If November 2024 me knew what November 2025 me would have to walk through in one single year, she probably would’ve walked herself right into a mental institution 🤣.
But in all sincerity, this year has been one of the most heart-wrenching, disorienting, growth-oriented, forward-facing, self-evaluating, healing years I’ve ever had in my life.
I write to process. I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by people I love willing to talk through my life experiences with me this year, but I’ve been in a fog and haven’t written enough.
So, as the year comes to an end, I am hopeful that writing this out will help bring clarity and understanding to things that I may not have even seen in the moment.
Additionally, life, for me, has always been the most fulfilling when it’s focused on helping others. Sharing what I’ve learned still feels scary and vulnerable sometimes, but if anything from my own heartache or growth can offer someone else hope or clarity, then it’s worth it for me.
With that said, here are a few of the lessons that I’ve learned this year:
One of the quieter lessons this year taught me was how often I was seeking peace through understanding rather than receiving the peace in Christ that surpasses understanding.
In my own pain and in watching the world unravel around me, I realized how instinctively we reach for information when everything feels unsteady. We want explanations. We want clarity. We want language that makes sense of broken relationships, cultural division, politics, injustice, betrayal, and grief. We consume podcasts, books, articles, conversations, and commentary until our minds are full but our hearts are still restless. We tell ourselves that if we can just understand enough, we’ll feel safe again.
But that’s not the kind of peace Jesus offers.
Paul writes in Philippians 4:7, “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” That verse doesn’t suggest peace comes after we make sense of things. It suggests peace arrives precisely when understanding runs out.
This year made it painfully clear to me how fragile peace based on understanding really is. Because understanding depends on answers, and answers depend on honesty, logic, and closure. And we live in a world where those things are often missing. Relationships fracture without repair. Truth gets distorted. Systems fail. People disappoint us. And if peace requires everything to make sense, then peace will always feel just out of reach.
I realized at some point that my need to know wasn’t always about growth. Sometimes it was about control. About trying to outrun fear by explaining it away. But Scripture consistently invites us into something deeper. “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you” (Isaiah 26:3). Not those who understand everything, but those who trust.
There is a kind of spiritual maturity that comes when you accept that some things will never be fully explained this side of heaven. The answers won’t come in the form of insight or information, but in the steadiness of God’s presence. Jesus himself said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives” (John 14:27). The world offers peace through certainty. Christ offers peace through surrender.
That distinction matters, especially now. In a time marked by anxiety, division, noise, and heartbreak, peace rooted in understanding will always be fragile. But peace rooted in God is not dependent on circumstance aligning or clarity arriving. It is something that holds you even when the world feels dark and unresolved.
I’m still someone who thinks deeply, who values learning and insight. But this year reminded me that understanding is not the same as healing. At some point, you have to set the analysis down long enough to allow God to meet you in what you cannot fix or explain. Psalm 131 describes it best: “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.” Not demanding answers. Simply resting.
That has been one of the most important shifts of this year for me. Learning that peace doesn’t always arrive through explanation. Sometimes it arrives the moment you stop chasing it and allow God to hold what you cannot.
I’ve learned in many ways this year that you can analyze the conversations until you feel like you’re going insane, try to understand someone’s thought process, try to make sense of a person’s decisions in a way that makes it feel less heartbreaking than it does, and convince yourself to believe the best because the alternative hurts too much… but eventually you have to accept that even people you never thought could crush you, can.
And that doesn’t make them a villain, necessarily. It makes them human. They have trauma and brokenness that eventually falls onto you. And at times, we have to be the ones to heal from, cry through, and carry the weight of their humanity sometimes.
In my own life, I wanted everything to make sense because the pain felt easier to hold if I could explain it.
But at some point, I had to accept that there are parts of people you will never understand. There are decisions you’ll never be able to logically reconcile. There are contradictions in others, and in yourself, that you simply will not unravel, no matter how many nights you lie awake trying.
And that’s been one of the hardest lessons for me: realizing that sometimes the closure I’m searching for doesn’t come through clarity or a conversation, but through surrender to Jesus.
