There. I said it. Not screamed across the room in the middle of an argument. Not thrown at him as ammunition when we were both angry enough to say things we would regret later. I said it sitting in a recliner, coffee in hand, on a cold weekend morning in Hart while our kids were still asleep. Which somehow made it worse.
If The Thorn taught me anything, it was that looking back wasn’t always about changing what had happened. Sometimes it was about changing what I saw. But apparently, God wasn’t content to let me examine only the things that had happened to me.
Eventually, He turned the mirror around.
It was late fall of 2024, only a couple of months after we had bought our house. Hart was finally becoming home, and after everything it had taken to get us there, life had settled down enough for Nick and me to find ourselves sitting together in the quiet again. We had been working through Jimmy Evans’s “I Will” marriage devotional, and that morning’s devotion had us talking about communication. Oh good. Communication. Something Nick and I used to think we were pretty good at.
For years, we had been the couple who could talk about the hard stuff. We had survived things that could have destroyed our marriage and somehow learned to sit across from one another and have conversations most people would rather avoid. We had even helped other couples because of what we’d walked through. But somewhere along the way, that changed. Our conversations became arguments, or worse, they simply stopped happening. The strange thing is, silence had existed in our marriage before. It had just changed sides.
After the affair, I made it very clear that Nick was going to have to prove himself if our marriage was going to survive. And he did a lot of hard work. We went through trauma groups. Pornography, drugs, and alcohol were removed from our marriage. We fought for our family. But underneath all of that, Nick was terrified of losing me, and somewhere along the way he learned it was easier to keep his opinions to himself than risk another fracture in a marriage he was desperately trying to save.
And while he was learning to stop making decisions, I was becoming very comfortable making them. I didn’t recognize it as control at the time. Somebody had to steer the ship, right? Apparently, I had volunteered. I became accustomed to making the decisions, trusting my judgment over his, and carrying a responsibility that I would later complain was too heavy. There’s a mirror for you.
Somewhere in the middle of all this was what I had begun calling the “plandemic,” followed by a mandate I believed was testing far more than my willingness to keep a job. When my job was threatened, Nick technically gave me his blessing not to take the COVID vaccine. He didn’t force me to do anything. That distinction matters. But underneath his words, I could hear everything else—the financial concerns, the uncertainty, the practical questions about how we were going to make everything work. What I desperately wanted from my husband wasn’t permission.
It was support.
I wanted him to look at me and say, If you believe this is what you need to do, I trust you. And there was a very old reason I needed those words so badly. Growing up, I had heard that I had no common sense. I don’t know that anyone saying it understood what those words would eventually become inside of me. But if you don’t have common sense, what does that make your decisions? Stupid. At least, that’s what I heard.
Somewhere along the way, it became part of how I saw myself. I didn’t make good decisions. My judgment couldn’t be trusted. I could be impulsive, foolish, wrong. And buried underneath it was an even deeper lie I had carried in one form or another for most of my life: You’re not good enough.
So when I wanted Nick’s support, it wasn’t because I needed his permission to have an opinion. Trust me, I have never struggled quite that badly. I am a strong-willed woman. If I decide I’m doing something, there is a very good chance I’m doing it. What I wanted was reassurance that I wasn’t making another stupid decision. That distinction would take me years to recognize.
Sometime after the mandate, I began recognizing the imbalance myself. I remember telling Nick that I wanted to give him back his rightful place as the head of our household. Looking back, I think that was probably my first sincere attempt at understanding biblical submission. I also think I still had absolutely no idea what biblical submission meant.
Apparently, I wanted Nick to lead. I just hadn’t realized I was still serving as quality control. I wanted him to have a voice, but after years of making the decisions myself, trusting that voice was another matter entirely. I wanted to submit, but I also wanted to understand where we were going, why we were going there, how much it was going to cost, what could go wrong, and preferably have some sort of emergency exit available should this whole submission thing go south. You know. Faith.
Nick was learning how to use his voice again too, and it didn’t always come out healthy. There were seasons when alcohol came back into the picture. Anger came quickly. There were times his words toward me became degrading, even in front of other people. Those things were wrong. Understanding where they came from doesn’t make them less wrong, and Nick has had to own those things himself.
Some people who witnessed pieces of that season believed Nick was a narcissist. At the time, I could understand why. They saw behavior that genuinely concerned them, and some of it should have. But over time, I began to understand that they were seeing a piece of the man, not the whole man. They couldn’t see everything underneath his anger any more than they could see everything underneath my silence. Calling his behavior wrong was appropriate. Making his behavior his identity wasn’t.
The same would eventually have to be true for me.
Somewhere in all of it, we had switched places. The man who had once been afraid to speak had found his voice, and the woman who had once had no trouble using hers decided it was safer not to. At first my silence sounded like, Why bother telling him how I feel? It won’t change anything anyway. Eventually it became, Is saying this worth the response it might cause? I began choosing when to speak, when to wait, and when it seemed easier to say nothing at all. No wonder our communication had fallen apart.
So by the time Nick and I sat in those recliners that cold morning in Hart, “communication” wasn’t exactly a light devotional topic. But something was different that morning. Nobody was angry. Nobody was defending themselves. Nobody was trying to win. We had coffee, sleeping children, nowhere we needed to be, and enough quiet around us to actually hear one another. For once, we both felt safe enough to tell the truth.
“I don’t trust you.”
I wish I could remember exactly what Nick said next. I can’t. I remember the moment far better than I remember the words. What I do remember is that he didn’t explode or dismiss what I had said. He listened, and then he told me what was happening inside of him. And I listened too. Really listened. Yet I can’t recall what he said, which almost makes it comical.
