🌿 Dear Sister,
Sometimes I sit with the question of why I’m doing a conference at all. Why not just keep doing what I was already doing quietly, working with one woman at a time, walking with them privately.
But the honest answer starts before there was ever a ministry, before there was ever a name for any of this. It starts with the rooms I sat in before I built one.
🌿 The Rooms That Didn’t Hold
I went to conferences before this one existed. Women’s conferences, retreats, weekends built to lift you up for a day or two.
And they did lift me. I’m not going to sit here and tell you they didn’t. There’s something real that happens when a room full of women worship together and cry together and leave feeling like maybe they can breathe again.
But then I’d go home.
And Monday would come. And the trigger I didn’t see coming would come with it. And nobody from that weekend was there to help me hold it. The high from the room didn’t last past the drive home most times, and by the time the next hard evening showed up, it was just me again, the same as before I ever went.
I don’t say that to knock those conferences. Conferences change lives. Retreats change lives. I’m not taking that away from what they did for me or for anyone else. What I’m saying is that for me, and I’m sure for others too, it just didn’t change the month later. The excitement of the weekend was real. The excitement of the day was real. But when the triggers came, when that next month showed up, that conference had already stopped working for me by then. A weekend can lift you, but for me, a weekend couldn’t hold me through the triggers I still had to deal with.
🌿 What the Groups Taught Me Instead
Groups were different for me. Not a weekend, something longer. Something you had to choose to keep showing up to. That choosing mattered as much as anything else.
And what I noticed, what I still notice, is that when you bring women together around one single purpose, and they make that journey together, something forms. I’m not saying conferences don’t produce that too. I know women who’ve walked away from a conference with real, lasting friendships, even lasting accountability. That does happen for some. It just wasn’t what happened for me. What I got from conferences was short-term. Friendships that lasted through the weekend, maybe a little past it, but not much further than that. In a group, it happens more often than not, because you’re choosing each other every time you show up. When I didn’t show up, it was noticed. I’d get a text, a call, somebody asking if everything was okay. Friendships that outlast the season you met in. Some of mine have lasted months. Some have lasted years. A few have lasted decades now.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up. Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, 12 (NKJV)
That’s not just a verse to me. It’s a verse I’ve come to understand holds weight, because what I learned from being in groups is that I actually had someone there. When I fell, just like the verse says, I had someone there to lift me up. One woman falling alone stays down longer. Women who fall together have somebody there to lift them back up.
I didn’t want to build another conference that gave women a weekend and then left them to figure out the next six months by themselves. That’s not what I wanted this to be. That’s not what Beauty for Ashes is meant to be.
🌿 The Letter I Didn’t React To
I’ve told part of this story before, about a letter that came from my father in the mail. What I didn’t say fully at the time is what that letter had to do with any of this.
When I opened it, I didn’t realize at first who it was from. It was after I realized who had sent it that I expected something to happen. I expected anger. I expected the old fear. I expected my body to do what it had always done before when something touched that part of my story.
None of that happened. I didn’t feel calm exactly. I didn’t feel anything close to what I expected to happen. There was just no reaction at all, and that unsettled me more than a reaction would have. I remember thinking something was wrong with me. I didn’t understand it until later.
What I understand now is that nothing was wrong. Healing was already completed on the cross a long time ago. What I’m doing, what all of us are doing, is walking it out, one step of the journey at a time. That step, this area of the wound, had already been walked out in me. I just didn’t know it yet. Managing a calm response that day was not what was required. I just didn’t know how much of my journey in healing had already taken place. Since I was already past that step, that part of the wound had been well taken care of. It was closed.
This is what quiet healing can look like sometimes. It’s what it looked like for me. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t ask permission to be believed. It just shows up one day in the mail, and you realize the work was already done before you had any proof of it.
That’s the moment I believe this ministry really started taking shape in me. Not the letter itself. What the letter revealed.
🌿 A Couple of Years Later
The recognition came with the letter. The love didn’t come until a couple of years after that.
I want to be honest about the gap because I think we rush past that kind of thing sometimes, like recognizing something about your healing and actually encountering God’s love for you happen in the same breath. For me, they didn’t. There was space between them. Real space. Years of it.
And then one day it came. I felt God’s arms around me in a way I can’t fully explain to you and don’t need to try. I felt precious to Him. Not because of my performance. Not because of how far along my healing looked to anybody watching. Just precious, because I was His.
That’s when reading Isaiah finally cracked open for me in a way it never had before.
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor. He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound… to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.” Isaiah 61:1, 3 (NKJV)
I had read that verse before. I’m sure I’d underlined it in a Bible somewhere. But that day it finally clicked what beauty for ashes could mean for someone who had lived what I’d lived. Ashes aren’t nothing. Ashes are what’s left after something has already burned all the way down. And He wasn’t offering to sweep them away like they never mattered. He was offering to make something out of them.
