Not Buried, But Covered

Finding the grace in the breaking.

Photo by Shivansh Sharma on Unsplash

---

The foundation didn’t just crack; it completely gave way, and I was free-falling. The silence in my head was so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. Darkness swallowed me. Days—no, months—floated past me without a nod, without an acknowledgment. They were weeks I’ll never get back.

“You’ve suffered an emotional break,” my counselor said.

The words fell to the ground as I looked past her without a flinch. My counseling sessions were the only thing I had forced myself through in those months. Most of the day, I just sat as the sand fell through the hourglass.

The kids walking through the door from school was the only indication that eight hours had passed. Quick hello’s and instructions to my oldest on what to do until daddy got home was all I could muster as I headed to the bedroom. Everything around me was a haze.

The pain was a physical weight, teetering right at the edge where I didn’t think I could keep breathing. I prayed the same prayer every night: “God, please don’t let go! I don’t think I can hold on!” Endless tears fell, but they weren’t accompanied by the normal animation of misery. They simply fell, as if the mechanism to keep them in had shattered.

I barely remember those months, but the pain—that, I will never forget.

---

Eventually, I came out of it. I wasn’t sure how. It was like passing through a long, dark tunnel that goes on and on until—suddenly—light. You are just out.

I’ve tried many times to write down the “ten steps to freedom” that led me toward the sun, but they eluded me. I realize now that I was looking for a ladder to climb, but you cannot climb out of soil. You have to grow out of it.

I look now at the words of the Apostle Paul:

“—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend... what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” —Ephesians 3:17-19

Photo by Fahim mohammed jaseem on Unsplash

Rooted and grounded.

When I prayed, “God, please don’t let go,” I didn’t feel the darkness change. The heaviness keeping me submerged didn’t lift. But I eventually realized that the breaking of my foundation was actually the breaking of ground.

It was the day God planted me in the soil of His love.

Before the breaking, I had been narrowing my focus, fixing it on a life I had been creating. An illusion had wallpapered itself over the “walls of invisibility” I had built back in childhood. My hard shell encapsulated years of loneliness and reaching. I had laid down high-priced floorboards—calculated revisions of myself designed to capture attention at any cost.

But beneath the surface, rot had eaten away at the corners until the foundation could no longer contain the weight of the lie.

I thought I was being buried by the debris of my own life, but I was actually being covered. The darkness wasn’t a tomb; it was a womb. God wasn’t interested in repairing the house I had built for myself; He was interested in the life in the seed.

In the crushing weight of that earth, the hard shell of who I thought I had to be finally surrendered. It split wide open, allowing the person God intended me to be to finally reach for the light.

I used to fear the dark, thinking it was a place of abandonment. But I found that the dark is where roots do their hardest work. In the silence of that soil, away from the eyes of the world, God was knitting together a version of me that didn’t need wallpaper to be beautiful.

I didn’t find ten steps to freedom; I found a Savior who held me tight in the dark until it was time to bloom.

I’m curious—have you ever looked back at a season you thought was an ending, only to realize it was actually a planting? If you feel comfortable sharing, I’d love to hear about the 'soil' you’ve walked through.