I’m So Sorry, Sis: There Is Still a Safe Place

I’ve been thinking about how we come into this world. We come in completely innocent. Before we ever know what fear is, before we know rejection, disappointment, betrayal, or heartbreak, we know what it feels like to be covered. For months, we are tucked away inside our mother’s womb. We can hear things happening around us. We hear our mother’s voice. Maybe our father’s voice. We hear laughter, conversations, music, movement, and probably even some things that weren’t so peaceful. But there is still this layer between us and the world. We are in there, warm, covered, protected. We don’t know what bills are. We don’t know what abandonment feels like. We don’t know what it means to be afraid that somebody is going to leave. We don’t know what it feels like to question whether we are enough. We are just there, growing, existing, being held.Then, all of a sudden, we are born.

Think about how strange that must be. One minute you are in this warm, dark, familiar place, and the next minute cold air hits your body. There are bright lights in your face. People you have never seen before are touching you, pulling on you, wiping you down, examining you. There may be masks over their faces. There are noises everywhere. And what do babies do when they enter the world? Most of them cry. I know there are medical reasons for that cry, but when I think about it, it also feels like such a picture of life. We come out crying, and in some ways life starts life-ing almost immediately.

And somewhere between that first cry and the woman you are today, some things happened.

Sis, I’m sorry. I really am.

I’m sorry because I think sometimes we look at ourselves now and get frustrated with the way we respond to things without stopping long enough to ask where that response came from. We get mad at ourselves because we are anxious. We wonder why we overthink everything. We beat ourselves up because we are always trying to make everything perfect. We hate that we get scared when somebody gets quiet on us or when their tone changes. We wonder why we need so much reassurance, why rejection cuts so deeply, or why the thought of somebody leaving can send us into a whole emotional spiral.

But you didn’t just wake up one morning and choose that.

You didn’t sign up for fear. You didn’t decide that anxiety sounded like a good way to live. You didn’t say, “You know what? I think I want to spend my adult life questioning whether people really love me.” You didn’t choose perfectionism because you thought it would be fun to exhaust yourself trying to get everything right. You didn’t choose depression. You didn’t choose abandonment. You didn’t choose rejection.

Some things happened. And some of those things happened when you were way too young to even understand what was happening to you.

Maybe you grew up in a home where you never really knew what mood somebody was going to be in. So you learned to pay attention to everything. Facial expressions. Tone of voice. How hard somebody closed a door. Whether the house felt “off” when you walked into it. You learned to read a room before you ever had language for what you were doing. Now you’re grown, and you call yourself an overthinker. But maybe there was a time when paying close attention helped you feel safe.

Maybe perfectionism came from learning that being “good” got you praise. Maybe you got attention when you performed well, made good grades, behaved yourself, helped everybody, didn’t cause problems, or made the adults around you proud. Somewhere along the way you may have started believing, “If I do everything right, I’ll be okay. If I don’t mess up, people won’t be disappointed in me. If I can keep everybody happy, maybe they won’t leave.”

That will wear you out. Maybe somebody did leave. Maybe somebody who was supposed to choose you didn’t. Maybe somebody rejected you. Maybe somebody kept making promises and breaking them. Maybe your feelings were dismissed so often that you eventually stopped sharing them. Maybe every time you cried somebody told you that you were too sensitive, so now you apologize for having emotions. Maybe you were forced to grow up early. You became responsible, dependable, mature, “the strong one.” Everybody admired how strong you were, but nobody stopped to ask why a child needed to be that strong in the first place.

And I’m sorry, sis. I’m sorry for the things you had to learn just to survive certain seasons of your life. I’m sorry for the times you needed somebody to make you feel safe and they didn’t. I’m sorry for the times you needed someone to protect you, believe you, choose you, or simply sit with you, and that did not happen. I wish I could tell you that none of it should affect you now, but I don’t believe that. Life affects us. What happens to us matters. It gets into the way we see ourselves, the way we see other people, and sometimes even the way we see God. That doesn’t mean every struggle we have can be traced neatly back to one childhood experience. People are more complicated than that. But I do believe our experiences teach us things, and sometimes we keep living by lessons that were learned in painful places.

