There are places in this world that do not merely exist, they witness.
The Black River is one of them.
It winds through the Pee Dee with a quiet authority, carrying secrets older than the towns that sit along its banks. Dark water, rich with the tannins of ancient cypress and cedar, hides more than the eye can see. Some say it remembers everything: the storms, the losses, the whispered prayers, the sins, the stories time tried to bury.
I have lived beside this river long enough to know this much: the Black River does not lie. It reflects the soul exactly as it is, broken, bruised, healing, becoming.
And in this season of my life, the river became my mirror.
Just as the black river is named for its darkened color, as are our lives during the darkest of days. You don't have to be "clear" to be pure. You can be deeply marked by your past and still be "clean" in your integrity and spirit.
This is the darkest season I have ever walked through, a stretch of time where everything familiar was stripped away, leaving me exposed and unsure of my own footing.
I was left standing in emotional wreckage, grieving a love I had given everything to, burying a version of myself I had outgrown, piecing together a heart cracked in places I didn’t even know existed.
Healing did not come.
Clarity did not come.
Only the quiet ache of being undone.
And yet, I survived.
I met them all in their storms.
I loved them through shadows.
I prayed for them long after they walked away.
These were not coincidences.
They were assignments.
Spiritual ones. Heavy ones. Ones that reshaped who I thought I was.
And in serving them, I began, slowly, painfully, to find pieces of myself again.
Stories that remind us that every depth holds a truth, and every shadow holds a story.
As I walked its banks in my lowest moments, I realized how closely my life mirrored its water. I, too, held secrets. I, too, carried storms. I, too, had depths that frightened even me.
And like the river, I learned that darkness does not mean destruction.
Sometimes, darkness means depth.
This is the story of the woman I buried…
and the woman I became.
Growth, I learned, rarely blooms in safe seasons. It grows in confusion. In unraveling. In the nights when the heart fractures just enough for light to seep through.
And maybe that was the point all along, not to understand, but to trust that something was being born in the dark.
During my season of reconstruction or, more honestly, unemployment came the season of
Clarity.
The word hung in the air between us, as if even the trees leaned in to listen.
This season of my life has felt barren, cold, stripped back, exposed. So much has been shaken loose: my job, my sense of security, relationships I thought were solid, pieces of myself I believed were permanent.
I was being reshaped.
In that season of unraveling, I met some of the most genuine people. Not the friends I imagined I’d make when I blew into town like the ball of fire I tend to be, and certainly not the husband I jokingly told myself might be waiting around the next corner. Instead, God handed me people who needed something deeper, people whose lives had been torn open like mine.
People who needed truth.
Kindness.
Prayer.
Or simply someone willing to sit in their pain without turning away.
I prayed with the hurting. I held the broken. I listened to stories that twisted my heart in ways I wasn’t prepared for. I loved strangers with a fierceness I didn’t recognize in myself.
These were not the people I expected to meet.
But they were the people God sent.
And somewhere between their heartbreak and my own, I realized this: purpose does not knock on the front door and wait to be welcomed. It slips in quietly in the faces of the hurting, in the hands we hold, in the moments that stretch us into someone we never expected to become.
This was my first season in dark water, a season of breaking, a season of becoming, a season written long before I understood how to read it.
I thought purpose in this new season would look like new friendships, busy weekends, laughter around fire pits, maybe even a second chance at love. But instead, God handed me something far more meaningful: people who needed compassion, healing, and someone willing to stand in the gap for them.
And in showing up for them, I discovered something about myself.
Purpose isn’t always loud. Sometimes it is a whisper tucked inside small acts holding someone’s hand while they cry, praying with a stranger who feels forgotten, offering truth gently when their world is tilting sideways.
Sometimes purpose is simply showing up with a heart willing to break for others.
I didn’t choose these encounters. They chose me. Or maybe God chose them for me.