You may never get the ownership or apology you fantasize about. People may change the rhetoric or alter a story simply to self-preserve. Someone may tell your story without your permission. And you may never get to share your side. And while it isn’t right, it is human.
We’re all deeply flawed. I’ve looked back at my own behavior and thought, “I don’t understand why I acted out of fear or loneliness or longing in those moments either.”
When I’m willing to look at my own shortcomings – my selfishness, my pride, my own sinful decisions – it gives me the ability to hold more grace in my heart for others. Jesus has forgiven me of so much, who I am to withhold it from someone simply because I don’t think they’ve earned it?
My soul and heart may not ever return to their original shape after the heartbreak and grief I’ve felt this year, and you may feel the same, whether it’s a friendship, romantic relationship, or family relationship, but we’ll eventually be okay. And intentional forgiveness will always expedite that process.
Time, and the small, new experiences you never thought you’d have the strength to step into, do help you to heal. You can either turn into a ghost of yourself, feeling tears burn their way down your face as you lie in bed (and many days that was all that I could do) or you can choose to grow. And some days I chose to grow. I rarely felt like I had the energy to do so, if I’m honest, but I did it anyway. I believe that was the Holy Spirit’s presence in my life: Jesus loved me enough to get me on my feet when I couldn’t do it on my own.
And what I experienced is that you can smile and laugh even when there’s a relentless ache in your chest.
You can choose presence even when you feel a million miles away, even if only in short, fragile spurts.
You can do the things you never thought you’d actually be capable of, and in doing so, you begin creating new neural pathways that remind your mind and body that joy is possible and that your life is beautiful.
Life can crush you and create a hole like something you’ve never felt before, but you can also become the best version of yourself that you’ve ever been…despite all of it.
I believe that these experiences create a new sense of empathy for others who’ve been shattered, too. You start showing up for your people in ways you never could before you sat in the same hurt that they did. You carry a softness and humility (whew, that humility is real) that you didn’t have in your unbroken years.
And this is the strange mystery I’ve felt in my suffering and one I have repeated many times on Instagram and on my podcast: beauty really does come from the ashes (Isaiah 61:3).
My pain and confusion haven’t disappeared, but they have reshaped me into someone who can hold more freedom, kindness, and understanding than I could before. And I believe it can do the same for you, too.
This is one that you’ve likely heard from me time and time again if you’ve been around at any point for the past ten years. Yet, I seem to learn it in a new way every year.
Complaining is often a spiritual issue, it isn’t just an emotional one. What I want to encourage so many of you to realize is that there’s a difference between honest lament and habitual venting. I have continuously had to learn where one quietly turns into the other. Venting can feel productive in the moment, but over time it rarely serves the healing we think it will. Instead, it tends to stoke the fire.
There is a strange pull to talking about what hurt us. We want to revisit it. We want to say it out loud again. We want others to see how deep the wound is and how unfair it feels. And for a moment, it does give relief. But that relief is temporary. It often acts like a dopamine hit that keeps pulling us back to the same story, the same anger, the same resentment. Or sometimes it prevents us from having to heal from it: ‘If I can talk about it over and over again, I don’t have to fully let it go.’ So rather than releasing the pain, we rehearse it to anyone who will listen.
Scripture warns us about this cycle more than once. “Do everything without grumbling or arguing” (Philippians 2:14) is not about suppressing pain, but about guarding the heart. Complaining has a way of training us to stay oriented toward what was done to us instead of what God is doing within us. It keeps us tethered to the wound instead of moving us toward freedom.
I learned that if I wasn’t taking my pain to Jesus in prayer, I was usually just stirring it. I wasn’t processing, I was rehashing. I was reopening the wound every time I’d vent or drag on about a topic or situation. Each conversation would then end in frustration or a spike in emotion instead of surrender and made it easier to return to bitterness rather than forgiveness. “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Proverbs 15:1) applies not only to how we speak to others, but to how we speak about our circumstances.
God invites us to a different posture. “Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). Not cast it on conversations alone. Not cast it into cycles of venting. Cast it on Him. Lament that leads us to God softens the heart. Complaining that circles around the problem hardens it.
