Pain in Progress

My pain wanted to be heard.

It raged in my heart and sloshed in my chest like molten lava. I cried and yelled in my car as I prayed — telling God my pain, telling Him my fears, telling Him how angry I was at the fear itself.

The fear felt unfair.

The trigger felt unfair.

The history felt unfair.

Something as innocent as my son going on a trip sent my nervous system into fight-or-flight. And suddenly I wasn’t just a mom watching her child pack a bag — I was a five-year-old girl whose body still remembered.

I wanted to make a scene.

To show my pain.

To let the world feel the injustice of it all.

My arena was going to be Facebook.

I drafted the post. My questions circled around one central ache:

“How does it feel to never have experienced the chains and wounds of being molested?”

“How does it feel to be free of something you were never burdened by?”

Even typing those words now, I can feel the heat rise in my chest.

And here’s the honest part: I believe God is angry for me too.

He didn’t want this for me.

He never authored that harm.And yet — He has carried me through so much of it.

In the fall of 2018, during the Me Too movement, I finally had vocabulary for what happened to me when I was five. Words I had never allowed myself to use. Words that named what I had minimized.

That was the year I began intentionally presenting my pain to Jesus.

It meant asking hard questions of my parents to understand context.It meant facing the boogeyman I had avoided for years — run from, numbed, drank away from.

One morning, while driving to work, I let it all spill out.

“It will never be fair. I will never get justice. Even if I saw him damned to hell in front of my face, it wouldn’t repair the damage. It wouldn’t restore what was taken.”

Somewhere in the middle of that crying rant, a thought surfaced:

This is my pain. This is my story.

And then I saw it.

A treasure chest.

It opened — and inside was rotten treasure.

Not gold. Not jewels.

Rot.

What I understood in that moment was sobering: the injustice, the bitterness, the rage I was clinging to — it had become rotten treasure I was hoarding. I thought it was proof of what happened. Proof that it mattered. Proof that it was wrong.

But it was decaying inside me.

So I prayed a simple, desperate prayer:

“God, take this rotten treasure. Replace it with something good. Free me from dragging this around for the rest of my life.”

Before that day, I lived with four feelings: mad, fine, hungry, and tired.

That was my entire emotional vocabulary.

I had shut down the rest. It felt safer that way.

But once I handed Him the rotten treasure, something shifted. I had to learn how to feel — actually feel. And I won’t romanticize that process. Sometimes I missed the numbness. Numbness is easier than sorting through grief, fear, vulnerability, and tenderness.

Healing is holy work.

But it is still work.

What I can say is this: since 2018, I have not carried the weight and chains of that rotten treasure the same way.

The chest still exists.

But I am no longer lugging it around.

And yet — every now and then — something happens that beckons me to reopen it.

A trip.

A milestone.

A shift in control.

Old echoes ring through new moments.

Yesterday was one of those days.

As I listened to Never Would Have Made It by Marvin Sapp, I found myself back in my car — crying, unraveling, feeling the injustice all over again.

But this time, something different happened.

God brought Hagar to mind — the God who sees.

El Roi.

The God who sees me.

Not just the composed version.

Not just the healed version.

But the flapping, panicked version too.

He showed me a picture of myself as a chicken — wings flailing, squawking, frantic — and then burrowing down into its nest on solid ground.

It was funny.

It was painfully accurate.

And it was deeply comforting.

Because that’s what I do.

I panic.

I prepare to post.

I want witnesses to my pain.

And then I burrow back into Him.

Here’s what I’m learning:

Echoes of old trauma will surface in new seasons. That doesn’t mean I’m back at the beginning. It doesn’t mean I failed healing. It doesn’t mean God has left me.

It means my body remembered.

And now, instead of reclaiming the rotten treasure, I have another opportunity.

To hand it back.

Again.

Pain in progress doesn’t mean pain erased.

It means pain surrendered in layers.

In less than 24 hours, God shifted me.

From crashing out in my car…

to quietly grateful.

From wanting to broadcast my rage…

to recognizing His nearness.

He sees the five-year-old.

He sees the mother.

He sees the woman still healing.

And He is not asking me to pretend I’m fine.

He is simply asking me to burrow.

Thank you, Jesus — for seeing me.

For holding what I no longer have to hoard.

For turning rotten treasure into redemption.