“I think it might be time for you to jump ship before it crashes and burns.”
Smoky Quartz said it sitting in her house on May 17, 2023, while I was still trying to figure out why people would find something they loved and then leave it.
I had come over as her friend, not as somebody trying to defend a church or collect information or talk her into anything. I remember telling her that. I wanted to know what happened because at one point, she loved it there. She had served because she wanted to. She had raised kids in that world. She had believed in it enough to give it her time and her energy and all the parts of herself people like to call “a servant’s heart” when they are benefiting from it.
Then things changed.
She told me she had been going through serious stuff and tried to step down. The response was basically, “Let’s pray about it.” Which is a fascinating answer when someone is telling you they are barely functioning. As long as she was still there, still doing the thing, still filling the spot, nobody seemed too worried about whether she was okay.
Nobody asked why she left.
Nobody asked if she was coming back.
That part stayed with me because I was still in the middle of my own slow exit. I had recently been at one of those staff meetings where you hear something that lands wrong in your chest, but the old programming jumps in before you can even form a thought: Don’t be offended. Don’t have feelings. Don’t make this a thing. Manage your faith better. Go read your Bible.
It is wild how fast you can be taught that hurt feelings are a spiritual failure.
I asked Smoky Quartz why she had stayed on that train so long, and I started wondering the same thing. What was the common thread in all these friends who had left? Not people who moved away or got busy. Good people. People who loved hard, served hard, and had enough character that you would think somebody might stop and wonder why they were suddenly gone.
She said when you are new, you feel loved and wanted. It is warm. It is immediate. You walk into a room and people know your name and hug you and tell you they are glad you are there. For a while, that feels like the whole thing.
My own buy-in was, “If even one more person can find the life I found here, then it is worth it.” That sentence kept me around longer than it should have.
It kept me giving grace in places where grace had gotten pretty scarce. It kept me working hard, explaining things away, and assuming people had good intentions even when the actual experience was starting to say otherwise.
Because eventually you notice the difference between being loved and being useful.
Our husbands fit into that place differently than we did, but we both saw it. They could do things. They ran sound. They taught classes. They filled gaps. They made things work. At one point we laughed about the fact that nobody wanted to piss us off because we did too much.
Which sounds cocky until you have watched someone ask your husband for sound team tutorials just mere weeks before calling to cancel his position in the hot seat completely, all while nobody is asking why his wife is quietly unraveling over on TikTok.
That is how it works sometimes. The useful people get kept close. They get one more request, one more job, one more “we really need you.” But when you are no longer easy to manage, when you have questions, when you stop smiling through the weirdness, nobody wants a giant confrontation.
That would make a mess.
So they do it quieter.
They let you slide.
Less access. Less conversation. Less room. Nobody says, “We need to talk.” Nobody says, “We see you pulling away.” You just start realizing that the people who knew how to find you when they needed something are suddenly not that concerned with whether you are okay.
I told her I was still on a different mission. I wanted people to win, but I also wanted to stay in the wings long enough to see when somebody would finally confront me. Ask me what was wrong. Ask why I was pulling back. Ask whether I was okay.
They never did.
Smoky Quartz had already figured out what I was still trying to prove to myself.
I asked Smoky Quartz when she became okay.
She said it was the moment she walked away and had the balls to say, “I’m done.”
That was when she could breathe again.
Not when somebody apologized. Not when somebody finally asked the right question. Not when everything made sense. She could breathe when she stopped waiting for permission to do what was best for her.
Her husband stayed a little longer. He was serving, not attending in the same way she had been. She still had to decide what was right for her, even when everybody in her house was not standing in the exact same place yet.
That part felt familiar too.
Sometimes leaving does not happen in one big family parade with matching luggage and a perfect explanation. Sometimes one person gets to the edge first and realizes they cannot keep standing in the smoke just because someone else is not ready to walk out yet.
Years before that conversation, Smoky Quartz helped spark the idea behind Exposure. We were talking about our kids and what they surrounded themselves with. I said something about how the things they expose themselves to eventually become part of who they are.
That sentence followed me.
Because it is true for kids, but it is also true for grown women. The rooms we keep sitting in. The things we are taught to ignore. The voices we keep letting into our heads. The way people respond when we are hurting. It all gets in there.
Smoky quartz is still quartz underneath it all, but it gets its color from what it has been sitting inside. Brown, gray, almost black. Some pieces are clear enough to see through. Some are so dark you have to hold them up to the light before you can tell what is still there.
That felt like Smoky Quartz to me.
Not ruined. Not fake. Not less valuable. Just changed by what she had to sit inside for too long.
Some smoky quartz gets darker around the edges, like the stone remembers where the pressure lived. It can fade if it stays too long in harsh light, then deepen again when it is put back where it belongs. There is something about that I cannot quit thinking about. Not every dark thing is damage. Sometimes it is evidence. Sometimes it is what happens when you survive the rock around you and still stay whole underneath it.
Noah Kahan’s “Northern Attitude” is not her exact story, because no song gets to hold all of somebody’s story. But the part that feels like Smoky Quartz is this: if I get too close and I’m not how you hoped, forgive my northern attitude. I was raised out in the cold. If the sun does not rise until the summertime, forgive my northern attitude. I was raised on little light.
And then there is the version with Hozier.
The yell in the middle of it.
That part is Smoky Quartz too.
Not polished. Not careful. Not asking permission to feel what she feels. It is the sound of somebody who has spent too long swallowing the truth finally letting it leave her body.
Some people hear that song and think hard, distant, difficult.
I hear a woman who learned not to hand her softest parts to people who were not going to handle them carefully. A woman who can still laugh, still sit with you in the ugly part, still build a life, still tell the truth, but is not interested in pretending she has not seen what she has seen.
She will not make the smoke smell like incense.
She will not call the fire a growth opportunity.
She will sit beside you until you can breathe again, then look you right in the face and say, “You know you can leave, right?”
Honestly, Sandie 
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