“And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Loose him, and let him go.” John 11:44 (NKJV)
🌿 Dear Sister,
I want to start with a phrase that has followed me around for years now.
Sick and tired of being sick and tired.
That was me. Not one bad day. Not one hard season. Years of carrying sexual trauma the only way I knew how, quietly, privately, mostly by myself, and telling myself that was just what healing looked like for someone like me.
Then something in me hit a wall. I was tired of being tired. Tired of managing it. Tired of surviving the same day over and over and calling it healing just because I was still standing. I no longer just wanted to survive, I wanted to move past that and into thriving, and then into success. So, I made a decision that didn’t feel dramatic to me at the time, but I can see now it was the beginning of everything. I decided that no matter what, I was going to be healed from this trauma of my past. I had not learned yet that healing was already completed on the cross. I was determined to not manage it for the rest of my life but to be healed.
That decision is what preparing my heart for deeper healing actually looked like for me. It may be something completely different for you. It doesn’t look like a moment where we suddenly feel ready. It looks like getting sick and tired enough of where we are that we finally become intentional about where we’re going.
🌿 When I Got Tired of Being Tired
Once I became intentional, I started doing things that probably didn’t make much sense to people watching from the outside. Especially to those who wanted to tell me I didn’t have faith or didn’t trust God, or that I was doing too much, or better yet, that people didn’t need to know all of that.
I started going to women’s conferences. I joined sexual trauma groups. I even started taking training to become a group leader for sexual trauma programs, and if I’m honest with you, part of the reason I signed up for that training was because I knew it would help me too.
I wasn’t trying to fix anyone. That position belongs to Jesus, not me. I was just looking for community. I didn’t know that at the time. I was trying to find my own way out, and something in me understood that the training, the groups, the rooms full of other women, those were part of the way out. Not a detour from my healing. Part of it.
What I found surprised me. When my focus started shifting toward helping other women on the same journey, my own healing began moving faster than it ever had when I was only focused on myself. I don’t fully understand the why of that, not completely. I just know it’s true for me. My wounds started closing while I was helping someone else deal with their own.
That’s the part nobody told me about intentional healing. It rarely stays private for long. If you actually follow it all the way, it starts pulling you toward other people whether you planned on that or not.
🌿 What My Body Was Holding
I want to be honest about what staying quiet cost me physically, because I think we underestimate this more than we should.
There’s a book called The Body Keeps the Score, and the title alone tells you most of what you need to know. Trauma doesn’t just live in your memory. It lives in your body, whether you’re aware of it or not.
For years I dealt with fibromyalgia. I’m not going to stand here and tell you it’s a proven fact that most women with fibromyalgia have suffered sexual trauma, because when I actually looked into the research, it’s more complicated than that. But there is real research connecting trauma to how much pain the body carries and how loud that pain eventually gets. I didn’t need a study to prove that to me, though. My body told me first, long before I had language for what it was doing.
I carried that pain for a long time before I understood it was connected to what I had never fully released. And I don’t say that to hand you a formula, because your journey looks different than my journey, and your body isn’t going to respond the way mine did or do. I only say it because I don’t want you to feel crazy if your body has been trying to tell you something for years and nobody around you has connected the dots either.
🌿 The Day at Tamar Ministry
I remember the first time I truly opened up about how I felt about what happened to me. It was at First Baptist Church of Glenarden, in a ministry called Tamar Ministry, and I want to tell you what happened there because it’s still one of the realest moments of my life.
A woman prayed over me. She prayed specifically about what I was holding regarding my sexual trauma, and something happened in my body that I didn’t expect and couldn’t have manufactured if I tried. My nose started bleeding. Not a little. So much that they had me leaning over a trash can while it happened, and it went on for what felt like a long moment.
When God was done dealing with that part of my journey, the bleeding stopped.
I’ve come to understand that moment as the Holy Trinity (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit) opening up a festering wound in me, one that had to be opened before I could actually start walking out what had already been finished on the cross. Jesus already did the work. But I still had to walk it out in my own body, and that day was part of the journey.
I didn’t get to that room by accident. I got there because I had already decided I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. The room was ready for me because I had already started preparing my heart to walk into it.
🌿 The Room That Didn’t Need Me to Be Ready
Here’s the part I think a lot of us skip past. Even after all of that, even after the training and the conferences and what happened at Tamar Ministry, I still sat in women’s groups afterward and stayed quiet more often than I spoke.
