Not for all of it.
Just for giving me the perfect metaphor twenty years before I needed it.
Because somewhere around 2023, I found a loose thread.
Now, a normal person sees a loose thread and leaves it alone.
Maybe they trim it.
Maybe they tuck it back in.
Maybe they do whatever emotionally healthy people do.
I don’t know. I’ve never met her.
I pulled it.
The thread was a question.
Why do people leave things they love?
That’s it.
That was the whole thing.
No hidden agenda.
No exit strategy.
No secret plan to burn my life down.
I genuinely wanted to know.
Because I had watched people leave things they swore they loved.
People who built friendships there.
People who raised kids there.
People who volunteered there.
People who cried when they talked about leaving.
And that part messed with me.
If they hated it, the story would make sense.
But they didn’t.
That’s what kept bothering me.
Who leaves something they love?
So I started asking.
Coffee shops.
Hallways.
Parking lots.
Random conversations that turned into bigger conversations.
One story led to another.
Then another.
Then another.
Meanwhile, life was doing something strange.
In March of 2023, I started my master’s degree.
The same month I started applying for full-time jobs.
If you had asked me then if I was leaving, I would’ve laughed.
I was still showing up.
Still serving.
Still leading.
Still planning events.
Still doing all the things I’d always done.
I was so not leaving that I was making future plans.
That’s what gets me.
Looking back, there were clues everywhere and I missed every single one.
Around that same time, I found myself writing things that make perfect sense now and absolutely no sense then.
Flying home from Romania, I scribbled notes in a notebook.
Grow.
Go.
Grow so you can go.
Go so you’ll grow.
I remember writing:
“Finding home sometimes means leaving what you held to. Leaving the thing that carried you. Leaving the thing that once saved you.”
Cool.
Love that.
Very poetic.
Would’ve been helpful if I had realized I was writing about myself.
Instead, I treated it like some deep thought I had on an airplane and moved on with my life.
Apparently my subconscious was way ahead of me.
The thread kept unraveling.
Not dramatically.
Not all at once.
Just enough to be annoying.
Like when you’re wearing a sweater and something feels off, but you can’t figure out where it’s catching.
One of the strangest clues had nothing to do with theology.
It was my closet.
Seriously.
For years, I would get dressed without realizing how much of my decision-making was tied to approval.
Not modesty.
Not dress codes.
Approval.
Would this fit in?
Would this look right?
Would this feel acceptable?
I never said those things out loud.
I don’t even know that I consciously thought them.
But then I stepped away for a bit.
And something weird happened.
I got dressed because I liked it.
That’s it.
No committee meeting in my head.
No imaginary audience.
No trying to figure out who I was supposed to be that day.
Just me.
Standing in my closet.
Picking clothes that made me happy.
Which sounds ridiculously small until you realize it isn’t about clothes at all.
It never was.
That’s when I started noticing the same pattern everywhere.
The thread wasn’t attached to one thing.
It was attached to everything.
Questions.
Identity.
Belonging.
Approval.
Purpose.
The stories people told.
The stories I told myself.
The version of me I had spent years becoming.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I kept thinking something was wrong.
Something was breaking.
Something was falling apart.
I thought I was losing certainty.
I thought I was losing direction.
I thought I was losing pieces of myself.
Now I think I had it backwards.
Nothing was falling apart.
I was growing.
And growth is awkward.
Growth doesn’t send a calendar invite.
Growth doesn’t ask if now is a good time.
Growth just shows up one day and suddenly the life that fit you five years ago feels a little tight across the shoulders.
That’s what 2023 felt like.
Not rebellion.
Not offense.
Not some dramatic crisis of faith.
It felt like outgrowing a sweater while still trying to wear it.
And by the time I realized what was happening, I was already halfway across the parking lot with a thread in one hand and a completely different life waiting for me in the other.
Honestly, Sandie 
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