Honestly, Sandie

DAY 9/10 DEVELOPING

Song pairing – “Yellow” by Coldplay I listened to a lot of songs trying to understand what grief sounds like when love is still sitting in the room. Not anger. Not bitterness. Not even clean heartbreak. Just the strange ache of missing something while also knowing it changed. Nothing sat beside this chapter quite like Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Push play before you read. Not because it explains the story, but because it somehow understood it alongside me. The softness of remembering something beautiful. The grief of watching it change shape. The strange tenderness of realizing something mattered deeply, even when it hurt. This chapter feels quieter. Like standing in the after and realizing your heart survived, even if it came out carrying different questions.

July felt strange.

Not dramatic. Not explosive. Just strangely quiet in a way that made everything louder. Life technically kept moving, but internally something had shifted and I could not stop noticing the absence of what used to fill every corner.

By then, we had stopped pretending things felt normal. You can only sit inside confusion for so long before your body starts asking harder questions than your loyalty wants to answer.

Pieces of me were still trying to hold on. Not to leadership. Not to systems. Not to weird politics that somehow crept into sacred places.

The people.

The youth.

The memories.

The version of church that once felt safe.

July became the month of stepping down. One thing at a time. Youth. Worship leadership. Video team. Women’s ministry. Executive leadership. Titles I once thought mattered suddenly sitting in my lap feeling strangely heavy and oddly hollow.

June 16, I wrote this in my notes:

This is a lot to process right now.

In order to protect my heart and the hearts of those around me, I need to take some time away from serving.

How do you quit a team in love when you have not been loved well?

Reading that now catches me a little because I can hear myself trying so hard to leave gently. Trying to stay kind. Trying to protect everyone else while quietly falling apart.

Something else had started shifting in me too.

Back in May, I had been filling my notes app with uncomfortable questions. Questions I probably was not brave enough to say out loud yet.

What actually counts as growth?

Because busy rooms look exciting. New faces look exciting. Full seats look exciting. But somewhere in me, I could not stop wondering about the people who quietly disappeared. The ones raised inside those walls who slowly stopped belonging. The ones who loved deeply, served faithfully, and somehow vanished without anyone asking bigger questions.

I wrote to myself that growth is not just people showing up.

Growth is people staying.

Healing.

Becoming healthier versions of themselves.

I kept circling another question too: what happens when hurting people come looking for help? Are we helping people heal, or teaching them how to stay busy enough to survive? Somewhere along the way, I started wondering if serving quietly became the answer to wounds nobody was helping people actually tend to.

That realization got uncomfortable fast.

Because when you spend over a decade somewhere, serving quietly becomes identity. People stop asking, How are you? and start asking, What are you leading? or Are you serving this weekend?

You become useful in ways that feel meaningful until one day you realize usefulness and care are not always the same thing.

Sometime that summer, I sat in a pastor’s home and cried.

Real crying.

The ugly kind.

The kind where words finally come out because holding them in takes too much energy.

I remember saying out loud that none of this felt okay. I could not understand how people who had known us for years seemed comfortable standing at a distance while everything quietly unraveled. Nobody was checking in. Nobody was asking harder questions.

The strange part? I still was not angry. Mostly sad. Confused.

Trying to reconcile the church I loved with the version standing in front of me.

Grief gets weird when the thing breaking your heart also holds some of your best memories.

August came. Romania. A mission trip, which feels strange to write now because somehow I was still trying to love something while grieving it at the exact same time.

August 20, I went back alone. One last visit.

I do not know what I expected. Closure maybe. Comfort. Some movie moment where somebody notices hurt and says exactly the right thing.

Instead, everything felt familiar and unfamiliar at once. Like standing inside a house you once loved after somebody moved all the furniture.

Same building. Same songs. Same voices. Same hallways.

Nothing felt the same.

Ordinary things suddenly felt cinematic. A hallway. A familiar face. A worship song drifting through speakers. Voices I had heard every week for years suddenly sounding farther away than they should have.

I wish I could tell you there was one clean ending. One moment where I stood up and thought:

Okay. I am done now.

Life rarely works like that.

Leaving something you loved does not usually happen all at once. Sometimes your body leaves before your heart catches up. Sometimes grief lingers long after the story changes. Sometimes loyalty stays standing in places your spirit quietly stopped recognizing.

By the end of that summer, I still thought I was grieving church.

I had not figured out yet what I was actually mourning.