In the Rearview Mirror

Forney, Texas Sept 2025

I thought I had braced myself for the return. But the moment I turned down that old rock road, my heart dropped. I hadn’t been there in well over a decade. Maybe two.

And there it was…the house. The house that raised me.

Time had grown up all around it, but the bones were still the same.

The same bones I ran from. The same bones that live inside me still.

The rearview mirror of our past is always there. Sometimes it tries to drive us.

And sometimes it’s inviting us to glance back, not to stay in morbid reflection but to remember.

Healing has a funny way of circling us back to the places we once desperately wanted to forget. I was definitely being circled back. And at the same time resisting it with everything in me.

Isn’t that how it goes sometimes?

The heart knows what’s waiting on the other side of the return, but the body remembers the ache.

The nervous system flinches.

The old stories rise up.

I didn’t want to look back.

I didn’t want to feel it all again.

But there I was, on that rock road of High Country Lane, being herded by something holy.

My heart slowed.

My breath slowed.

I slowed.

Glancing back in time into somewhere tender, somewhere buried.

And there she was…the younger version of me, barefoot on that rock road, carrying more than her little shoulders ever should’ve carried.

Trying to be good.

Trying to be enough.

Trying to make everything ok.

Oh how she wanted to make everything ok.

I want to tell her…

You make it.

You don’t stay stuck here.

You find your voice little one.

You get sober.

You learn to love from a healed place.

You discover God’s goodness.

You find the quenching well of God’s grace.

That house may have built me, but it doesn’t own me.

Not anymore.

I’ve learned how to glance back in the rearview mirror, but not  to stare. Not to stay stuck there.

The past shaped me - yes.

But it doesn’t get to own me. Drive me. Control me.

God’s the One driving now.

I whisper a sacred thank you…

to the house,

to the girl,

to the God who never left me.

And I keep going down that rock road of life.

Forward.

Lighter.

Free.