That’s why I think we have to stop looking at every part of ourselves with judgment.

Sometimes the question isn’t, “What is wrong with me?” Sometimes the better question is, “What happened to me?” When did I start believing I wasn’t enough? When did I start thinking everybody was going to leave? When did I decide I had to be perfect to be loved? When did I learn that having needs was a problem? When did I start confusing being needed with being loved? When did I become so afraid of disappointment that I stopped expecting anything good at all? Those are different questions. And they require a different kind of compassion. I’m sorry, sis, because I know you didn’t ask for all of this.

And the hard part is that I can’t go backward and change it for you. I can’t go back and stand beside the little girl you were and tell the people around her to do better. I can’t go back and make somebody stay. I can’t undo the words that were spoken, replace the love you didn’t receive, or stop something that should have never happened.

I wish I could. But I can be here now. I can be a healing partner. We can journey through this thing together. And I don’t mean dragging you into places you aren’t ready to go or making you tell every painful story you have ever lived through. Healing has boundaries too. I want us to learn how to respect them. I want us to learn what healthy love actually feels like, because some of us have called things love that never felt safe. Sis... Love should not always have you scared. Love def should not require you to disappear. Love should not constantly make you prove that you are worthy of staying.

And as we learn what safe love looks like, I want us to look again at the love of our Father.

Psalm 91 gives us this picture of God as our refuge and our fortress. It says that under His wings we can find refuge. I love that image because it takes me right back to where I started. Covered. Protected. There is something about being underneath His wings that reminds me that safety is still possible. Not safety in the sense that nothing painful will ever happen again. I can’t promise you that, and I don’t think faith requires us to pretend that life won’t hurt. It will. People can still disappoint us. Relationships can still change. We can still experience grief. We can still have moments when fear shows up. But there is somewhere to go with it. That matters to me.

There is somewhere I can take the fear. There is somewhere I can take the anger. There is somewhere I can take the part of me that is still asking questions. I don’t have to clean it up before I take it to God. I don’t have to walk into His presence pretending I’m fine when I am absolutely not fine. I can just come. And maybe that is something we have to relearn too.

God is not scared of the complicated parts of you. He is not surprised that the grown woman still has moments when the little girl in her gets scared. He is not sitting there irritated because you need reassurance again. He already knows. And I believe He would rather you bring Him the real thing than give Him some polished version of yourself that sounds spiritual but isn’t honest. So bring all of it. Bring the part that trusts God and the part that still has questions. Bring the part that has healed and the part that still gets triggered. Bring the woman who has accomplished so much and the little girl inside of her who sometimes still wonders, “Am I safe here?” Bring her too... its ok... we all have that going on. Because maybe we were robbed of some of that innocence we had before we knew life. Before we knew fear. Before we knew abandonment. Before we knew rejection. Before we knew what it felt like to have somebody break our heart.We cannot go back into the womb. We cannot unknow what life has taught us. But we can learn safety again.

We can learn that every relationship doesn’t require us to brace ourselves. We can learn that boundaries are not rejection. We can learn that somebody being disappointed in us does not mean we have failed. We can learn that we are allowed to rest. We can learn that love does not always come with anxiety attached to it. We can learn to recognize when an old wound is talking louder than what is actually happening in front of us.

And while we are learning, when life starts life-ing—and it will—we have somewhere to run.

Not back to perfectionism. Not back to people-pleasing. Not back to shutting down. Not back to pretending we don’t care. Not back to “I’m fine” when we know good and well we are not.

Under His wings. That is where I want to learn to run.

So, I’m sorry, sis. I’m sorry for the things you did not deserve. I’m sorry for the things you were handed before you were old enough or equipped enough to carry them. I’m sorry for the ways some of those things still show up in your life today.

I cannot change what happened to you.

But I can sit beside you while we stop letting it define everything that happens next.

I can remind you when you forget that healing is possible. I can respect your boundaries while you learn how to trust again. I can point you back to the Father when fear tries to convince you that you are out here by yourself.

And maybe, little by little, we learn how to feel safe again.

Not because nothing bad will ever happen.

But because we finally know where home is.

Under His wings.