To you in year 2026: here’s a flashback of your pain
A vulnerable flashback to future you who is reading:
2023-2024 was a time marked with pain and grief unlike anything I’ve experienced before.
I was in shambles. In 2023, I got let go of job positions at a dream company I was so sure of working with long term. It left me jobless for months. And even when I did get a job eventually, I worked for a toxic workplace that mentally and spiritually drained me. It broke me down and nitpicked at the core of who I was. It left me curled up on top of my bed feeling shattered as a human glass, too frail to get back up.
Then 2024 came along––a year of trying to trust God (with the little strength and faith I had) to rebuild those broken parts of me and my dreams for the future. Vincent and I were tested of of our faithfulness as we lived in scarcity. We struggled financially often living paycheck to paycheck, but it was really more like debt to debt with our bank accounts living in the negative balance for weeks. Followed by the scarcity was loss. I experienced this insurmountable grief when a beloved family member, whom I looked up to, left the church due to church hurt and ultimately abandoned God to pursue the pleasures of the world. I didn’t know how to process that (and still don’t know to this day). As the year went by, I began losing parts of my authentic Christ-confident self and traded them in because of the insecurity of being unloved and not enough for the people closest to me.
Those years were the dark ages. They were the dark age in every aspect of my life that I couldn’t escape. It felt like this dark cloud loomed over my head and blurred my vision of who I was as God’s child. As His beloved image bearer. As His. It eventually blurred my vision of the triune God Himself. My circumstances brought me anguish, despair, and bitterness. I yearned and eagerly awaited for the day I’d be delivered from these things.
Then that’s what birthed this platform that planted a seed of hope, which started in a literal mess and total darkness.
Going into 2025, I had no idea what to expect. Particularly what this space would become. And then it became this:
The Sojourney Co platform and community was a lifeline for me. It became a lifejacket that kept me afloat to continue looking upwards to Jesus, the lighthouse. This place became a ray of hope that reminded me of God’s promises and truths for His children. For me. This became the space I could creatively express myself––a part that I lost confidence in––and gave me the chance to respond back to a holy triune God who was sustaining me even when I didn’t feel it.
But one of the best things it became for me was the very peace I longed for. For three years I searched to understand who God created me to be and why He created me that way. People I looked up to and every job position/identity I held onto would remind me of my shortcomings. Of my failures. Of how I wasn’t and could never be enough.
But here? I have felt nothing but peace and joy. Every post I posted on social media, caption and blog I vulnerably wrote, embroidered piece I made and sold, and friend I talked to gave me this culmination of peace that passes understanding: that this is what God had planned for me all along. This is where He wants me to be because it’s where He is. All the closed doors and hardships were redirections to here and to Him––in this season that had to begin at this age.
And finally came the deliverance from God in the second half of 2025.
I will never forget the fall of 2025 when I began to feel God’s complete deliverance and His abundance for the first time in what felt like forever. I finally began to see God’s bigger picture and redemptive plan for some of the pain I went through, and ironically it happened when I finally hit rock bottom. There was a pivotal family situation that shook Vincent and I in that September. That moment was the turning point for us even though it was the lowest point of the past three years. It’s funny how God will redeem the worst situations and turn it for good because that’s exactly what happened for us. That good was when we fully surrendered all our pain, doubt, and fear of the future in exchange for 100% trust in God’s power and sovereignty. All the brokenness in our family pushed us to draw even closer to Him. All the sin baggages the family had on them humbled our human limits and finally forced us to fully surrender.
When you’ve hit rock bottom and have no where else to go to, God really becomes the only best good thing to cling onto.
And He became that for Vince and I. We looked at other people around us trying to survive their broken lives without God, and all we saw was true hopelessness and far more pain. We saw the consequences and result of what life without God looks like. It’s complete utter darkness, loneliness, and despair.
So I’ve come to this conclusion: I don’t want to live my life without God. I can’t afford it. No––actually I won’t afford living a life without Him. I can’t imagine experiencing everything I went through without God by my side. It would be 100 times more excruciating and hopeless. He is the antidote to my suffering. So how foolish would it be to consider trading in a prescribed antidote for the general tylenols of this world. I want the all good sovereign God on my side to protect me. To hold onto me. To help be the strength that I don’t have. To be the only source of goodness in a painful life. And it was in those moments when I finally realized that true hope comes from who the triune God is and not the results of my circumstances.
That point became the beginning of God’s deliverance in my life. The cloud that once darkly loomed over my head started to dissipate the more time I spent with Him. He started to soften my heart again. He turned the tides of my bitterness when I chose forgiveness and unconditional love towards others. He erased the darkness and despair that eclipsed my heart with His goodness. He traded my anger in with patience and showed me the anger was a mask for deep sorrow. And so 2025 truly became the end of a new beginning.
