God Sees the Battles No One Else Can

I haven’t let myself stare at a blank page in months. I haven’t wanted to unearth the emotions hiding beneath the surface. I haven’t wanted to confront what I’ve experienced over the last year. Or how much I’ve let it affect me.

The heartbreak.

The loss.

The guilt.

The thoughts that tell me “I deserved it”.

I’ve walked beside and inside these negative undercurrents for some time now. I’ve let the thoughts I know have no place inside my head have the last say in so many of my internal conversations. It’s the white noise of my brain. What would I do without the constant voice telling me “I wasn’t enough to be loved,” or “I didn’t give them a good enough reason to stay,” or “I could have done more,” or “said the exact right thing that would have changed the outcome”?

What would it sound like if I told myself, “not everyone is meant to hold what I have to give,” or “the right people won’t need convincing to value me”? Would I welcome this melody of peace, or will I continue to invite the dissonance of all the emotional weight I’ve been trying to hold on to? Would I listen to this new song of stillness, or keep clinging to the discord of old pain?

After a year of collecting mental clutter and relentlessly shelving old narratives, a shell has formed around me, covering how I see myself in a thick and quiet layer of insecurity. It’s muted the way I let myself experience life. Shrinking the space I allow for happiness. 

It’s become somewhat terrifying to live in and out of this place. To exist around a sort of numbness, I’ve become acutely aware of it. I’m innately afraid of overfeeling or needing too much. I’m even scared of wanting too little and settling for less. I’m fearful of giving someone all of me, just to end up with the leftover pieces of the brushed aside parts of me. But then, what if I overthink myself out of something good simply because I’ve been on the receiving end of painful moments?

I’m scared of never being loved in quite the same way I know I’m capable of loving someone who wants me to. What if they say no? What if they “wish me the best in life” and walk away like the last 9 years meant absolutely nothing? What if they reduce me to the smallest version of myself?

The version of myself who doesn’t deserve anything. Let alone anything good.
The version of myself who’s a master at plastering on a smile because it’s the brave thing to do.

The version of myself who retreats to feeling empty because it’s easier than being filled with all the weight I don’t want but now have.

I’ve tried so hard to climb out of this hollow I keep falling back into. The battle I’m facing every day is a battle many of us face silently. It’s the biggest battle of our generation. The battle of our minds. Our thoughts. The way we think about ourselves. The lens by which we see the world.

Sometimes it’s a heavy, moody blue. A storm-waiting-to-break kind of blue. Heavy like a sky swollen with rain. A blue that clings to your life, damp and unmoving, soaking everything it touches in both quiet sorrow and thunderous ache.

At other times, it burns a dark red: thick and blistering. The color of lingering lies, of the hurt that still stings, of all the things you wish you could say to that person now. It’s anger with nowhere to go. The pulse of feeling misunderstood and unheard. The bleeding of stubborn, cauterized wounds.

And then there are days it all fades to grayscale. Washed out. Lifeless. It’s as if someone has dialed the saturation down on the world. You go through the motions, but nothing catches the light like it used to. There’s a sterile kind of neutrality in everything now that makes you want to scream, just to hear something echo back.

Sometimes we lose the full spectrum, not because we don’t want to see the colors we grew up learning to love, but because of what we’ve walked through. The grief that stained us. The words that left bruises. The unfulfilled dreams we’ve been waiting on for so long.

Sometimes life looks unfair to us when we’re stuck in the middle of the story. When we don’t have the full picture. When we can’t see what’s ahead.

But God sees it all.

I know that He will use the blue of my sadness to stretch the skies open just wide enough until I remember how to breathe again beneath the soft rain. Until I start to dance again, barefoot and unfraid. Until the puddles beneath my feet start to reflect what God has always seen in me.

He’ll take the dark red I’m sometimes blinded by and streak it across the sky like a sunset in full blaze as the day bows out in breathtaking beauty. 

He’ll take the haunting gray I’ve become accustomed to and lay it down as primer to catch the color that will one day return. Little by little, He will restore the saturation of my life. One hue at a time. Because He knows the palette of my soul better than I do.

Though I’m surrounded on all sides as I fight on the battlefield, I’m also surrounded by the strength of my Heavenly Father. The hope of Christ. The power of the Holy Spirit. I’m never alone. As the lies loop back, circling like they always do to convince me of how broken I am, I remind them of the truth:

The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart 

And saves such as have a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18)

God is beside me in the hurt. He walks with me in the messy emotions. He draws near to me as I humbly draw near to Him.

Then, as the doubts slip in unnoticed, threatening to weaken my identity, I stand firm, reminded that I am a child of God. And that no earthly rejection, no stressful memory, and no scheme of the enemy can ever undo what God has already declared over me. What Christ has already done for me.

The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together. (Romans 8:16-17)

The war in my mind may rage. But the truth has already won. The healing my soul yearns for may not always be the loudest voice in the room. Sometimes, it sounds more like a whisper from the One who never leaves:

“You’re still mine. I’m still here.”

The light always cuts through the darkness.
The truth always severs the lies.

And God’s love always has the final word.

So I’ll continue to show up worshipful and willing, even when it hurts and people walk away, “because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” (1 John 4:4)