Honestly, Sandie

Song vibes: IDGAF by Dua Lipa
A surprising pick for this one, maybe. But some songs hit less like rebellion and more like remembering yourself. Not because I didn’t care. I cared deeply. For years. Maybe this one is about the version of me learning that caring for people and abandoning myself were never supposed to be the same thing.

– – – – –

“You’re loved. You’re accepted. You belong.”

It is a beautiful sentence.

Warm. Safe. Hopeful. The kind of sentence that makes people unclench a little when life feels hard. The kind of sentence you carry around quietly and repeat back to yourself when you’re lonely, lost, tired, ashamed, scared, or trying to rebuild something in yourself.

And I believed it.

Not halfway. Not performatively. Not in a “this sounds nice on a Sunday” kind of way. I believed it with my whole chest.

Because I wanted people to feel that kind of belonging too.

I spent years helping build spaces around that idea. Photographing them. Designing them. Marketing them. Leading inside of them. Youth rooms, worship nights, women’s events, retreats, conference weekends, late-night conversations, folding chairs, parking lot tears, backstage moments, group texts, prayer circles, coffee dates, emergency grocery runs, checking in on people when life cracked open a little.

I loved people. That part matters.

I loved people. And I loved what the sentence promised.

You’re loved. You’re accepted. You belong. 

Looking back, I think what I never understood was that belonging and fitting are not always the same thing.

Funny thing about photography: every picture tells the truth and hides it at the exact same time.

There is the frame. And then there is everything just outside of it. The lighting. The cropping. The details softened. The story being emphasized. I knew how to build an image long before I realized communities do the same thing. Somewhere along the way, edits were quietly being made to the one I was living inside.The strange part is that I already knew the tools.

I had been taught how stories are shaped. I helped design them. Photograph them. Frame them. Tell them back to people in ways that felt hopeful, polished, meaningful. I was trusted near the process. Close enough to help carry it. Close enough to see pieces of it. Just not close enough to touch the controls unless someone else decided the picture needed me.

There always seemed to be a version of the image already living somewhere else, held quietly in the mind of the person arranging the room, steady and unquestioned, like an old photograph folded soft at the edges from being carried too long in someone’s pocket.

We all learned to move toward that picture.

Most of us just never realized we had never actually seen it.

Winter of 2019 slipped in quietly.

By then, church life had stopped feeling like something we attended and started feeling like something we lived inside of. Nights blurred together in with many days of the week taking up out time. I think most weeks had us in the church building 4 out of the 7 nights and also Sunday mornings – always with a problem to be solved. We were deeply in it. Not because anyone forced us. Because we cared.

Especially about young people.

That age between high school and adulthood always sat heavy on my heart. The drifting years. The lonely years. The years where everyone suddenly expects you to become a person while quietly removing the structure that helped hold you together.

We had watched students age out. Disappear. Get lost. Untether. Faith shifts. Relationships shift. Identity shifts. Life gets loud. And nobody seemed to be building a bridge for the middle. (Remember we don’t run after the ones who walk away, that isn’t what we have energy for.) 

So we wanted to. Nothing flashy. No big vision statement. No leadership ladder. No title chasing. Just space. A living room. Real conversations. Food. Questions. Young people sitting in the strange middle between being somebody’s kid and becoming themselves.

Juniors. Seniors. Young adults. The people already slipping through the cracks. We cared because we already knew them. Had cried with them. Prayed with them. Driven them places. Watched breakups happen. Heard the fears. The family stuff. The loneliness. The things teenagers say when they stop pretending they are fine.

We wanted a place where people could land.

That mattered to us. And to be clear, we were not standing outside leadership asking to be let in. We were already trusted. Youth leadership. Creative teams. Worship. Events. Planning…The machine already knew our names. Which is why what happened next confused me so deeply.

At the time, I did not call it a warning. Or even a wound. Mostly, I sat with the strange ache of trying to understand why something that felt so rooted in care suddenly felt confusing.

The conversation happened in an office. One of those rooms designed to feel warm enough that hard things somehow sound softer. A couch. Chairs. Familiar faces. Concern arranged neatly enough to feel safe. We sat down believing we were there to talk about the Grow Group. How to build it. Support it. Maybe sharpen the idea. Instead, the room tilted. The concern arrived carefully. A family had apparently left. They left the church because of us, or so the story we were hearing was being used as the driver for this conversation, but only after a little push back from me. Like this detail was going to be left out if no objections were made in this room. 

Suddenly, our home had become part of the conversation. Our daughter. Her pregnancy. Her boyfriend living with us. The baby. The implication hanging quietly in the room: this does not look like leadership.

No one said it exactly like that. Not directly. That is part of what made it confusing. Because technically, we were still trusted.

Still youth leaders.