That doesn’t mean we ignore pain or pretend it doesn’t exist. Scripture is full of honest prayers of grief and sorrow. But those prayers always move somewhere. They move toward trust. Toward surrender. Toward hope. “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing” (Isaiah 43:18–19). Healing begins when we stop dwelling and start yielding.
This year taught me that growth often begins with discipline over our thoughts and our words. Left unchecked, complaining can anchor us to anger. But when we choose prayer over venting, humility over rehearsing, and forgiveness over fixation, something shifts. We stop running back to the pain for comfort, and we start walking forward with God toward peace.
This year taught me that growth often shows up in moments when I take action. There were so many moments that slipped in between the hurt and reminded me that I was still capable of wonder, hope, courage and joy.
A few months ago, my husband and I took a trip to Switzerland and Italy. I’ve dreamt of (and talked endlessly about) skydiving over the Swiss Alps for over ten years. One random night, I decided that I was tired of talking about it, so I booked the flights.
It has always been so important to me that I keep promises to myself. That I follow through with what I say I’m going to do. So I decided to just go. It was a little impulsive at the time, and may have been an attempt to fill the hole, but… that’s my nature haha. I started creating the itinerary for a 2-week trip and filled it with bucket list items I’d always dreamt about.
Skydiving over the Lauterbrunnen Valley was one of those experiences. I woke up the morning of in our beautiful Interlaken hotel and had so much anxiety in my chest. I jumped on top of Jesse in bed and joked with him that “sex probably feels just as good as skydiving, so we can just stay in bed all day” haha. But I knew I would be so upset with myself if I didn’t follow through, so I eventually crawled out of bed and we took the train over to the meetup location.
And I know it likely sounds cliche, but the jump was life-altering for me. Even as I write this 4 months after, I still feel like it was one of the most expansive experiences I’ve ever had in my life. When I was in the air, held by a quiet peace and overwhelming excitement I didn’t expect, I felt so incredibly free. I felt light. I felt so, so, so much happiness. And my perspective of the world and my own life shifted significantly.
The most poignant thought kept rising up in my chest: “If I can show up and do something that scared me this much, then what else have I convinced myself I can’t do? What else can I do? What have I limited myself to?”
It made me feel like I could face and achieve so much more than I ever gave myself credit for.
It was a moment that reminded me that fear isn’t always a wall. Sometimes it’s an invitation. Since that day, I’ve been heavily reconsidering who I’m becoming and what I’m capable of. Hearing the story of one of the skydiving instructors, who went from being a mathematician in Seattle to a completely new life in Switzerland, reminded me that we are rarely trapped the way we think we are. We can choose again. We can change directions. We can build something new when the old thing stops feeling like home.
After a few days in Florence, Italy, we took a private cooking class in Tuscany. I had dreamt of doing specifically that since I was eight years old. It was beautiful, DELICIOUS and amazing! It felt like honoring the little girl who used to dream about traveling and creating beauty in the world. I felt proud of myself for following through.
Travel has a way of opening the windows in your mind. It stretches your perspective and reminds you that your world is not limited to the hardest thing you walked through. These experiences didn’t magically fix my year, but I found belief in myself again. I found hope for the life I’m building and realized that joy can sit beside hurt without canceling it out.
As I look back at this year, it’s impossible not to see the film of pain that covered over each day. But it’s didn’t crush me the way I thought it did. It clarified me. It helped me (maybe forced me) to remember the parts of myself I had pushed aside during long seasons of survival. Courage. Curiosity. Strength. Softness. All of it was still there, waiting for space. And somewhere in the middle of fear and exhaustion, I learned that I am still capable of beginning again.
You only have one life. For many, it’s nearly halfway over. I pray every single day that I won’t get to age 60, look back, and say, “I wish I would have”. So I choose to live in a way that that won’t happen. Go adventure. Chase fun and laughter. Take the risks. Listen to your convictions. Share God’s love and truth. Start the business. Book the trip. Fall in love. Jump out of the plane. 😉
You won’t regret it.