I’m a shy person by nature, and I remember thinking, more times than I can count, that what I had to say was irrelevant. Unimportant. That my pain was mine to carry and nobody else needed to hear it. I told myself I was protecting the room by not adding my mess to it.
But eventually I did share. And what I found out was that it wasn’t only helpful for me to say it out loud. It was helpful for the room. Something that felt too small and too personal to matter turned out to be exactly what someone else in that circle needed to hear that day.
Scripture says it plainly.
“Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” James 5:16 (NKJV)
Another step in the journey. Right there, tied to one another. It was not tied to figuring it out alone first and then bringing the finished version into the room.
That’s when I started understanding something about Lazarus differently than I had before.
🌿 Grave Clothes
You remember the story. Jesus stood outside the tomb and called Lazarus by name, and Lazarus came out, alive. But he came out still wrapped. Still bound in his grave clothes.
“Now when He had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Loose him, and let him go.” John 11:43–44 (NKJV)
Jesus did the calling. But it was the people standing around Lazarus who did the loosing. It took his community to unwrap what the tomb had already lost its power over. Lazarus didn’t walk out of that grave already free of every grave cloth. He walked out alive, and still bound, and it took other hands to finish what Jesus had already started.
I think a lot of us are like that. We’ve already been called out. We’re already alive. We can hear our name being said. But we’re still walking around bound in the very thing we survived, because we never let anyone close enough to help with the unwrapping.
🌿 You Don’t Have to Have It Figured Out to Show Up
If there’s one thing I want you to hear from all of this, it’s this. Preparing your heart for deeper healing was never about arriving somewhere healed enough to finally show up.
I didn’t walk into that first conference healed. I didn’t walk into Tamar Ministry with my wound already closed. I didn’t sit down in that women’s group with something wise and put together to say. I showed up sick and tired, shy, unsure, still bleeding in places nobody could see yet.
And it was enough. Because willing was always the actual requirement. I didn’t have to show up healed enough, or better yet, completely ready. I surely was not polished, and I wouldn’t claimed to be even now, to say the right thing in any room. We must be willing enough to walk in and let someone else help with the parts we can’t reach on our own, the grave clothes.
🌿 My Moment of Reflection
When I look back now, I can trace the whole thing. The decision to get sick and tired of being sick and tired. The conferences I almost didn’t go to. The training I signed up for partly for me and didn’t fully admit that at the time. The nosebleed over a trash can that I still can’t fully explain except to say God was in it. The quiet meetings where I said nothing. The one where I finally did.
None of it happened because I got healed enough first, as I have already stated, the healing had been completed on the cross, I was just willing to get up and start walking it out.
🌿 A Gentle Pause
If you’ve been carrying something quietly, managing it, praying about it alone, journaling about it alone, surviving it alone, I want to say this to you. That private work matters, it’s part of the process. But at some point, deeper healing is going to ask you to stop carrying it by yourself.
How that looks is different for each of us. It could look like one woman in a small circle finally hearing you say the thing you’d decided was too small to matter. Or it could be letting the person God has destined for that moment pray over the exact spot you’ve been protecting. Or better yet, it could be a seat at Beauty for Ashes 2026, a conference created just for you, where you have been living the journey already, but now allows you to rise together with others.
You don’t have to have the words figured out first. You just have to be willing to let someone help loose what’s still wrapped around you.
🌿 Journal Reflection
Take a few quiet minutes with these and let God show you what’s ready to be spoken instead of carried.
Where have I decided whether my pain is too small or too irrelevant to bring into a room?
What would it look like for me to become intentional the way I did in other seasons of my life, even in this one?
Is there a place in my body that may still be holding something I haven’t fully released?
Who has God already placed near me to help with the unwrapping, if I let them?
What would it mean for me to show up willing instead of waiting to show up healed?
🌿 Join the Journey
Still On The Journey Ministries exists for Christian women healing from sexual trauma, women learning that preparing your heart was never meant to be a solo work. If you’d like to support this ministry or bring a tool for your own healing home with you, a journal, an affirmation cuff, a diffuser to change the atmosphere while you walk, you can do that through Support the Journey.
Save the Date
Still on the Journey Ministries invites you to save the date for the 2nd Annual Beauty for Ashes Women’s Conference: Where Faith and Healing Meet.
Saturday, September 19, 2026
10:00 AM to 4:00 PM EDT
Anne Arundel County, Maryland
www.sotjmin.org
Come be reminded that you are not alone, your healing matters, and God is still walking with you on the journey.
