May 15, 2026
Dear Gee and Em,
I want to tell you about a season you were both too young to really remember, but old enough to have lived through with me — because I think you’re old enough now to hear it plainly.
Some nights back then, sleep didn’t come easy. Pain-relief meds that had stopped working weeks before. A small shriek from you, Em, and I’d cover my head with a pillow — as if that could stop the sound from reaching the pain. I’d wake at midnight, sometimes at three, hoping more meds would carry me back under. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t.
A sleep-deprived version of me was the ugliest version of me — angrier at how slowly you ate breakfast, Gee, guiltier for the breakfast I didn’t have the energy to make well. Gee, you once answered “False” to “The Mother takes care of their children” in one of your books. I remember reading that and feeling it land exactly where it should have — because that’s what I’d shown you, some days.
And on the worst evenings, I would retreat into my room, lock the door, and cry while you knocked.
I am telling you this because I want you to know: I was the water. Formless. In the dark.
Genesis 1:1-2 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
That’s not just a description of the earth before it had shape. That’s a mirror of me. It’s also a boat far from shore, wind against it, alone in the dark — Matthew 14, the disciples sent ahead while Jesus stayed behind to pray.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The word for moved is rahap — the same word used for a mother bird brooding over her eggs, faithful that what isn’t yet formed will one day become what it’s meant to be. That is the same Spirit that sent Jesus walking toward that boat in the darkest hour of the night, toward men who didn’t yet know their rescue was already on its way to them.
I want you to know the wind picked up for months before I understood what it meant. A typhoon hit that year, and it knocked out our power and internet for days — even staying at a hotel just to have electricity didn’t fix it. My work became nearly impossible; I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t keep up, while also trying to be present for you both. Then came the surgeries, and the rest days they required. I had used every leave credit I had before February even ended.
By December, my manager told me, gently, that my performance had dipped. I didn’t argue with him. I already knew. I didn’t have the motivation left in me to defend it, because I understood what he was really telling me. The whole team had been compromising for me and everything I was carrying, and even I knew that my situation wasn’t sustainable for the company anymore.
I knew something was up. I just wasn’t ready to name it yet. The blog was still in my head the entire time — a calling I kept trying not to hear, while I was drowning in career, motherhood, every role I thought I had to hold steady all at once.
Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.
When the graceful exit finally came — and it was graceful, and it deserves its own letter to you both someday — I went up to the rooftop, looked at the sky, and opened my arms. “I am all Yours now! Happy?” I asked God, half-joking, half-daring Him. “I won’t have my own money now, but whatever — surprise me!” I meant it the way Peter meant it: “Lord, if it’s You, tell me to come to You on the water.” I was asking Him to do the impossible with me, and to bless me in a way I could never take credit for myself.
I stepped out of the boat I’d known for almost nine years, heartbroken to leave people who had genuinely loved me, into water I couldn’t see the bottom of.
The water didn’t calm just because I’d finally jumped. The wind kept blowing. I started sinking — not back into the storm I’d left, but into a new one: no income of my own, no certainty, just faith and a rooftop prayer I couldn’t take back.
And God divided the light from the darkness. When Peter felt the wind and began to sink, he cried out, and Jesus caught him instantly. “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” Not a rebuke to shame him — a hand, already reaching, already dividing him from the water pulling him under.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. He didn’t just save me. He named what had almost taken me — the doubt, the fear about money, the grief of leaving people I loved. In Paleo-Hebrew, Day is Yom — a hand holding water together, holding chaos into flow. That is what His hand did the moment it closed around mine.
And the evening and the morning were the first day. And when we climbed back into the boat together, the wind ceased. A finishing point. “I’m done for the day.” And it was okay to rest there, even with everything still unresolved.
I asked Him once, quietly, how He could name darkness so easily — call it by name without hesitating, without needing to study it first. He said, “It’s because I know what Light is like. I know who and what I am. So I can tell what is not Me from what is Me — because I know what I am.”
That is what Day 1 taught me, and it’s what I want you both to carry: Named.
God didn’t remove my darkness on Day 1. He named it. Not to shame it, and not because naming it made it disappear — but because naming is what makes separation possible. Light and dark can only be divided once both are called by their true names. He didn’t need to fight my chaos to overcome it. He knew exactly who He was, clearly enough that everything which wasn’t Him became visible by contrast — and then He could say: this is Light. This is Darkness. And they are not the same thing, and they will not stay tangled together.
He didn’t need to fight my chaos to overcome it. He knew exactly who He was, clearly enough that everything which wasn’t Him became visible by contrast
That’s the separation Day 1 is actually about. Not God cleaning up a mess. God knowing Himself so completely that the mess could finally be told apart from Him — and then telling me apart from it too. My doubt was named, and once it was named, it stopped being simply “me.” It became something I carried, not something I was.
I wanted you to know all of this — not the softened version, the real one — because one day you may find yourselves in your own boat, your own storm, your own rooftop moment. When you do, I don’t want you to pray first for the storm to disappear. I want you to pray to know Him well enough that you can finally see, clearly, what in you is not Him — and let Him name it. That’s Day 1. That’s where every day after it begins.
Prayer
Abba, I was a chaos. The earth in me did not even have a form. There was darkness in me I did not have the ability to separate from myself. I needed You.
I needed Your Spirit to brood over my waters the way You always have — patient, faithful, already certain of who I was becoming. I needed You to reach for me the moment I started sinking, and to name what had almost taken me, not to shame me, but so I would know it by its name.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Remind me, always, that Your Glory exceeds anything that ever kept me under.