One of the hardest things I’ve learned this year is that you can only run on emotional autopilot for so long.
You can only be the peacemaker, the problem-solver, the one who pretends everything is “okay,” before you realize you’ve slowly been stepping over your own needs. I think I finally understood that ignoring myself wasn’t humility, though I have framed it that way for my entire life. It was self-neglect. And it inevitably catches up.
I’ve realized how much resentment my people-pleasing has caused. I’ve learned that it’s very common for this realization to occur in our 30s. You’re willing to be more honest with yourself about how often you’ve carried the weight of other people’s expectations. You begin to see your own brokenness, you see the patterns that have caused problems, and realize you’ve been saying “yes” even when you knew better or when it made you uncomfortable.
You may relate to what I’ve done for so long: you don’t want to let people down, you don’t want to be a disappointment, you want to be wanted, so you lie to yourself and put on a blindfold to the glaring red flags or crossed boundaries.
And now you’re faced with the choice to swallow it, as you always have, or to tell the truth. To admit out loud that you’re hurting, that you can’t hold certain things by yourself, that your compartmentalization only works for so long before you become the worst version of yourself, and that you also need support and gentleness.
You can’t spend your life pouring out onto others without being refilled. It will harden you. It will make you bitter. And it’s genuinely one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever done: to admit that I’m not as self-sufficient as I pretended to be. That I need to be seen. That things need to change. And that just because I’ve pretended to be “fine” for so long doesn’t mean I’m actually fine. This admittance to the people in my life has been immensely healing.
I’ve realized more than ever that my strength isn’t connected to how much I suppress, and that my strength and value aren’t tied to how much hurt or boundary-pushing I accept from others. My worth lies in Christ and in how honestly and openly I live. I’ve failed myself in this in so many ways and the guilt and regret can be extremely heavy. But repentance, conversations with God, and honesty with ourselves are the beginning of healing.
You simply can’t build an entire life on a foundation where you’re missing from the equation.
This year reshaped my understanding of loneliness. I used to believe loneliness meant being alone, disconnected, or lacking people in my life. But I’ve learned that some of the deepest loneliness can exist in the presence of others. Loneliness is not always about who is around you. It’s about the quiet belief that no one truly has you. That your inner world, your emotions, your fears, and your tenderness are somehow too much or too unseen to be fully held.
That kind of loneliness is disorienting because it doesn’t resolve itself through proximity or activity. You can be loved, supported, surrounded, and still feel profoundly alone if you don’t feel known or emotionally steadied by the people you are closest to. Scripture does not shy away from this reality. David writes, “Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted” (Psalm 25:16). His loneliness wasn’t caused by isolation. It came from carrying pain that felt unshared.
One of the hardest truths I faced this year is that people have limits. Even people who care. Even people who mean well. Even people who once felt like home. Some cannot stay present when emotions become layered or complicated. Some withdraw when things are hard. Others offer closeness without true covering. And over time, that absence of emotional holding teaches your heart a painful lesson: that you might need to protect yourself, edit yourself, or endure quietly in order to belong.
But Scripture interrupts that narrative.
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). Near does not mean distant empathy. Near means attentive presence. Near means holding what others cannot. It means there is a place where your grief does not overwhelm, your sensitivity is not a burden, and your pain does not require translation.
Jesus speaks directly to the fear underneath loneliness when He says, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18). An orphan is someone without protection or covering. Loneliness often mirrors that fear. The fear that when things fall apart emotionally, there will be no one steady enough to hold you through it. Jesus names that fear and answers it with presence, not explanation.
This year taught me that part of healing from loneliness is shifting where you look for safety. When people become the primary place we expect to be fully held, disappointment becomes inevitable. Not because people are cruel, but because they are human. God’s care, however, is not limited by emotional capacity, fear, or fatigue. “Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). That care is personal. It is steady. It does not withdraw when the weight increases.
Loneliness loses some of its power when you stop interpreting it as evidence that you are unlovable, too intense, or unseen by God. It does not mean you lack worth or connection. It means your heart longs for safety, and that longing was never meant to be carried by other people alone.
