✞ Stay Through the Ache ✞
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There was a time when pain felt like something that had to be escaped immediately.
Not processed.
Not prayed through.
Not endured.
Escaped.
The moment loneliness settled in, something inside me panicked. Silence became dangerous because silence left room for memories, shame, fear, trauma, and self-hatred to speak. I did not know how to sit with discomfort without trying to medicate it somehow. If life hurt, I reached for something that promised relief faster than healing ever could.
Sometimes it was alcohol.
Sometimes drugs.
Sometimes attention.
Sometimes relationships that were clearly unhealthy from the beginning.
Sometimes music filled with anger, lust, hopelessness, and destruction because I convinced myself it was “relatable.”
Sometimes pornography because it temporarily numbed loneliness and made me feel wanted in a distorted way. Sometimes it was simply staying around people who were bad for me because being treated poorly somehow felt less terrifying than being alone with my own thoughts.
At the time, none of it felt intentional.
It felt like survival.
Looking back now, I can see that while life had already handed me genuine pain and trauma, I kept creating new suffering trying to escape the original suffering. I was bleeding emotionally, and instead of learning how to heal, I kept grabbing things that only stained my hands darker.
I thought I was treating the wound.
In reality, I was feeding it.
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One of the hardest truths to admit is that not every storm in life came from outside of me.
Some storms were reactions.
Some were choices made from fear, desperation, loneliness, abandonment issues, untreated trauma, addiction, and the overwhelming need to feel loved or numb for even a few minutes.
There were relationships I should have walked away from early on, but I stayed because I confused attachment with love. I thought if someone wanted me, even in unhealthy ways, then maybe I still had value. I tolerated things that slowly damaged my mental health because abandonment terrified me more than dysfunction did.
There were nights where I used substances not because I wanted to destroy myself, but because I desperately wanted relief from my own mind. I wanted quiet. I wanted rest. I wanted the ache inside me to stop clawing at my chest for a little while.
But temporary escape has a price.
What started as coping slowly became bondage.
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There was no magical moment where life suddenly became easy after I started truly putting God first.
That part of the testimony is important to me because sometimes faith is presented as if following God removes hardship entirely, and that has not been my experience at all.
But something fundamentally changed once I stopped treating God like a last resort and started making Him the center of my life instead.
The suffering stopped feeling pointless.
Before God, pain felt random and consuming. It felt like drowning without meaning. But once I started genuinely pursuing Him, even difficult seasons began producing something in me instead of just destroying me.
The same experiences that once almost ruined my life became part of the testimony God now uses to help me connect with people society often overlooks.
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Looking back, I can see how many times God protected me while I was still running from Him emotionally.
But God kept reaching for me anyway.
Not always by removing the hardship immediately, but by walking beside me through it until I finally understood that healing was never going to come from the things I kept running toward.
Healing came from learning how to stay.
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What amazes me now is that the things I once feared most—loneliness, stillness, surrender, change—ended up becoming places where God met me most deeply.
But my life today has more peace, more stability, more wisdom, more purpose, and more genuine love in it than the life I was building while trying to numb myself constantly.
God did not simply help me survive what was meant to destroy me.
He taught me how to become someone new while surviving it.
And the greatest lesson hidden inside all of it is this:
Creating additional suffering will never heal original suffering.
Only God can reach the root.
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✞ Closing Prayer ✞
Lord,
Thank You for staying beside me even in the years when I kept running toward things that hurt me instead of toward You. Thank You for Your mercy in the middle of addiction, loneliness, unhealthy attachment, confusion, and self-destruction.
Thank You for showing me that true healing is deeper than temporary relief. Thank You for teaching me how to endure instead of escape. Even when the process was painful, You were building something stronger inside me than the things trying to break me apart.
Please continue renewing my mind, guarding my heart, and helping me recognize the difference between comfort and healing. Strengthen every weak place still learning how to trust You fully.
And thank You for proving that survival was never the end of the story. You bring restoration too.
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