Because each person, each story, each moment of raw human vulnerability revealed something I had overlooked: I wasn’t brought here to be entertained. I was brought here to serve.
Looking back, I see it clearly now. Every tearful conversation, every prayer whispered over someone else’s pain, every act of kindness that cost me a piece of myself, none of it was accidental.
It was purpose shaping me.
Sharpening me.
Teaching me who I had always been, even when I didn’t feel like enough.
Purpose does not require perfection.
It requires willingness.
And I was willing, even when I did not understand.
Perhaps that is the truest calling of all.
It was through the people God placed in my path, each broken in their own way, that my spiritual calling came into focus. Not in peace. Not in certainty. But in the raw, trembling spaces where their lives touched mine.
God did not thunder His purpose from the heavens.
He whispered it through the stories of strangers who became sacred assignments.
He spoke through single mothers, women who carried entire worlds with trembling hands. Women who rose each morning already exhausted, working jobs that underpaid them, loving children who depended on their strength even when they felt their strength slipping.
They did not need judgment.
They did not need lectures or pity.
They needed presence.
A voice that said, I see you. You are not alone. And I will sit with you in this storm.
And in loving them, something inside me awakened a truth I had long ignored.
Purpose does not wait for us to be whole. It meets us in the dark water, right where we are bruised, right where we are tired, right where we feel unworthy, and still trusts us to carry something meaningful.
He spoke through two brothers whose family inheritance, modest land layered with childhood memories and generations of history, was stripped away in a tax sale, as if their legacy had no weight.
Their grief ran deeper than legal loss. It was spiritual. Identity torn from the ground it had grown in.
Walking beside them taught me this: advocacy is not paperwork. It is standing between someone and erasure. It is protecting what should never have been taken. It is refusing to let dignity disappear quietly.
I came to understand this even more through a family whose entire inheritance was being devoured by their own blood, while their mother wasted away in what they called a luxury villa for the elderly.
But how luxurious can abandonment ever be, when the cost is the absence of the very people she once lived with, for people she now struggled even to remember?
If God had no purpose for me, I would not be here to witness these lives. To carry these stories. To feel this ache that keeps teaching me how to love.
So now I show up the only way I know how: with presence. With compassion. With a heart willing to break open for others.
In a chaotic life, we often strive for clarity to return to “clear water,” where everything is simple and transparent. But the Black River suggests a different kind of beauty. The beauty of stained water. The kind that gives each family who has blessed my life in this season a unique, soulful color that others lack.
Because every encounter is holy.
Every story is entrusted.
And purpose is not something we find.
It is something that finds us in the lives we are brave enough to sit inside.
He spoke through a family torn apart by false accusations, jealousy dressed up as truth. One person’s bitterness became a weapon, and suddenly an entire household was displaced, scattered beneath a cloud of suspicion that never belonged to them.
For three years, they waited.
Court dates. Whispers. Sleepless nights.
Three years of being watched as if guilt could be seen in a glance.
Then came the trial.
Twenty-eight minutes.
Less time than it takes to prepare a simple meal.
Twenty-eight minutes for a jury to undo three years of fear.
Twenty-eight minutes for truth to rise back to the surface.
A man walked free.
A family learned how to breathe again.
And I learned something else: sometimes justice arrives quietly. That truth bends, but it does not break. That standing with the falsely accused is a holy act especially when the world has already decided to look away.
Each person was a mirror.
Each story a summons.
Each heartbreak a doorway into the life I had been called to live.
These were not coincidences. They were invitations. Divine assignments revealing what I had spent years avoiding: my purpose was never about what I wanted. It was about who I was created to serve.
Through every mother, every brother, every abandoned child, every betrayed woman, every silenced man, God showed me that my tenderness was not weakness.
It was preparation.
Even now, the two brothers fighting to reclaim their family land remain woven into my daily life. Their struggle has become my own their memories, their losses, their stubborn hope. They are no longer clients or causes.
They are kin.