This year reminded me that while relationships can wound and disappoint, they are not the final authority over our sense of belonging. “The Lord will fulfill His purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever” (Psalm 138:8). That promise does not depend on anyone else’s ability to stay present or show up well.
People may struggle to hold us fully. Some may try and fall short. Some may retreat altogether. But we are still deeply held. Fully seen. Completely known. And when that truth settles into your spirit, loneliness no longer defines you. It becomes a place where faith anchors itself more deeply, reminding you that you are never without a keeper.
This year also showed me that trauma from our childhood or past relationships doesn’t politely sit in the past just because you want it to. It lingers, it burrows into the parts of you that you don’t always see, and when something triggers it…like a tone of voice, a memory, a season, a smell, a feeling of loneliness, or even silence…it rises like it never left and seeps into every area of your life.
For a long time, I judged myself for the ache. I wondered why I couldn’t “get over” things as quickly as I wanted. I wondered why certain patterns held onto me through logic and prayer and willpower (like an anxious attachment style), but I learned that trauma isn’t something you think your way out of. You eventually have to learn to understand it.
And when you do finally understand it, the shame around the damage it has caused eventually loosens. You start to make sense of why your mind fixates, why your body reacts, why letting go isn’t a simple command your heart will obey. You start to have compassion for yourself instead of frustration.
Healing didn’t come from forcing myself to “move on” from the aches, betrayals, and confusion. It came from learning how to listen to the pieces of myself that were scared, confused, grieving, and overwhelmed, allowing myself to genuinely feel the weight of them, instead of avoiding them or shutting them down.
And when you’re honest with yourself about why you’re doing certain things, when you stop rushing and racing into something in order to squash the pain, when you’re able to sit with yourself alone to feel all of the feelings, to not distract or avoid but to cry and break and then rebuild, that is where genuine healing takes place.
I recently heard a quote that said, “When you stop treating trauma as misbehavior and start treating it as communication, everything changes”, and I believe this is a defining lesson of my year.
I’ve learned this year that having big feelings isn’t a flaw. It isn’t immaturity. It isn’t something to suppress or hide. It’s simply the way I was wired — to care deeply, to notice everything, to love intensely, to hurt honestly, and to want more meaningful connection than most people know what to do with.
As I started writing this, I felt like, “Here we go again, Lindsey. Another year where you share how complex things were.” But I felt God encourage my heart in accepting who I am.
I feel very deeply. I love people with every piece of my soul and do my best to hold relationships tightly. I have countless friendships that are 13+ years old; I don’t have a lot of practice saying goodbye to people or watching the shift of a relationship happen. It really, really hurts me to say goodbye. I often dig deeply into my own behavior and want to fix it or make it better, and I replay my actions and words — and the words and actions of others — sometimes until it makes me feel crazy. I just want to understand. But I realize that it’s because when I love a person, I really, really love them. With every piece of my soul. I give a lot of myself away, and people tend to give a lot to me, which I’m thankful for. But when that shifts or when I fail, it’s really tough for me to process.
But this year taught me that passion and depth need boundaries just as much as they need expression. When you feel everything so intensely, you can accidentally let your emotions run the entire show. You can slip into overthinking, over-functioning, over-caring, over-attaching — all because you were never taught how to sit with a feeling without letting it take over your entire world.
I’ve learned that wisdom isn’t shutting your emotions down; it’s giving them a place to land that isn’t destructive. I’m figuring out how to feel something fully without letting it define my identity or determine my next step. And, very importantly, how to pause before spiraling, how to breathe before reacting, how to stay grounded even when my heart is racing.
And I think that’s growth. Not necessarily becoming less emotional (though I wouldn’t hate that), but becoming more anchored inside of your emotion. It’s the continual practice of feeling deeply without losing yourself in what you feel.
I love you guys. Thank you so much for being here. If you haven’t already, please take a second to pre-order my new book, ‘Don’t Burn Your Own House Down’. It includes many life lessons like this, but includes far more personal stories and practical advice for a healthier faith, marriage, and home life. Your support means the world!
with grace,
linds.
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