Maybe this isn’t the victory you had imagined

There were nights I swore I wouldn’t make it through till morning… nights where my own heartbeat felt like a countdown, where the silence was too loud, where it hurt just to still be here.

There were mornings I could not recognize the hollow-eyed stranger staring back at me in the mirror…not the girl I once knew, not the one who used to laugh freely, dream loudly, believe easily.

There were moments I was certain I was too fractured to ever be pieced back together again, that the breaking had gone too deep this time …that maybe this was the undoing no one walks back from.

But breath kept coming.

Grace kept carrying me.

And God… even when I could not feel Him, when I doubted He was listening, when I was convinced my prayers had died on the way out of my chest…

He. Never. Let. Go.

Survival doesn’t mean I walked through the fire untouched.

It means the flames did not consume me.

It means I stood in the blaze… and somehow, impossibly, I am still standing.

Scorched? Maybe.

Shaken? Absolutely.

But not destroyed.

And that alone, this breath in my lungs, this pulse still pounding in my chest, this unrelenting evidence that the enemy lost again, is nothing short of a miracle.

I am not here because I am strong.

I am here because mercy refused to move on without me. Maybe this isn’t the victory I imagined.

Maybe there’s still grief in my hands and weariness in my bones.

Maybe my prayers are cracked and my praises trembling.

But I’m here.

Still standing.

Still trying.

Still believing

I am here because a faithful God held me when I did not have the strength to hold on to Him.

I choose to call it grace. I choose, even with tears in my eyes, to whisper…

Hope is not gone.

Because I am still here.