When God Stepped Into My Storm

 

When God Stepped Into My Storm: A Letter for Anyone Who Feels Abandoned

I grew up in a house where safety wasn’t really a thing people talked about — or provided. I was the youngest of four girls, spaced far apart, and by the time I came along, the adults in my life were emotionally tapped out or simply uninterested in being present.

My father was a preacher who spoke passionately about righteousness from a pulpit but rarely showed up where it mattered most — at home. My mother was sharp-edged, skeptical, and often cold. And the sister closest to me in age, desperate to escape her own pain, married someone who eventually became the source of years of mine.

From just before my ninth birthday until a couple months shy of eighteen, I lived with a trauma no child should ever have to carry. The details aren’t the point — what matters is that it stole my trust, scrambled my sense of safety, and left me questioning my worth for a very long time. Trauma like that doesn’t disappear when you become an adult. It echoes. It hides in corners. It wakes up at the worst times.

And then life kept piling grief on top of old wounds.

Ten years ago, on December 10th, I lost my sister to inflammatory breast cancer. Thirteen months later, my mother died from the weight of her own health and heartbreak. Complicated relationships still hurt when they’re gone. Sometimes they hurt more, because the things that were never said — or never fixed — stay raw. And after they died, the already-thin thread holding my family together snapped. My dad started a new life somewhere else, and I was left standing in the wreckage of the old one feeling very, very alone.

People don’t always understand why grief lingers. But when you’ve lost the only people who ever knew your history — even imperfectly — it feels like parts of your own story die with them.

This year, the anniversary season hit harder than usual. And then, on top of everything, my son admitted something painful, something that reopened every old scar all at once. It felt like the universe grabbed a crowbar and pried my chest open. I didn’t know where to go with the pain. Every direction hurt.

Last Sunday morning, I cracked.

I went outside to the car, shaking, crying, smoking, praying — all at once. Begging God, yelling at God, wondering if God even cared. I even said out loud that maybe the cigarettes would kill me, because I felt so unbearably exhausted. And yet, in that same moment, I reached out for something — anything — that could hold me together long enough to breathe.

I picked a song.

Just… a song.

“It Is Well With My Soul.”

I didn’t even know then what that choice was about to mean.

I decided to go to church alone that morning. Something in me wanted to be near God even while I was screaming inside. I half-expected to feel judged or guilty or out of place, but that’s not what happened. The sermon was about praising in the storm, not in the sense of pretending everything is fine, but choosing to cling to God in the middle of the mess.

Honestly, I thought it was going to be another guilt trip sermon… until the very end.

They showed a clip from A Week Away — a scene talking about Horatio Spafford, the man who wrote “It Is Well With My Soul.” They didn’t even get to the singing part. They just told the story: how he wrote those words while sailing over the exact place his four daughters drowned.

And right then, it was like something in the room shifted.

I started crying before my brain even caught up. Because for the first time in my entire life — after everything I’ve lived through, after all the silence and abandonment and grief — I felt God speak straight to me.

Not in a thunderbolt.

Not in a miracle moment that fixed everything.

Just a gentle, unmistakable whisper in the middle of my collapse:

“I haven’t abandoned you.”

I didn’t know moments like that had a name. I didn’t know people called them “glimpses” — little flashes of God breaking through when you’re at the end of yourself. But that’s exactly what it was.

It didn’t erase my trauma.

It didn’t undo my losses.

But it reminded me of something I had forgotten so completely I didn’t even know it was still inside me:

God never left.

Not when I was a terrified child.

Not when the people I loved slipped away.

Not in the car last week with tears rolling down my face.

Not now.

And if you’re reading this — especially if you’re hurting, especially if your story feels too heavy or too messy or too full of silence — I want to tell you something from the deepest, rawest part of my own experience:

God hasn’t abandoned you either.

Even if your family failed you.

Even if trauma took pieces of you.

Even if grief has sat on your chest for years.

Even if you screamed at Him last night or begged Him to show up and heard nothing but your own breathing.

Glimpses come when we least expect them.

Comfort comes through the cracks.

Hope slips into the car next to you when you’re convinced you’re done.

You aren’t alone.

Not now.

Not ever.

God hasn’t abandoned you.

And He never will.

Isaiah 43:2 (NIV)

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;

and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned;

the flames will not set you ablaze.”