Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

You know what they say; be careful what you ask for.

If you ever find yourself standing at a crossroads and decide to lay everything down in a season of radical faith, (something like a forty-day fast) you need to understand exactly what you’re asking for. We love the idea of clarity in theory. We pray for truth, direction, wisdom, and answers like we’re asking God to hand us a neatly folded map with the route highlighted in yellow highlighter. I mean I prefer the baby blue but whatever. What we don’t consider is that sometimes God answers those prayers by dismantling everything. It’s not Google Maps rerouting you; it’s a demo crew showing up at 6:00 AM to tear down the house you’re still sleeping in.

The last six months have been some of the most destabilizing ground I’ve ever walked, and that’s saying something considering the storms I’ve already survived. What made this season different was the intent. I walked into this one willingly. I asked for it, I fasted for it, and I told God I wanted the truth, no matter where it led. After spending the next half-year immersed in discovery, I can tell you there’s a massive, terrifying difference between wanting truth in the abstract and actually having to live with it once it pulls up into your driveway.

the ask

It takes an enormous amount of courage to put your life under a microscope and invite that kind of revelation. There were moments when the ground got so uncomfortable that I broke down and told Him I wished I’d never done it. I yelled at Him a couple times.

But He answered, though not in the order I expected and certainly not wrapped the way I’d imagined.

Some of those answers came quietly. For years, I carried the crushing weight of emotional eating, spending countless hours praying, journaling, and analyzing why something so irrational still held so much power over me. I did the work, sat through the horrific discomfort, faced the episodes. I kept doing it even when I had no evidence that anything would ever change. Somewhere in the middle of that fast, the food noise just… stopped. The constant, nagging pull disappeared and the episodes stayed away. Six months later, the silence is still there. I know what I asked for, and I know what He gave me, and there is no language for it other than a miracle. Not because the work wasn’t mine, but because after years of doing everything I knew how to do, He made possible something I had started to believe might never be possible at all.

what it uncovered

What I did not expect was that the disappearance of the symptom would expose the thing hiding underneath it. For years I thought I understood the origin of the struggle. I assumed it lived in childhood because that was where so much of the obvious pain began. The fast revealed something entirely different. What surfaced was a belief I did not realize I was still carrying; the quiet conviction that being enough was something I had to earn. That belief had followed me much farther into adulthood than I ever understood. It had woven itself into relationships, opportunities, disappointments, and places where I had been told directly that who I was was not enough. I had spent years doing the work to heal old wounds without realizing that this one was still quietly shaping how I showed up in my CrossFit community. The freedom from emotional eating turned out not to be the end of the story. It was the beginning of understanding why the story had lasted so long in the first place.

then there was the opposite

Then there were the answers I would’ve given anything not to receive. Nobody talks about the utter grief that arrives when God answers a prayer exactly as requested.

Not every answer arrived as a miracle. Some arrived as a truth so heavy that for a while I would have traded all the clarity in the world to put it back where I found it. The same God who removed decades of struggle from my life was the same God who illuminated truths that devastated me. Sometimes the answer is exactly what you asked for, and it breaks your heart.

I have always been drawn to depth in my relationships. In fact, I crave deep connection. Maybe part of that comes from spending so much of my life in a space where genuine connection can be surprisingly rare. The CrossFit community has given me some of the greatest gifts of my life, but it has also exposed me to how easily proximity can be mistaken for connection. We spend years standing next to people, cheering for them, competing beside them, following their lives online, and calling them friends without ever venturing much deeper than the stories they tell in public. There is a difference between being known and being seen, and I think much of my life has been spent searching for the latter. I have seen people celebrated, dismissed, elevated, overlooked, embraced, and excluded, sometimes for reasons that had very little to do with who they actually were. After enough years of navigating those waters, depth starts to feel precious.

I have often felt like a deep-water swimmer. What God showed me was that care, respect, loyalty, admiration, friendship, and capacity do not always travel together. People move through the world differently. They carry different thresholds for vulnerability, different fears, different histories, and different capacities for connection. There was a grief in recognizing that some relationships are not limited by a lack of value, but by a difference in capacity. The devastating part was not discovering that people cared less than I thought. It was discovering that sometimes they care exactly as much as they are able. And perhaps the hardest lesson of all has been learning to love people exactly as they are without asking them to become anything else. That work has been excruciating because it requires absolute surrender; loving them enough to allow them the freedom to come closer, move away, or remain exactly where they are without making any of it mean the connection mattered less.

surrender

That was the lesson hidden inside surrender, a word I thought I understood until I actually had to live it. As a Christian woman, I had known that word for years. I chose “surrender” as my word for the year because it sounded like exactly what I was supposed to do. In my mind, surrender looked peaceful. What I discovered was something entirely different. Surrender is not peaceful when it is happening. It can feel violent.

Surrender is more like driving eighty miles an hour down a rain-slicked highway and taking your hands off the steering wheel while every instinct in your body is screaming at you to grab control. It’s waking up every morning and choosing trust before you have a single shred of evidence that things are working out.

It’s the place you arrive when every plan, expectation, timeline, and version of how you thought the story was supposed to unfold has been stripped away. It’s releasing the outcome not because you want to, but because you finally understand that holding on is costing more than letting go. The uncertainty of that place is one of the hardest things I have ever had to live through.

the reality

Before the fast ever began, I made a promise that if I felt God leading me somewhere during this season, I would simply do it. I would follow the prompting whether it made sense or not. So I did; every single one. Looking back, I can honestly say the prompting was right, but I can also honestly say the cost was far greater than I imagined.

From the outside, this season has looked remarkable. There have been milestones, breakthroughs, and evidence of incredible growth that I am incredibly proud of. But what nobody sees is that some of the hardest moments of my life were unfolding right alongside those victories. The miracle sat at the dinner table next to the grief. Freedom sat next to disappointment. The miracle and the devastation occupied the same space. God was moving in undeniable ways while simultaneously asking me to release things I wasn’t ready to release and accept truths I wasn’t ready to accept. For someone who has spent most of her life trying to understand, solve, fix, anticipate, and prepare, there was something uniquely painful about discovering that not every answer arrives with resolution. Sometimes the answer is the uncertainty itself and learning to carry the question without demanding anything.

gratitude

I’m not standing here six months later with a tidy testimony wrapped in a bow, and I’m definitely not on the other side of the story yet. What I have instead is six months of evidence that the ground never actually gave way beneath my feet. When everything else felt uncertain, the thousands of ordinary days spent showing up, training, writing, praying, and trusting became the foundation that held.

The strangest truth I carry now is also the simplest: I wish I had never asked, and yet I would do that forty-day fast again tomorrow. Both are true.

I would do it again because the God who answered me loved me enough to tell me the truth.

And however much it cost, I don’t want a life built on anything else.