Still serving.

Still helping lead worship and creative spaces.

Still in meetings.

Still around teenagers.

Still carrying responsibility.

Just somehow not trusted for this. And then there was the moment that stayed with me. One of the pastors struggled to remember the name of the family supposedly concerned. Instead, he reached for descriptors. Hair. Appearance. “What’s-her-face.” The kind of casual dismissiveness that lands strangely when someone is being discussed as evidence in a conversation about your character. His wife quietly filled in the blank. The room kept moving. But something in me stalled.

Because suddenly I was sitting there thinking:

Wait. Is this how we talk about people when they are not in the room? This was the first time I witnessed the “Leader” talking crap about someone he led. I had heard things and always defended it, made excuses for it, said it must have been a misunderstanding.. The strangest part is I remember feeling embarrassed before I felt angry. Like somehow we had become a problem I did not realize we were creating. Like there was a rulebook everyone else had quietly read and I had somehow missed the chapter. And because I still believed in the goodness of the room, I mostly blamed myself for not understanding.

To be fair, I did not handle that meeting perfectly. I wish I could tell you I sat there calm, thoughtful, endlessly gracious. I did not. Because underneath all the confusion sat something fiercer. Protectiveness. Toward my daughter. Toward the messy, terrifying, deeply human situation we had just walked through. A teenage pregnancy.

Fear.

Hard conversations.

The possibility of abortion.

A baby.

A young couple trying to figure out how to grow up while raising someone smaller than themselves. And us, trying the best we knew how to create stability in the middle of it. So when the implication quietly became that somehow this made us unsafe people to lead young adults, something sharp came out of me. I remember looking across the room and saying, in much less polished language than I would use now, something to the effect of:

So let me understand this. Our daughter gets pregnant, we help her keep her baby, we support them, love them, give them a safe place to build a family… and somehow we are the cautionary tale? Meanwhile, are we really pretending nobody else’s kids are out there making complicated choices too?

Sex.

Pregnancy scares.

Private mistakes.

Decisions nobody talks about because they stayed invisible.

I remember thinking, maybe too loudly:

Interesting. So the issue is not the mess. The issue is that ours could be seen. I think that moment embarrassed me almost as much as it relieved me. Because something in me already knew I had crossed an invisible line. The kind where once you say the quiet part out loud, rooms never feel quite the same again.

–

The strange thing is, I was already in the internship while all of this was unfolding. Even saying that still makes me laugh a little. Because internship for what exactly? I was already there. Already serving. Already leading. Already helping build things.

Already responsible for people, projects, communication, creative work so many little invisible pieces nobody notices until they stop happening. I knew how things worked. Not perfectly. But enough. Enough to know how rooms moved. Enough to know who solved problems quietly and who got celebrated for solving them loudly. Enough to know decisions did not always happen in meetings. Enough to know there were currents underneath things. And yet there I was.

Interning.

Learning.

Sitting in rooms acting as though I had just arrived.

Which feels odd to admit now because I think part of me genuinely believed I still had not earned something.

Not wise enough.

Not polished enough.

Not trusted enough.

Not… enough enough.

And maybe some of that belonged to me. Maybe I kept volunteering to stand at the back of rooms I had already helped build. Maybe I kept mistaking humility for smallness. But I also think that place trained a lot of people, women especially, to live in the space between incredibly capable and quietly unsure. To lead while asking permission. To carry enormous things while still wondering if we deserved to be in the room. To shrink ourselves just enough to stay useful.

So there I was.

Close enough to see more. Close enough to understand more. Close enough to feel the tension of holding responsibility while still somehow questioning my own footing. And once you start noticing that tension, something shifts.

Not loudly. Just enough to make rooms feel different than they used to.

The kind of shift you do not recognize while you are still standing inside of it.

Not fully anyway. Because that is the strange thing about film. Sometimes the image catches before you know what you are looking at. A glance that lingers too long. A room that suddenly feels different. An answer that shifts. A mask that slips for half a second before everyone carries on like nothing happened.

Something gets captured. Not loudly. Quietly. And before you know what to call it, the roll is already developing. The negative already exists. Tucked somewhere in your back pocket.

Waiting. Waiting for enough time, enough light, enough distance for the thing you lived through to finally become something you can hold in your hands and say:

Oh. There it is. That is what I was seeing. But back then, we stayed. Three more years. Still sitting in the darkroom for a while longer.

Still trusting.

Still serving.

Still hoping.

Not knowing yet what other conversations in familiar rooms would expose. How many times the curtain would move just enough. How often answers would change shape when pressure entered the room. How hard it becomes to unknow something once you finally catch it in the light.

That is the strange thing about exposure.

Sometimes the picture has already developed before you are brave enough to look at what it captured.