Honestly, Sandie

Song vibes for this piece came from “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele. As always, this post is not about the song itself. It’s about the memories, questions, and truths that surfaced while listening.

Yesterday I wrote about sitting at my grandson’s lacrosse game and realizing how many opportunities my own kids never got because there simply wasn’t much room left. The post wasn’t really about sports. It was about the trade-offs we don’t notice while we’re making them. A few people reached out and asked the same question I found myself asking. If those opportunities mattered so much, why were we so willing to give them up? That question followed me around all day, which is usually a sign that there’s something underneath it worth paying attention to.

The answer isn’t nearly as dramatic as people might expect. Nobody forced us. Nobody locked the doors. Nobody demanded our attendance under threat of exile. Most of the time we were surrounded by people we genuinely loved and cared about. We believed in what we were doing. We believed we were helping. The strange part is that some of the decisions that seem absolutely wild to me now felt completely normal at the time.

Take the day Julia was born. I had a C-section, left the hospital the next day, stopped by my grandma’s house, and then went to church because it was Wednesday night. Writing that sentence feels ridiculous. Reading that sentence feels ridiculous. Yet there I was, fresh out of surgery, carrying around a brand new human being, headed to church like that was the most reasonable thing in the world. The next day I packed a bag and drove to Seattle for a women’s conference. A church conference! One night at home with my newborn daughter and I was back on the road because the conference was on the calendar and the calendar was king.

The part that surprises me now isn’t that I did those things. It’s that nobody thought twice about them. People probably thought it was admirable. Dedicated. Faithful. Committed. Looking back, I don’t see commitment. I see a woman who had become so accustomed to putting herself last that she couldn’t even recognize when rest might have been the holier choice. Somewhere along the way, exhaustion started wearing a halo.

A few years later I signed up for an internship through church. On paper it sounded like a great opportunity. Growth. Leadership. Development. All the buzzwords that make ambitious people immediately start reaching for a pen. What I didn’t stop to consider was the timing. My grandson had just been born. My daughter was learning how to be a first-time mom. Julia was getting ready to start kindergarten. Life was already handing me moments that would never come around again, yet my instinct was still to sign up for something that would take me away from them.

The answer always seemed to be more.

More serving. More commitment. More sacrifice. More availability. More responsibility. Looking back, the finish line had a funny habit of moving every time you got close to it. The people who gave the most were often treated as the example. The people who were always available became the standard. Nobody ever said your family didn’t matter. Nobody had to. The culture taught us what was celebrated, and most of us responded accordingly.

Family vacations were planned around the church calendar. Time off was planned around the church calendar. Entire seasons of life were planned around the church calendar. Church wasn’t simply something we attended. It became the framework everything else had to fit inside. Looking back, that’s probably one of the biggest clues. Anything that quietly becomes the center of every decision deserves a closer look.

Recently I was reading through some staff meeting notes from January 2023. Most of it was exactly what you’d expect. Easter planning. Events. Calendars. Team updates. Then I landed on a section from that week’s message. The notes included phrases like “get over ourselves,” “why are we not loving our neighbors,” and “we need a conviction to not accept anything less.” What struck me wasn’t the content. What struck me was my reaction to it at the time. I probably underlined those statements. I probably wrote little stars next to them. I probably left that meeting thinking I needed to do better.

That realization stopped me in my tracks. By January of 2023, I had already spent more than a decade serving. More than a decade showing up, helping, building, volunteering, and saying yes. Yet my response wasn’t, “Maybe I’ve done enough.” My response was, “I should probably do more.” That’s when I started seeing the pattern.

As Christians we talked constantly about grace, redemption, and being loved by God. We sang about freedom. We preached about freedom. We celebrated freedom. Yet there was another message quietly running underneath all of it. Be better. Try harder. Give more. Stay later. Serve again. Love your neighbor more. Surrender another piece of yourself. The language was wrapped in good intentions, but the outcome was a constant state of striving. You were redeemed, but somehow still under construction. Loved, but never quite finished. Accepted, but still chasing the next level.

A leadership speaker once said something that didn’t bother me at the time. “You have to teach people how to do church.” I remember hearing it and nodding along. Years later, that sentence lands differently. Because what does it actually mean to do church? Show up. Volunteer. Serve. Give. Attend. Prioritize. Sacrifice. Repeat. Nobody handed out a checklist, but the expectations became clear over time. We learned what was celebrated. We learned who got recognized. We learned what commitment looked like. Most of us responded exactly the way humans always respond. We moved toward the things that were rewarded.

What if the problem wasn’t that we hadn’t gotten over ourselves?

What if we had gotten so far past ourselves that we stopped noticing what our own families needed?

That question has been sitting with me ever since.

The older I get, the less interested I am in proving my devotion through exhaustion. My grandson’s lacrosse game reminded me that childhood only happens once. Those early years with your kids only happen once. A random Tuesday night at home only happens once. The people sitting around your dinner table do not get bonus years because you spent their years helping someone else.

The people mattered. They still do. The friendships mattered. The work mattered. The impact mattered. None of that has changed. What has changed is my understanding that my family mattered too. Not after the mission. Not when there was time left over. Not somewhere down the list after everyone else’s needs had been addressed. Right alongside all of it.

Turns out the question was never whether I loved my neighbor enough.

The question was whether I remembered to love the people waiting for me at home.