You’re Still Here: The Night God Found Me Under Confetti

For years, I kept moving. Always moving.

That sounds strong, doesn’t it? Like resilience. Like faithfulness. Like doing what needed to be done. And some of it was.

I raised my children. I showed up. I carried responsibilities. I kept a home running. I kept going when life was heavy, when marriage was hard, when motherhood required more of me than I knew how to give, when grief and disappointment settled into places I did not have language for yet. I gave everything to the people and things in my life, not realizing that I was slowly losing who I was. 23 years of pouring out, and not much filling me back up.

But there is a kind of surviving that can look like living from the outside. You can be present in all the rooms and still feel like you have gone missing inside yourself.

I know that now.

For a long time, I did not know how to explain what had happened to me. I only knew I felt far away from the woman I used to be. The fun one. The passionate one. The one who lit up around music and beauty and possibility. The one who dreamed without apologizing. The one who felt alive in her own skin.  Somewhere along the way, she got buried. I was merely existing. 

Not because I was weak. Not because I stopped believing. Not because God left me.

I got buried under years of being needed. Years of holding everything together. Years of pain that had to be pushed down because dinner still had to be made, children still had to be taught – I homeschooled both of our children from grades 1 to 12, bills still had to be paid, took care of both my husband’s mother and my own, and everyone still needed me to be okay. 

So I learned how to function. I learned how to smile when I was tired. I learned how to keep the peace when I was breaking. I learned how to be useful, dependable, and strong. I learned how to survive so well that I almost mistook survival for my whole identity. I became that woman. The one who looked like she had everything together, while breaking apart inside. Survival was never supposed to be my home.

When Survival Became My Whole Identity

There were scars I had not fully named yet. Some came from old wounds. Some came from disappointment. Some came from trauma, marriage pain, identity loss, motherhood, grief, silence, and years of feeling like I was slowly disappearing from my own life. I was. I loved God. I still believed. But I also felt buried.

The Night God Found Me in the Confetti

And then, on June 14, 2025, God found me in the middle of a place I never would have expected. A concert.

Almost a year before, my daughter shared the K-Pop group, Stray Kids, with me. Their music and message found me at a time when I needed to hear that I mattered, all on my own. Not because of what I did, but because of who I was. Their community became a source of strength and their music started giving words to all the pain I had endured.

I was there, first in Atlanta, and then in Orlando, with my sister and my daughter. It was just supposed to be a fun trip. Music, laughter, memories, and something exciting after a long season of feeling like my entire life had gone quiet.

But by the time the first encore began, something in the atmosphere shifted.

The festival version of “Chk Chk Boom” started. The stadium erupted. Lightsticks flashed. The sound moved through my whole body. Red confetti poured from the sky until the air looked alive. I could barely see my daughter who was standing in front of me. She is the one who captured the picture of the confetti right at that specific time.

And then I felt Him.

Not vaguely. Not as a sweet thought I could explain away.

I felt the unmistakable presence of God.

And what I heard in my spirit was this: You’re still here. You were never gone.

It undid me. Because I had felt gone. I had felt like the real me had been lost somewhere between the years, the wounds, the responsibilities, the depression, the silence, the survival, and the version of myself everyone needed me to keep being.

But God was saying I was not gone. I was still there.

I was still here.

The woman I thought I had lost had not disappeared. She had been buried, and God had never lost sight of her.

I stood there with my hands lifted, spinning slowly under that red confetti, thanking Him with everything in me. I did not care who saw me. I was not thinking about the song anymore. I was not thinking about the crowd. I was not performing some polished version of worship.

It was just God and me.

For a few minutes, that stadium became holy ground. Because to me, it was.

I have called that moment my Heaven on Earth, because that is what it felt like. Not perfect. Not quiet. Not traditional. But sacred.

A mercy so specific it could only have come from Him.

It Was Never Just About the Concert

When I came home, I started trying to understand what had happened. At first, I could only describe it as a beautiful concert moment. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized it was not really about the concert.

