The Miracle and the Middle

On recovery, redemption, and the return of the prodigal daughter.

I bury my nose in Elijah’s soft hair, breathing in that warm, milky scent only babies have. He scrunches his face into a gummy smile, then shifts his gaze toward the sidewalk—mesmerized by strangers, colors, movement. I follow his eyes, then let mine drift to Ember. She’s perched on a planter nearby, legs swinging, lost in her sherbet: Jeni’s Tropical Bloom with rainbow sprinkles, of course. She’s four going on fourteen, her long waves catching the breeze, loose strands stuck to sticky lips.

Less than a foot away, Joe is destroying his double scoop like it’s a competition only he knows he’s winning. I take it all in, their infectious delight, and I feel that tight, beautiful ache rise in my chest.

It tastes like joy. And it tastes like healing.

I send up a quiet prayer before taking a bite of my own peanut-butter ribbon. I know none of this would’ve been possible without God.

I wasn’t always this close to God.

I was baptized Catholic as a baby, raised in a family that showed up to mass, sat through catechism, and bowed our heads before holiday dinners. I took it all in with a kind of gentle curiosity, always more interested in the stained glass windows and incense than in memorizing prayers.

But somewhere along the way, the rhythm of religion faded. Church became less frequent. Prayer became silent. My faith didn’t vanish, but my closeness did.

I still believed in God, but I started to reach for answers elsewhere. Answers I could measure, prove, decode. I hungered for logic and held onto psychology like a flashlight in the dark. I wanted to understand why I felt so far from peace—why I was haunted, terrified, so often lost in myself.

My faith went quiet, and in that silence, something else took root.

As a teenager and young woman, I lived inside a world shaped by sexual and emotional trauma. My mind tried to make sense of what my heart could not. I didn’t yet know the name for what I was experiencing: the sleeplessness, the flashbacks, the dissociation that stole hours and whole days from me. Later I would learn, post-traumatic stress disorder; back then, I only knew I was afraid.

Afraid of my own memories. Afraid of feeling. Afraid of the moments when everything felt too much or not enough. So I did what so many survivors do: I searched for something to quiet it all. I found it in my eating disorder.

Anorexia became my shelter. It numbed what I couldn’t face. It gave me control in a world, and a nervous system, that felt wildly, hopelessly out of control. And more than that, it muted everything: the panic, the rage, the sadness, the memories that threatened to pull me back under. For fourteen years, I lived there; in the hollow place between survival and self-destruction. And the truth is: some of those years nearly killed me.

My rock bottoms were occasionally life-threatening, but always ugly.

By the time I turned thirty, I had done everything I knew to do. I had studied trauma in classrooms and textbooks, sat across from therapists of every style and school of thought, tried EMDR and somatic work and inner child healing. I had uprooted my old life. I had become a mother. I had learned how to speak gently to myself, how to breathe through panic, how to stay.

And for the most part, it worked. I was 85% recovered.

That number lived in my mind like a badge and a resignation. I was proud of how far I’d come. I was also secretly, silently convinced that the remaining 15%—the part still tangled in control, still stuck in old beliefs about my body and my worth—was my burden to carry forever. I figured time would sand down the edges. That maybe “mostly healed” was the best someone like me could hope for.

Last year, we found out we were expecting our second child, a son. I remember the joy first. The deep, glowing kind. The disbelief that our family was growing again, that Ember would have a sibling, that my body would carry life once more.

But soon after the celebration, we were strapped into what felt like a ten-month rollercoaster. At every appointment, there was another curveball. More scans. More specialists. More contradicting opinions that offered no clarity, only questions.

It wasn’t our first time navigating medical uncertainty (our NICU and PICU chapters had prepared us in some ways), but this felt different. Because this time, something else entered the room.

Three months into my pregnancy, I felt it. God. Not as a whisper, but as a flood. A presence that came in loud, unmistakable, and pressing. It wasn’t just comfort, it was invitation.

Come back.
Return to Me.
Start here: Red Rocks.

We started attending Sunday service, week after week, sitting in the back with our questions and fears and hope barely stitched together.

And somewhere in the worship, in the stillness between lyrics, I let go.

I gave God every ounce of my heart. Every thread of hope I had left. Every tight coil of anxiety wrapped around the future. I knew I couldn’t control what was coming, but I refused to live helpless. Disillusioned with perfect plans, I knew that I was being asked to rely on something bigger than me.

So I did.

I leaned all the way in. I chose trust over tightness.

I didn’t pretend our situation wasn’t real. I didn’t bypass the uncertainty. But I did choose to believe that God was in it. That He was not distant or indifferent. That He was close: steady, present, active.

I believed He had good plans. That there was meaning in the mess, purpose in the not-yet, and movement even in the waiting. And I surrendered. Fully. Fiercely. Finally.

I gave Him the pregnancy. The outcome. The unknown.

I gave Him my future.

I had never truly surrendered before. Not all the way. Control had always been my lifeline, my shield and safety net. Letting go felt like willfully sending myself into a free fall, and yet in this season, God was unmistakably asking me to open my hands. To stop gripping. To trust what I could not see.

I didn’t know what would happen next. I only knew I couldn’t go back to the way things were; to spending this one precious, unpromised life ruled by anxiety. So into the free fall of deliberate, irrational, unyielding faith, I went.

"If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it."

—Matthew 16:24-25

Pastor Shawn always says that church is the emergency room, and God is the Great Physician. I believe that. I’ve lived that.

But I’ve also come to know Him as something else: A Master Gardener.

He used my pregnancy as soil. He reached into the hard ground of my life, into fear and striving and all the tightly knotted roots, and He began to tend it.

He pulled the weeds.

He planted new seeds.

He watered the soil with grace.

He pruned what no longer served me.

And in the quiet, sacred dark, He formed something new.

Me.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

—2 Corinthians 5:17

Today, I have a healthy, vibrant six-month-old son. That, in itself, is a miracle.

But even more astonishing, almost unthinkable if you knew who I once was, is the quiet peace I carry in my chest. All is well with my soul.

Not “mostly healed.”

Not “coping better.”

Not 85% recovered.

I am free.

Free from my eating disorder.

Free from the anxious grip of control.

Free from the pain that once lived on loop inside my body.

When I close my eyes now, and wait in the stillness, I no longer brace for the shame or self-criticism. I don’t run from myself. There is stillness. There is joy. There is Jesus.

I’ve come to believe that recovery is a relay. I ran the first leg with all the strength I had—therapy, study, introspection, effort. But then I reached a hand forward, trembling and open.

And God took it.

I did what I could. He did what I never could.

Looking back, I know now: He was never just in the final 15%. He was in all of it. Every inch. Every step. Every tear-soaked night and every inch of progress. He gets the glory, not just for the miracle but for the middle.

I owe Him everything. And now, I give Him everything.

He saved my life. And now my life is His to use.

The prodigal daughter has come home.

And ice cream on a Wednesday afternoon?

Once, it would have felt impossible. Illogical, even. In the depths of my eating disorder, joy and nourishment couldn’t coexist. Food was a battlefield. My body, the casualty.

But now?

Now, it’s easy. And more than that, it’s sacred. Treasured.

The sweetness, the presence, the bite of peanut butter ribbon and the rainbow sprinkles Ember insists on—it’s all part of the miracle. Dripping in joy like the passionfruit running down her chin.

This is what freedom tastes like.