Purity's Story

Maybe the saddest thing about losing yourself is that nobody notices when it happens.

People notice when a marriage ends. People notice when you lose a job. People notice when someone moves away.

But nobody notices when you stop believing in yourself.

Nobody notices when you stop speaking up.

Nobody notices when the dream you once carried so fiercely gets buried under pain, disappointment, trauma, survival, or simply the weight of life.

One day you're full of ideas. Full of hope. Certain of who you are. Then life happens. And little by little, without even realizing it, you become a stranger to parts of yourself.

The hardest part? After enough time passes, you stop expecting those parts to ever come back. You tell yourself you're being realistic. You tell yourself you've moved on. You tell yourself that's just the way things are now. Until one day, something happens that makes you wonder if maybe they were never gone in the first place.

On Wednesday, one of the women in our program shared something that I haven't stopped thinking about since. Her name is Purity.

As she reflected on the last six months, she spoke about growing closer to God in a way she couldn't fully explain. About finding confidence again. About finding clarity again.

Then she said something that seemed to hang in the room a little longer than the rest: "I was the one who was done with Him. He wasn't."

Not because I've lived her exact story. But because I know what it feels like to reach the end of yourself. To stop believing. To stop hoping. To quietly assume that what has been lost is gone for good.

Then Purity shared something else. Something she had wanted to do ever since giving her life to Christ in high school. Years had passed. Life had happened. And somehow it never happened. Until now.

To sum up six months of gratitude for what God has been doing in her life, she walked into a recording studio for the very first time and recorded a worship song.

Because somewhere along the way, this woman had lost confidence in herself. Somewhere along the way, trauma had taken up so much space that other parts of her had gone silent. Somewhere along the way, a dream she had carried since high school got pushed further and further into the background.

And now here she was. Not talking about what she had lost. Talking about what was finally doing. Talking about what was possible again. Talking about God differently. Talking about herself differently.

And for a moment, I was thinking about all the things people quietly give up on. All the parts of themselves they stop believing can return. All the dreams that get packed away because life got hard. And I wondered how many of us are carrying something we have already declared dead while God is still breathing life into it.

Maybe that's why the room felt different. Because we weren't celebrating a song. We were witnessing something much harder to put into words: a woman beginning to believe again, a woman beginning to trust again, a woman beginning to use her voice again.