That’s the moment I knew I wanted every woman carrying what I’d carried to feel what I’d just felt.
🌿 The Night Before the First Beauty for Ashes
The first Beauty for Ashes was virtual. I remember that night and that morning like they were one long stretch of time, because honestly, they were. I don’t think I slept at all.
I was excited. I was nervous. I was sick to my stomach. I was terrified. I wanted to cancel the whole thing more than once before the sun came up. I wanted to procrastinate right up until I couldn’t anymore. If you’d asked me to name one feeling I was having that morning, I couldn’t have done it, because I was having all of them at the same time.
But underneath all of that, there was something steady I couldn’t shake either. A sense that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, even while every part of me wanted to run from it.
I told myself, if at the end of this even one woman walks away with something she could use the next time a trigger comes, the next hard month, the next quiet evening alone, then this was worth it. It was never about me having a good day in front of a screen. It was about God meeting them in that room, whatever that room ended up looking like on a laptop.
🌿 What I Think About When I Think of That Conference
There wasn’t one dramatic moment I can point to and say that’s the one. It was more the whole picture of it. Women showing up for their own healing. Women showing up to be trained so they could help somebody else. Women realizing in real time that they weren’t the only one carrying what they’d been carrying alone.
But if you ask me what stayed with me the most, it wasn’t a survivor’s story. It was a witness’s.
There was a woman I spoke with afterward who had never experienced sexual trauma herself. She told me something had shifted in her, that she finally understood why some of the people in her life responded the way they did, reacted the way they did, pulled away the way they sometimes did. Before that conference, if she was honest, she’d chalked a lot of it up to excuses. After, she couldn’t comfortably say that anymore.
That’s the moment that has stuck with me the longest. Not because her pain was the point. Because her understanding was proof that a room like that does something bigger than comfort the people already carrying the weight. It opens the eyes of the people standing next to them too.
🌿 What’s Different This Year
Going into this second one, what’s different in me isn’t the mission. It’s the trust.
Last time I was still measuring the conference against what I thought it needed to look like, against what other rooms had done before, against what somebody else might expect from it. This time I’m following what I know God told me to do, even in the places where it may not resemble the first one. It may look different this year. I’ve made my peace with that. I’d rather follow what I know is right than perform what I think people expect.
One thing I am doing differently on purpose is this. After the conference, I’ll be hosting groups. Not because a weekend wasn’t meaningful, but because I remember exactly what it cost me every time a weekend was all I got. This time the room doesn’t have to end when the conference does. The tools, the accountability, the people who know your name and ask how you’re really doing, that continues.
That’s the whole difference between what I once sat in and what I’m trying to build now. Not a bigger stage. A longer table.
🌿 A Gentle Pause
If you’re trying to decide whether September 19th is for you, I want to be honest instead of persuasive. This conference was never built to be a quick fix. It wasn’t built to give you one good day and send you home the same as before.
It was built out of every room that couldn’t hold me, and out of a letter that showed me healing had already been happening in the quiet before I had proof of it. It was built so that after the room closes, there’s still somewhere to go. That’s why the groups start after, not because the conference doesn’t matter, but because you matter past that one day too. And even if you never make it to a group afterward, you still walk away from the conference itself with tools and resources that are yours to keep, things you can use on your own time, whether or not the group ever becomes part of your story.
You don’t have to have it figured out to come. You don’t have to know what you’ll say if somebody asks how you’re doing. You just have to be willing to sit in a room with other women walking the same journey you are, even when it looks nothing like yours. Nobody in that room is ahead of you. My being able to sit across from my father today doesn’t mean I’m further along than a woman who can’t. She may be married to a man who can touch her without her flinching, something I’m still walking out. Two different journeys, two different battles, but the same road. None of us is ahead of the other. We’re just walking it out side by side.
🌿 Journal Reflection
Take a few quiet minutes with these and let God show you what’s ready to be answered honestly instead of guessed at.
What rooms have lifted me for a day but didn’t hold me through the months after?
Is there a place in me that’s already been healed quietly, that I haven’t had the proof of yet?
What fire have I already been through that’s still waiting to become something beautiful?
🌿 Join the Journey
Still On The Journey Ministries exists for Christian women healing from sexual trauma, women learning that beauty for ashes was never meant to happen alone in a weekend and never meant to end when the weekend does.
If you would like to support this work and help us continue creating safe, trauma-informed, Christ-centered spaces for women healing from sexual trauma, you can join the journey through Buy Me A Tea or choose or gift a tool for your own healing journey or another woman on the journey, such as a Hardcover Journal, Affirmation Cuff Bracelet, or Scent Diffuser.
🌿 Save the Date
Still on the Journey Ministries invites you to register 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.