Whatever Nick shared that morning caused me to recognize something I hadn’t seen before. There was something in the way he was relating to me that reflected something happening in his own relationship with God. Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised me. Marriage is covenant. Scripture says the two become one flesh, and apparently becoming one means you get close enough to bump into things neither of you knew were there. Nick and I weren’t responsible for sanctifying each other—that job belongs to God—but marriage had certainly given Him plenty of material to work with. Trust, control, surrender, forgiveness, vulnerability—eventually the things showing up between us had a way of exposing what was happening inside us.
I had been listening to Nick and seeing the connection in him. The way he related to me was revealing something about the way he related to God. And apparently, mirrors work both ways.
I don’t trust God.
Excuse me?
Of all the things I had expected God to show me that morning, that was certainly not one of them. It wasn’t a vision. There was no booming voice from Heaven. It was one of those moments I have come to recognize as revelation—when something you didn’t understand thirty seconds earlier suddenly becomes knowledge you can’t un-know. Because, of course, I trusted God. Didn’t I?
I had moved across the state because I believed He was leading us here. I had left behind what was familiar. I had followed Him into situations that made absolutely no sense. My entire life had been changing because I wanted to obey Him. But apparently following God and trusting Him weren’t proving to be exactly the same thing. As you may recall from Awakened, I did have a tendency to pull a Gideon. A LOT. Sometimes, I still do—clearly, I’m a work in progress.
What if I heard Him wrong?
What if I misunderstood? What if the decision I thought was obedience was actually just another one of my stupid decisions? There it was again. You have no common sense.
Suddenly I could see something I hadn’t been able to see before. I could believe God was completely trustworthy while still believing I wasn’t trustworthy enough to follow Him correctly. I could ask Him for direction and then desperately search the faces around me for confirmation that I hadn’t gotten it wrong. I could believe I heard God and still need someone else to tell me it was safe to move.
Maybe that was why Nick’s support had mattered so much during the mandate. Maybe it was why submission had become so complicated. Maybe it was why I could pray for God to lead our family and then become completely unnerved when His leading didn’t come with enough details for me to approve the plan. And suddenly, even the camper made more sense.
Months earlier, we knew we might need to live in a camper again, and Nick knew I wasn’t okay with returning to the conditions we’d lived in before—without reliable water, without a functioning kitchen, and carrying everything that had surrounded our departure from Aunt Amy’s property. His desire to buy a better camper wasn’t simply about something he wanted. In many ways, he was trying to take care of me. He wanted our family, and especially me, to be comfortable if camper life became necessary again.
Nick looked at that camper and somehow had enough faith—or perhaps considerably less concern than I did—about how God would provide for it. I looked at the price tag.
We bought the camper, and I tried to let my husband lead. I just also wanted the budget, the plan, the backup plan, and preferably confirmation that God had reviewed the financing. Apparently submission and trust weren’t exactly the same thing either.
The camper wasn’t proof that Nick was selfish. If anything, his motivation had been partly selfless. The camper was exposing something in me. Could I trust his judgment when it differed from mine? Could I stop needing to know exactly how everything would work before taking another step? Could I let someone else steer without keeping one hand hovering over the wheel?
And underneath all of those questions was the one I really didn’t want to look at.
Could I trust that I had actually heard God?
Funny enough, that camper now sits in our front yard as the Sojourner’s Stay, an Airbnb rental that I launched to make that darn thing pay for itself. Apparently, my solution to not knowing how God would provide for the camper was to come up with my own plan for how He could do it. Insert face-palm emoji. God has jokes. In hindsight, I’m sure His are funnier.
But sitting in those recliners that morning, the camper wasn’t really the point anymore. Nick wasn’t entirely the point either. I had started that conversation looking at my husband and recognizing all the reasons I struggled to trust him. Some of those reasons were legitimate. His choices were his to own. But apparently, I had some things to own too. And suddenly, the problem was bigger than I don’t trust Nick.
Some of those roots had been growing long before Nick ever gave me a reason not to trust him.
“As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart.” — Proverbs 27:19
That morning, Nick became a reflection for me. And somehow, I had become one for him. That didn’t make his choices mine or mine his. But what if noticing something in another person could become an invitation to examine myself?
Jesus had already warned about this. Apparently, I had gotten pretty good at spotting everyone else’s speck while walking around with enough lumber in my own eye to build a house. He never said the speck wasn’t there. He just suggested I deal with my own lumber first (Matthew 7:3–5). Well, that was inconvenient.
Because it changed the question. Instead of only asking, What is wrong with them? I could ask, God, is there something here You want me to see in me?
And once I started asking that question, reflections had a funny way of showing up everywhere—in my marriage, in my relationships, in the people who irritated me, in the ones who rejected me, and even in the people I loved more than anything in this world.
For years, I had spent a lot of time looking through the windshield at everybody else. What were they doing? Why did that person bother me so much? Why did this rejection hurt so badly? Why couldn’t Nick understand? Why couldn’t people just—
Well. You get the idea.
But now there was another place to look.
If I spent my whole life staring through the windshield at everyone else, I might completely miss the woman staring back at me from the glass.
I thought God brought me to Hart to show me where I was going. Turns out, He also brought me here to finally show me me. And once I saw the reflection, there was really only one thing left to do.
Keep looking.
I just didn’t realize how quickly one mirror could multiply.
Sometimes God uses what we notice in the people closest to us to reveal something we couldn't see in ourselves.