And families torn apart by lies have become another kind of home. We check on each other. We hold space. We speak truth when the world grows heavy again.
Our bond was forged in fear, strengthened in truth, sustained by grace.
They remind me of something I will never forget:
Sometimes God gives you family not through blood,
but through battle.
And sometimes the calling is not something you find.
It is something that finds you
in the lives you are brave enough to love.
Sometimes, the very people walking through their own storms become the vessels God uses to steady our steps.
The Black River doesn’t try to wash away what life hands us; it carries it gracefully to the sea. It reminds us that chaos doesn’t have to be a pollutant it can be an infusion. You are not muddied by what you have been through; you are enriched by it.
My place in their lives has shifted. I am no longer their paralegal, no longer standing beside them in courtrooms, drafting motions, fighting legal battles on their behalf. That chapter has closed.
But in its closing, something else opened.
Now I get to be far more personal, far more sacred: their friend.
Not because of obligation.
Not because of a job title.
But because our lives became intertwined in ways none of us could have predicted.
The weight we carried together, the storms we survived side by side, created a bond that no legal file could hold and no court date could contain.
As their friend, I show up with authenticity instead of authority. I celebrate their victories without the shadow of a pending case. I sit with their grief without the pressure of deadlines. I love them with a steadiness that does not need to prove itself.
Roles end.
Cases close.
But connection born in compassion, truth, and shared struggle remains.
And in this season, I am learning something I never expected:
Being their friend is not a lesser calling.
I’ve been asking God why everything looks so bare.
But standing there in the winter air, I realized something: maybe this season isn’t about beauty as abundance. Maybe it’s about beauty as vision.
When the leaves fall, you can finally see what’s behind them.
When the branches are bare, light reaches places it never could before.
When the noise dies down, you can actually hear God whisper.
Not peace, not yet.
But awareness.
This fifty-two-year-old woman, shaped by survival, stubborn in the ways life had taught her to be, was suddenly under construction. God was peeling back layers I didn’t want to surrender, exposing truths I didn’t want to face, asking me to see clearly in a season I was resisting with everything in me.
Clarity isn’t gentle when you’ve spent years avoiding the mirror.
But there I was winter all around me, winter inside me and God using the cold to carve a new kind of strength, a new kind of sight, a new kind of obedience.
Chaz
Even thinking his name felt like reopening something that had never fully healed.
If this was truly a season of reconstruction, then this part of my life had to be faced. It had to be named. It had to be made whole.
And I wasn’t ready.
I didn’t feel strong enough.
I didn’t feel brave enough.
I didn’t feel healed enough to reach for something still so raw.
But avoidance is not healing. And God does not allow us to carry unspoken pain forever.
I spent years believing in something that never believed in me. Years building dreams with someone who never planned to stay. Years stitching my hope onto a future that only existed inside my own heart.
Loving him became a habit one I didn’t know how to break, even when it broke me.
I held onto the idea of us long after the reality was gone. I told myself loyalty would be rewarded. That patience would pay off. That love would finally be enough.
But the truth settled slowly, painfully:
I was the only one fighting for something he never intended to keep.
I thought love was supposed to feel safe. Steady. Chosen.
But mine always felt like waiting, waiting for him to love me back, waiting for him to show up, waiting for him to finally see me the way I saw him.
And looking back now, I can see it clearly:
I was doing the loving for both of us.
I was carrying the relationship in my hands
while he barely held the edges.
That wasn’t love.
That was survival dressed up like hope.
And the worst part was this: I blamed myself for his absence. I thought if I tried harder, loved better, gave more, lost more of myself, he would finally choose me.
But he never did.
Not with his heart.
Not with his actions.
Like the Black River, I move slowly now—dark with memory, heavy with what I’ve survived, but still moving all the same.
I wanted so badly to be loved
that I convinced myself I was.
When he didn’t choose me back, something in me hollowed out. The emptiness was so loud I went searching for anything that could quiet it—travel, distraction, nights blurred just enough that the truth didn’t sting.
