Peace Train Lens: Selah Station & Grove of Becoming
Pausing, grieving, and beginning to walk in identity
Marriage felt like solid ground at first, but it carried its own landmines. Doug and I began our journey with love, hope, and a shared faith — but we were both unprepared for the depth of pain God would use to form us. Loss and longing wound themselves together so tightly that I could hardly separate them.
Two early miscarriages tore holes in my heart and introduced me to a grief I couldn’t yet name. Each loss felt like another cruel landmine — the hope of life snatched away before I could hold it. I had no idea there would be more to come. But then came the gift of two living children. Grief and joy lived side by side. In that tension, I began to taste the faint sweetness of lemonade.
The slow turn toward identity
The Lord was faithful to bring me what I needed at just the right time. One of those gifts, before I was married, was a study called The Search for Significance by Robert McGee.
In it I discovered a truth that changed everything:
“Because of Christ and His redemption I am deeply loved, completely forgiven, fully pleasing, and totally accepted by God.”
This wasn’t just head knowledge — it started to sink deeper. It became a quiet anchor before I ever shared my full story with the man who would become my husband.
Later, when we were dating, he struggled to accept parts of my past. The hardest part for him was my abortion. He couldn’t imagine how I could have done something so unforgivable.
By God’s grace, I was able to stand and proclaim:
“God sees me as clean through Jesus. If you don’t, take it up with Him.”
The next day he returned with a patched-up teddy bear — a symbol of forgiveness, a sign of grace beginning to take root in our relationship.
Restoring the years
By that point, Joel 2:25 had become my anchor:
“I will restore the years the locusts have eaten.”
I began to see that God was not only saving me — He was restoring me. He was redeeming the years that felt wasted, stolen, or shattered.
Twelve miscarriages marked my journey — one before my twin pregnancy, one twin I lost before my son’s birth, two more before my daughter, and eight that followed.
Each one became a picture of life and a lesson in trust. I learned to hold hope gently and to release it back into God’s hands when the outcome wasn’t what I had prayed for.
Even before my son’s birth, there was a miracle. He had a twin I lost early in pregnancy, yet by God’s mercy, he remained. That glimpse of both loss and preservation shaped my faith in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
Through every miscarriage, I discovered a different facet of His character — His sovereignty, His comfort, His ability to weave beauty into places that felt unbearable. Over time, grief gave way to gratitude.
After the last miscarriage in 2007, the Lord began restoring life in unexpected ways. While in Hungary, Doug and I said yes to adopting my second cousin — a precious girl whose story carried its own hidden landmines. We had no idea of her past when we said yes, only that God was asking us to open our hearts wider.
Years later, she had a daughter when my second-born was eleven. That little girl began spending time with us from just six weeks old — sometimes for a season, sometimes for months at a time. By the time she was four, she had spent almost half her life in our home.
Then The KING did His Romans 8:28 work. As I began praying for her and her brother’s protection, within two weeks both children were safely relocated to their grandparents — she to her maternal and he to his paternal — a divine act of protection and positioning. Soon after, God made a way for us to adopt her fully.
Each child, each “yes,” became another thread of redemption — living proof that The KING restores what the enemy tries to destroy.
I had always desired four children, and The KING, in His own miraculous way, provided them — two by birth and two by adoption — each a testimony of His mercy and design.
By the time that season settled, I could finally rest in the truth that all of my children — those in heaven and those here — were known, chosen, and held by Him. Some were simply given a quicker pass to glory; others were entrusted to my arms for a longer stretch of the journey.
It took twenty years of marriage, and my son’s unexpected departure later in life, for me to truly see The KING through my pain. But He had been faithful through it all — restoring, redeeming, and revealing Himself one life, one loss, one unexpected “yes” at a time.
Every place the enemy meant for destruction became a building block for redemption — the 8:28 flip that turned pain into purpose.
The pain of marriage never wrapped up in a neat bow. The ache of being unseen and misunderstood didn’t disappear — it simply became another place where The KING met me. Not to fix what was broken between us overnight, but to steady what was breaking inside me.
Selah — the holy pause
This was my Selah — the place where I stopped running and finally paused long enough to listen. In the stillness, The KING began to teach me that peace isn’t the absence of emotion, but the presence of alignment.
A new way of seeing emotions
For most of my life I lived in Opposite World — where control felt holy and emotions felt dangerous. But The KING was inviting me into His Kingdom, where peace comes from relationship, not performance.
For years I had believed emotions were an affliction — something to suppress, unplug, or avoid. But through Scripture, study, and hard-won tears, I began to see the truth: emotions are part of God’s design of making us in His image.
They were not a curse. They were indicators, like dashboard lights on a car, pointing me toward the thoughts beneath them.
Negative emotions weren’t proof of failure — they were invitations to examine my agreements. Was I believing truth or lies?
It took years before I realized that much of the anger leaking out of me wasn’t defiance — it was Little. I couldn’t see it then, but she had been carrying deep anger at being unseen and unheard. The only language she had left was intensity. Her explosions weren’t rebellion; they were desperation.
Those explosions rippled through our home. They confused and hurt my children, hurt Doug, and left all of us walking on emotional eggshells. I still remember Doug shouting that he didn’t deserve it, and my son — bewildered — asking why I was always angry. Neither of them could see that the storm wasn’t really about them.
It was Little, trying to defend what had never been protected.
Big always forgave — after all, she had been forgiven much — but instead of comforting Little, she partnered with Doug in trying to manage and fix her.
Marriage magnified that struggle. Doug saw me as already whole and expected me to operate that way. I saw myself as broken and tried to fix myself. The clash between those two realities created sparks neither of us understood at the time.
When I finally looked back and saw all of this through The KING’s eyes, compassion replaced condemnation — for all of us. I could let Big take Little’s hand instead of silencing her, and I could see Doug not as my adversary, but as part of the refining fire God used to draw truth to the surface.
Breadcrumb forward
This was the beginning of my compass — but I still needed the full map.
By this point in my story, I was beginning to taste that first lemonade — identity in Christ instead of striving. But it didn’t happen all at once.
It started with noticing the emotions that leaked out despite all my efforts at self-control — emotions from Little, who was expressing herself without Big’s awareness. I began to see they weren’t failures, but messages I had been trying to silence.
👉 If you’d like to see where your emotions might be pointing you, the free What’s Good About You? Quiz [link] is a simple place to begin. It reveals your natural way of processing feelings — and whether Opposite World might still be writing your story.
The compass was forming, but the map was still unfolding — and the next station would show me what peace really looks like in motion.
Nothing missing. Nothing broken.
Even though it felt that way.
Because that’s what redemption really is — the place where everything shattered becomes everything sacred, when seen through The KING’s eyes.