It was about resurrection.

It was about identity.

It was about the God who can walk into the loudest room and find the woman buried under years of survival.

It was about Him saying, I still see you.

Not the useful version of me. Not the polished version. Not the one who keeps everything together so no one worries. Not the one who has learned how to be fine.

Me.

The whole woman. The scarred woman. The passionate woman. The tired woman. The woman with questions. The woman with grief. The woman who still loves music and beauty and joy. The woman who forgot she was allowed to want more than simply getting through the day.

The woman God created before life taught her how to shrink.

Why Every Mile Exists

That is the heartbeat of Every Mile.

Every Mile did not come from a content calendar or a branding exercise. It came from me, a woman standing under red confetti, realizing God had not lost sight of her even when she had lost sight of herself.

This space exists for the woman who feels buried but cannot yet explain why. For the woman who keeps saying, “I’m fine,” because she does not know where to begin. For the woman carrying scars from old wounds, marriage pain, motherhood, grief, shame, church hurt, identity loss, or years of being needed more than she was known. For the woman who still believes in God but wonders where He was when pieces of her went quiet.

For the woman who does not need another “Let Go. Let God.”

For the woman who needs someone to open the door, light a candle, pour coffee, and say: You do not have to pretend here. God never lost sight of you.

About the Tagline

every scar • every story • still here

Every scar matters because the wounds we carry are not proof that God abandoned us. They are simply signs that we have gone through things that God never intended us to carry. He grieves for those scars.

Every story matters because so many women have been living chapters they were never allowed to tell honestly. Stories that hold truths of a life that has not always been kind, and yet still deserve to be heard. 

Still here matters because sometimes the miracle is not that everything is fixed. Sometimes the miracle is simply that you are still standing. Even if your knees feel like they are about to buckle. 

Sometimes it’s realizing you are still breathing. Still feeling. Still becoming. Still capable of joy. Still loved by God. Still called. Still alive under all of it.

Awakening Is Not the Same as Everything Being Fixed

That night did not magically erase every hard thing.

That is the blunt truth. 

I did not come home to a perfect life. I came home to a real one. There was still healing to walk through. Still truth to face. Still conversations to have. Still grief to name. Still places in me that needed tenderness and courage. Still trauma that had to be faced head on and handed to the One who could heal it.

But something had changed.

I had changed.

Or maybe more honestly, I had begun to come back.

I started to understand that God was not asking me to become a watered-down version of myself to be faithful. He was not asking me to bury my joy, my passion, my creativity, my boldness, my love of music, my fire, or my personality so I could fit inside someone else’s idea of what a healed Christian woman should look like. The woman who loves God immensely, loves rock music, and will be getting tattoos. 

He was calling me back to the woman He made. Not the unscarred version. The redeemed one. The real one. The one still becoming.

The Reminder That Followed Me Home

Months later, I found one last piece of red confetti under my foot at home. It should have been random. A leftover from a bag, a suitcase, a memory that refused to be vacuumed into oblivion like every other tiny piece of evidence in a house where people actually live. But it did not feel random.

It felt like a reminder.

The moments God marks us with do not always stay in the same room. Sometimes they follow us home. Sometimes they show up later, under our feet, in the middle of ordinary life, whispering the same mercy and grace again.

You’re still here.

You were never gone.

An Invitation for the Woman Who Feels Buried

Every Mile is my testimony and my invitation. It is the road back to the woman God never lost sight of. 

It is a place for scars and stories, for grief and grit, for faith that has wrestled and survived, for women who are tired of pretending they are fine.

It is not about having a perfect healing story. It is about telling the truth on the way home.

And if you are reading this with an ache you do not fully know how to name, I want you to hear this:

You are not too far gone.

You are not lost to God.

You are not only what happened to you.

You are not only who needed you.

You are not only who you became to survive.

There is still a woman under the weight.

And God never lost sight of her.

Every scar.

Every story.

Still here.