, and heartbreak were never God’s desire for us. But He has promised that He will work all things together for good.

I believe that.

And when I look back on the seasons when I thought, I can’t do this anymore, somehow, some way, I did.

Not because I was strong enough, but because God was.

Through every trial, there has been growth. Through every heartbreak, there has been something He was teaching me. I am stronger than I think I am, or I wouldn’t still be standing today.

But if I’m being honest, I’m tired.

And growth has growing pains.

Sometimes I wonder, How much more can I be stretched?

I have to believe I’m not the only one who feels this way. In fact, I know I’m not.

So if that’s where you are today, let me give you permission to feel what you’re feeling.

Question.

Doubt.

Cry.

Be angry.

Be disappointed.

Be exhausted.

God is not afraid of your emotions.

He hears every cry. He sees every tear. He knows every burden you’re carrying.

And He is with you in all of it.

You are not too much for Him.

Your questions are not too much.

Your pain is not too much.

And your weariness is not too much.

So rest for a moment in that truth.

You don’t have to have it all together.

You don’t have to be strong enough on your own.

Because even when you feel like you’ve reached the end of yourself, God has not reached the end of His strength.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
Matthew 11:28

One of the hardest parts of everything we’ve gone through has been the heartbreak and disappointment my children have experienced along the way.

When I look back over the last five years, I see so many moments my husband and I missed—sometimes because we weren’t physically present, and sometimes because we simply weren’t emotionally present. We were surviving. We were putting out fires. We were carrying burdens that felt impossible to set down.

The chaos, drama, and pain I was experiencing inevitably spilled over into the lives of my children, who were simply trying to be kids, teenagers, and young adults. They were navigating their own emotions and challenges while living in the shadow of ours.

My son’s struggles became my full-time job. If I wasn’t somewhere trying to get him help, I was at home researching ways to get him help. And when I wasn’t doing either of those things, I was mentally and emotionally exhausted from the weight of it all.

I can’t help but feel that I wasn’t the best version of myself for my children during those years.

The truth is, I know I wasn’t.

I’ve spent countless hours beating myself up over what they experienced and what they will eventually have to work through because of it. I hate that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fully protect them from the reality of what was happening in our home.

There is no way any of them could walk away from those years untouched.

None of them really talk about it, even when I try to open the door for conversation. That’s heartbreaking in its own way because I know there is pain there. Pain from what each of them experienced individually, and pain from what we experienced as a family.

I am still working through my own grief—the grief of losing my son and the life I had imagined with him. I still carry PTSD from the trauma of those years, something I feel the effects of almost every day.

I have no doubt my children carry grief too.

They lost their brother.

They lost the life they knew before everything fell apart.

And they will continue to feel the ripple effects of this chapter in ways I may never fully understand.

As a parent, that’s the last thing you want for your children.

All I can do is pray for healing for each of them. I can continue to create space for conversation, continue to remind them that they don’t have to carry their burdens alone, and continue to respect where they are in their own journeys.

That’s all I can do.

But there is one thing I know.

My children are resilient.

They have endured more than most people realize, and somehow they continue to move forward. They’ve learned to cope, to adapt, and to keep going even when life has been unfair.

My hope is that even though I wasn’t perfect through any of this—and I’m still not—I have shown them what it looks like to keep moving forward when life hurts.

To get up each day and begin again.

To search for gratitude, even when you have to dig deep to find it.

To trust that hard seasons don’t last forever.

We live in a broken world, and suffering touches every life in one way or another. But we never walk through it alone.

Even in the darkest valleys, God remains present.

And sometimes simply taking the next step forward is an act of faith.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
— Psalm 23:4

There are mornings when worship hits differently.
This morning was one of them.

I could not stop the tears from filling my eyes. Every song seemed to reach straight into the deepest parts of my heart. Not in a painful way, but in the kind of way your soul desperately needs. The kind of reminder that I was never meant to carry this life alone.

Moments like this remind me just how good God has been to me and how much He has carried me through.

I can honestly say the only reason I am still standing today is because of my faith.

In some ways, it feels like yesterday. In other ways, it feels like a lifetime ago when I truly believed I could not keep going.

I can still remember that moment vividly.

I usually try not to revisit it because it is painful, but to understand where I am now, you need to understand part of how I got here.

That night, I left my house to bring dinner to my son, who was staying temporarily in a hotel while we waited for a judge to decide what would happen next. There is more to that story, and maybe one day I will share it fully.

As I drove there, I already knew I would likely be met with anger. The woman who helped create this entire circus was waiting there too, ready to record me, hoping I would react in a way that supported the false accusations being spread about me. It was heartbreaking to watch the influence she had over my son.

As I drove down the road, the anxiety and fear became overwhelming. The emotions were so intense I cannot fully put them into words. I had experienced difficult things before in my life, but nothing compared to this.

I felt weak. I could barely breathe.

And in that moment, I was ready to drive off the road and end all of the pain.

The pain.
The fear.
The betrayal.
The shame.
The humiliation.
The persecution.

It all felt too heavy.

But there is no doubt in my mind that I was not alone in that moment.

God met me there.

Jesus, the Holy Spirit, my guardian angels—He took hold of me when I could not hold myself together. He quieted the chaos in my mind, steadied my racing heart, and put breath back into my lungs.

I wish I could say everything instantly became clear and peaceful, or that I immediately remembered who I truly was beneath all the lies being blasted across social media and the news.

But honestly, it was simpler than that.

For just a few seconds, the noise stopped.

And all I could think about was my family at home.

My husband.
My three children.

I knew I could not leave them in the middle of this pain. I could not add more heartbreak to what they were already carrying.

What felt like forever was probably only a matter of seconds.

I took a deep breath. Then another. And I prayed for the strength and endurance to keep going. To face the world. To face the attacks. To face the enemy. And to keep moving forward one step at a time.

Now, almost two years later, I can look back and see God’s hand in every moment.

He gave me strength when I had none left.
He gave me endurance when I wanted to quit.
He gave me the mental and emotional strength to wake up each day and face whatever came next.

God is good through all of it.

Not just in the easy moments.
Not just after the breakthrough.
But right in the middle of the darkness too.

He has been my rock, my refuge, and the source of every ounce of strength I have had.

“But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.” — Isaiah 40:31