And then there was the drinking.
Because when the world softened, I didn’t have to sit with the knowledge that I was not loved, not wanted, not cherished not by the man I gave everything to, not by the man I loved more than I loved myself.
I thought numbing the pain would protect me.
But all it did was blur the truth I didn’t want to name:
I was trying to fill a void created by someone who never made space for me.
Eventually, I left. Really left. Moved far enough away that I thought distance might finally untangle me from the dream I kept trying to revive.
I thought distance would empty me. But like the Black River, I discovered you don’t outrun what you’re made of you only change the direction it flows.
No matter how far I went, I always reached back.
I texted. I called. I waited.
And never—not once—did he reach for me with the same urgency.
It was always my phone lighting up his name.
Never his lighting up mine.
And what remained in between was silence.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind where the echoes of what you hoped for are louder than anything that ever was.
Then one day, I saw it in his eyes, or rather, I saw what wasn’t there. No spark. No warmth. No trace of the man I once loved.
Just distance.
And in that moment, something inside me finally broke open.
The man I loved.
The man I wanted.
The man I would have died for.
Was already gone.
Maybe he wasn’t gone for the rest of the world. Maybe he still laughed with them, still lived, still existed in their eyes.
But for me?
The him that mattered the one I held onto, prayed for, sacrificed for would never be mine again.
And that truth cut deeper than anything I had ever known. A pain that lives in the bones. A pain you don’t know if time will ever touch or soften. A pain that feels permanent, like a scar that refuses to fade.
I texted him Friday night at 6:57.
I’ve needed you lately more than I ever have before. I kept hoping quietly that you might show up, hug me, and tell me it would be okay. You didn’t, and I am learning that this is the season where I have to live without you. I know now that if I make it to the other side of this, my heart won’t be the same. Not because I didn’t love you deeply, but because I did. And learning to survive without the person you most hoped would stay changes you. I am not angry. I am not asking anything. I just wanted you to know that this mattered, and that it still does, even as I am learning to let go.
He read it at 6:59.
He did not respond.
I wish I could say this taught me something profound. That it shaped me into a stronger, better version of myself.
But the truth is, I can’t. I drifted forward, carrying what I could not leave behind.
In this season of pain, grief, and uncertainty, the people I never expected to matter have become an integral part of my life. What I lost in financial security, I gained in emotional strength and support.
I had lost something I never truly had.
And somehow, that is the kind of heartbreak that lingers the longest.
This season is framed as survival. Rebuilding. Refocusing. As if these are simple instructions instead of lived realities. As if you don’t have to ask what they mean when your heart is still fractured, your faith feels thin, and your spirit is tired.
Helping others has given my life a kind of usefulness. It fills some of the empty hours. It gives shape to the days. But when the house empties and the quiet stretches, something else surfaces an ache that feels both physical and spiritual.
I ask God why I am here. Not from danger. From weariness.
Most people love the best version of you. They celebrate your competence, your resilience, the woman who looks like she can carry the world.
But when the armor slips, when you falter, they grow busy. Distant.
People think faith is strongest when it is confident.
I am learning it may be strongest when it stays, even when nothing feels answered.
I don’t feel chosen.
I feel exposed.
Alone in ways that don’t translate well in conversation.
Alone without the dignity of solitude.
There is no lesson waiting here.
No silver lining tucked into the margins.
There is only endurance, the quiet, stubborn kind that doesn’t feel brave enough to claim virtue.
If this chapter has a purpose, it is not resolution.
It is witness.
To the truth that some seasons are not meant to be conquered or reframed or redeemed on command. Some seasons are meant to be survived honestly, without pretending they are something else.
The river keeps moving toward the ocean through drought, through flood, through cold, barren days.
And so do I.
This is not the end of the story.
But it is where I am.
And for now, one steady breath at a time is enough.
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