April 12th, 2026

The Little Girl Who Remembered Her Way Home
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Something that you don't see every day
A little girl who found her way
Through a world that's designed to break
All of your dreams --Free Me by Joss Stone

These lyrics have lived in me since the moment I heard them many years ago. But when I think of them now, they hit differently than they did when I was 39. Little did I know that even just one year later, a shift would begin to take place that would change everything.
A shift that was, at times, dark and isolating, yet nonetheless one that moved me in ways I couldn’t imagine at the time.
When I look back at who I was then, I see a woman managing her life, holding it all together, doing what needed to be done.
But in all that managing…
there was a slow, quiet deterioration of my soul.
At 40, the wake-up calls began to come.
And I handled those too.
But if I’m being honest, I wasn’t really paying attention.
My life had become a series of quiet negotiations:
If I can just get past this…
If I can just fix this…
If I can just make it through this…
Work.
Finances.
Family.
Health.
Marriage.
I was determined to handle it all like a true FIO.
Oh yes, I prayed, but honestly, I don’t think I truly gave it over to God.
So when, at age 50, I left my marriage with very little to my name after dropping to my knees and asking for courage, I truly gave it over.
And that was the beginning of becoming Untucked.
It was through healing a lifetime of tucking myself away that I began to reconnect with my soul.
The deepest place within me.
My truest self.
And I won’t pretend otherwise, this work is lonely.
No one else can do it for you.
There is no checklist.
No timeline.
Only the willingness to meet yourself there.
And so today, as I continue this return,
I find myself asking:
How do we come home to ourselves, not by going backward,
but by remembering forward?
How do we shed what was never ours to reclaim what always was?
There comes a moment when you realize you have stepped outside the story you were taught to live.
And what remains…
is her.
The little girl
who felt the Divine not as something to reach for,
but something she lived within.
Like a seed buried deep in darkness, what is most true about us sometimes disappears for a time,
not lost, just waiting.
Waiting for the right breaking open.
Waiting for the light.
The world has a way of making us feel the
“shoulds” one quiet compromise after another
until we forget the sound of our own soul.
And yet…
nothing is ever wasted.
Every detour, every misstep, every moment of misalignment
becomes part of the path that leads us back.
Even the shame
It was placed gently, sometimes unconsciously,
into hands too small to understand it.
“You are not enough.”
“You must be more.”
But none of it was ever true.
And yet, God never left.
Not in the forgetting.
Not in the distance.
Not even in the choices that pulled you further from yourself.
There is a love
that does not keep score,
that does not turn away.
It simply waits with infinite patience for the moment you remember.
And when you do, you begin to see it all differently.
The people who appeared at just the right time.
The moments that shook you awake.
The feeling that something bigger was calling you forward.
It was always leading you here.
Back to her.
Back to truth.
Back to God within you.
You were never meant for the world’s narrow thinking, its shame-based systems, or its quiet insistence that you shrink to belong.
You belong to something far more vast.
Far more loving.
And that joy you feel now, that quiet, rising excitement about what God has placed before you.
That is your compass.
That is your remembering.
That is the little girl,
finally home.

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