I love to travel but five years ago, I stopped. My life had disintegrated. The divorce left me in a terrible financial position, without even a full-time job. My kids were hurting. My son was in a battle for his life. Travel, once a joy, felt like a distant, unreachable dream. So I stayed home, and I was glad to do it, because I didn't want to be anywhere else.
But now, now things are different. My son is healthy. My daughter just graduated from college. (How do the kids keep aging while we somehow stay the same?) The dust has settled. The transition I recognized in my last post is starting to feel real.
Quietly, beautifully, the world has started calling my name again. It’s not just about seeing new places. It’s about rediscovering myself in the process. Travel has a way of opening doors, external ones - yes, but also the ones that quietly creak open inside your soul. The ones that had been shut out of self-preservation.
I’ve started one of my favorite parts of any adventure, the meticulous planning. I know that might sound tedious to some, but to me, it’s part of the joy. After all these years, I’m planning my first international trip.
I renewed my passport. I’ve been watching YouTube videos like a student cramming for an exam. I’m even picking up the basics of the language, just enough to say hello, thank you, and maybe find a cup of coffee. The destination? I’ll share that soon. But for now, it feels good just to say: I’m going. Not someday. Not when everything is perfect. But in a few months.
There’s something sacred about reclaiming joy. Not chasing it, not forcing it, but noticing when it starts to return like sunlight after a long winter. I’m not the same person I was five years ago. I’ve carried sorrow. I’ve navigated survival. But maybe that’s why this joy feels different, hard-won and deeply rooted.
Planning this trip isn’t just about flights and itineraries. It’s about saying yes to life again. It’s about allowing myself to anticipate beauty. To believe that wonder still waits around unexpected corners. To remember that I’m allowed to feel light again.
Reclaiming Joy
My trials five years ago were difficult, but I didn't lose anyone close to me (although I came close). Naomi in the book of Ruth, however, couldn't say the same.
She left Bethlehem years earlier during a famine, hoping for a better life in Moab. She walked away from her homeland, her friends, her familiar routines, trusting that the risk would be worth it. And for a time, maybe it was. She had her husband. Her sons married. There was food on the table. A fragile sense of stability.
But then came the tragedies. First her husband died. Then one son. Then the other. Three graves in a foreign land with no family left and no future to look toward. Only two young widows, daughters-in-law who clung to her when she had nothing left to give.
Isn't that how it goes? Grief doesn’t just break the heart. It often empties the hands.
So Naomi did the only thing she could: she started walking. A widow, a mother without sons, a woman without protection or provision. She turned her worn feet toward her homeland of Bethlehem, not out of hope, but because she had nowhere else to go. Her body carried her home, but her soul felt buried in Moab.
When she arrived, the women of the town gasped. Is this Naomi? She didn’t look like herself. She didn’t feel like herself. So she answered with raw honesty:
“Don’t call me Naomi.”
Naomi meant pleasant, joyful, sweet. She couldn’t wear that name anymore. “Call me Mara,” she said. Bitter. Because “the Lord has dealt bitterly with me.”
She renamed herself not out of rebellion, but out of despair. That moment, standing in the street, surrounded by women who remembered who she used to be, it was the declaration of a woman who had been hollowed by grief and could no longer pretend.
And don't we understand this part of Naomi's story? I’ve had seasons where I felt renamed by sorrow. Where the woman I used to be felt unreachable, replaced by someone just trying to hold it together. There were years when “joy” felt like a word that belonged to someone else.
But God wasn’t finished with Naomi’s story. And He’s never finished with ours. Through the quiet faithfulness of Ruth, through unlikely provisions, through divine timing, Naomi’s arms were eventually filled with joy. Literally. When she held her grandson, Obed (the grandfather of David), in her lap, the women said, “Naomi has a son!” (notice they didn't call her Mara).
God didn’t just restore her circumstances. He restored her. She went from bitterness back to joy, not in a single moment, but through a slow unfolding of grace. The name God knew her by, the one rooted in joy, was never really lost.
