Maybe Your Pain Has Been Lying

I don’t remember what I made for dinner that night.

Honestly, I don’t even remember if I ate. I couldn’t tell you whether the television was on or if I washed the dishes afterward. I don’t remember what I was wearing or what time the sun went down.

I only remember the silence.

It wasn’t the kind of quiet you enjoy after a long day. It wasn’t peaceful. It was unnaturally quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you stop in the middle of the room because your brain keeps expecting to hear little feet running down the hallway or someone calling, “Mom?”

But nobody did.

For the first time in my life, my children were gone.

They were spending the weekend with their dad.

If you’ve never been a stay-at-home mom, it’s hard to explain what that felt like. For years, my entire world revolved around those two kids. Their laughter filled every room. There were toys on the floor, dishes in the sink, questions to answer, hugs to give, snacks to make, and bedtime stories to read.

Then all at once...

Nothing.

The divorce had already broken my heart. Nobody gets married planning to divide holidays, split birthdays, or watch the family they poured their life into come apart because of someone else’s choices.

The only way I’ve ever known how to describe it is this.

It felt like I had spent years standing in front of an easel, carefully painting the most beautiful picture I’d ever created. Every brushstroke mattered. Every detail had my heart in it.

Then someone walked in, ripped the canvas off the easel, and tore it to pieces while I stood there powerless to stop it.

That’s what divorce felt like to me.

The empty house only made it louder.

I cried off and on for days. Honestly, I struggled for months. Every room reminded me of what used to be, and every quiet evening seemed to whisper the same painful question.

Is this what my life is now?

Looking back, I don’t think the silence was the hardest part.

The hardest part was what the silence started saying to me.

It told me I had been abandoned.

It told me I’d never feel whole again.

It told me this broken version of my life was all I had left.

The heartbreaking part is that I believed it.

I didn’t realize it then, but my pain had slowly become the loudest voice in the room. Every time I looked at my circumstances, it handed me another label. Abandoned. Rejected. Forgotten. Alone.

Years later, as I studied Scripture and began training as a biblical counselor, I realized something that completely changed the way I understood my own story.

Pain wasn’t just hurting me. It was interpreting my life for me.

And that’s dangerous.

Because pain is real.

But pain is also a terrible narrator.

If you let it tell your story, it will almost always leave Jesus out.

In the rest of this article, I want to show you the four questions I now ask myself whenever pain starts telling me who I am. They’ve become one of the most life-changing biblical counseling tools I’ve ever learned because they help me recognize when my heart is believing a story that God never wrote.

Read Monday’s Article - Click HERE

Want a behind-the-scenes look at my debut novel? I'd love for you to come along. Click HERE