And maybe that’s what this season is for me: not becoming someone new, but remembering who I am. Not pretending the sorrow never existed, but allowing God to gently restore what I thought was gone forever. Joy isn’t always loud. Sometimes it returns in random ways like planning a trip, learning a language, watching your children step into their futures, or hearing your own name, your real name, called again.
Rediscovering Hope in the Ordinary
Rebuilding doesn’t always start with a revelation. Sometimes it starts with just getting out of bed. Sometimes it’s brushing your teeth. Folding the laundry. Answering the email. Planning a trip, even when you’re not sure you’ll take it. Rebuilding begins in the quiet. In the daily. In the deeply ordinary moments that don’t seem to matter, until you look back and realize they did.
That’s how Ruth started rebuilding.
She and Naomi had returned to Bethlehem with nothing. No plan. No income. No guarantees. Just grief, hunger, and the weight of starting over. And one morning, Ruth simply got up and said, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain.” She wasn’t strategizing her future, she was just trying to get through the day without starving.
Naomi didn’t go with her. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe her body was tired from the journey. Or maybe her soul was too worn down to move. Grief like Naomi’s doesn’t always look like tears, it often looks like stillness. Silence. Disconnection. The kind of heaviness that makes the most basic tasks feel impossible.
So Ruth went.
She stepped into the fields alone, carrying nothing but a willingness to try. And in that small, faithful act, just the simple decision to gather food, God began to write a new chapter. Not all at once. But one grain at a time.
Here's the best part of the story: Ruth may have entered the field in the lowest of positions, bending down to gather what others had left behind. But she didn’t stay there. God met her in the margins, in her survival, in her loyal act of provision for Naomi. That field of leftovers became the very soil where redemption began to grow.
She went from gleaning to being seen.
From scraping by to being provided for.
From a foreigner on the edge to a woman folded into the lineage of Christ Himself.
Isn't that what God does? He meets us in the survival but He doesn’t leave us there. Sometimes, all we have is the strength to take one small step, just enough to gather what’s left.
That moment when you realize you need to eat.
That moment when you answer the phone.
That moment when you plan the trip or go back to work or fold the laundry or whisper a prayer.
That moment when you just… move.
That’s where I find myself, even five years after disaster. I’m doing many of the same things I used to do—planning, working, showing up—but I’m not the same woman. Even if the tasks are familiar, I am not. I’ve walked through sorrow. I’ve watched life unravel and slowly begin to mend. I’ve stood where Naomi stood, unsure if anything good could come again.
I’m learning how to be this version of me.
The one with scars and strength.
The one with quieter dreams but deeper faith.
The one who doesn’t need everything figured out to start moving again.
This version of me is one who’s been through fire and came out refined. A woman who knows what it means to lose, and also what it means to rise. A woman with a deeper faith, not because life got easier, but because God proved faithful in the silence.
I don’t always feel brave and I don’t always feel whole. But I’ve started moving again. One step, one prayer, one passport stamp, one ordinary day at a time.
And that, too, is sacred.
The Story Is Still Being Written
Naomi didn’t know how her story would end.
When she stood in the middle of Bethlehem, asking to be called Mara, she didn’t know that Ruth would find her way to Boaz’s field. She didn’t know that Boaz would be kind or that he would offer protection. That he would redeem. That there would be a wedding. That there would be a baby. That the same arms that once cradled grief would soon cradle joy.
She couldn’t see the ending, but God was already writing it. I guess that’s the mystery of walking with Him. We see a few lines. He sees the whole page.
It makes me wonder where my story goes next, because I know He's already written it but I have no idea what the next chapter holds. What I do know is that God doesn’t leave things undone. He finishes what He starts and even when we don’t understand the detours, even when the scenes feel too quiet or too long or too painful, He is still writing. He is still present. He is still good.
And maybe that’s enough for now. The story is still being written.
And joy is not done with me yet.
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