When Healing Takes the Long Way Around (A New Years Reflection)

I’ve never been much of a New Year’s resolution person. Early on, I was always the coach and the one helping others set goals, start programs, and chase January momentum while quietly shelving my own needs until the seasonal wave passed and spring activities took over. So while January often invites big promises and fresh starts, my life has looked more like endurance; less about reinvention and more about learning how to keep going.

Most people who have known me for a long time would say I have always looked “healthy.” I studied nutrition, ran for fun in college, taught an exercise class or two, paid attention to supplements, and did my best to lift weights between pregnancies. But appearances have a funny way of hiding the parts of our story that do not fit the public frame.

What most people did not know and what I rarely talked about is that I lived with chronic jaw, neck, and shoulder pain from the time I was a teenage girl. The kind of pain that hums in the background until it suddenly does not. The kind that shapes how you eat, sleep, parent, and even how you hold conversations. It was not dramatic pain. It was persistent pain. Quiet pain. And this type of pain has a way of rearranging the inside of a life long before anyone notices from the outside.

By the time I reached college, the tension had become so normal that I assumed everyone felt it. Specialists could not explain it, so eventually I stopped asking for explanations. I just lived around it. I ran a lot. Running was the only time my shoulders relaxed and my jaw unclenched. Then mono hit, followed by a series of events that took the life out of my lungs and legs. My stamina never fully returned. More irony for the girl finishing her exercise science degree.

The years rolled forward. Marriage. Babies. A career in preventative health. I could teach others how to build strong, resilient bodies while privately managing a body that required constant negotiation. I was raising kids with one arm around them and the other guarding a neck that never fully let go of its ache, no matter the pillow. Even now, looking back, I realize how much of my twenties and early thirties were shaped by learning to function in small windows of relief. In my mid-thirties, a backward fall on the ice left me with a concussion that included a brief loss of consciousness. At the time, I thought I was healing well. Life moved on. I adapted, adjusted, and kept going.

Then COVID arrived a few years later, and whatever balance I had managed began to unravel. The daily 3 a.m. migraines showed up like clockwork, unforgiving and uninvited. I saw every specialist you can imagine. After every event where I had to talk or smile or simply be present, I came home, slipped on my compression ice wrap, the one that covered my eyes, ears, and jaw and blacked out the world for twenty quiet minutes, and prayed the pain would ease before morning. Weekly PT helped temporarily, but nothing lasted.

One physical therapist finally said, “You need a second opinion,” and those words changed the trajectory. Braces, sharply reduced activity, structural work, slow progress, and small mercies that felt like grace followed. I had my braces put on in December, my first time ever, adding a level of pain I hadn’t anticipated. I didn’t yet understand what so many preteens endure when braces go on for the first time. I do now.

During that season, my prayer life intensified, but not in the way I would have expected. I wasn’t praying for direction. I was praying for relief and for the ability to function. Prayer became part of how I tried to regain some measure of control when my body felt unpredictable.

Listening came later, almost quietly, through the discipline of showing up anyway. As physical therapy began to give me a few days of relief each week, I found myself with enough margin to act rather than just endure. It was in that narrow window still waking with migraines, but no longer entirely consumed by them that I enrolled in a master’s program in apologetics and began classes that January. On paper, it made little sense. Some might have called it temporary insanity. I experienced it as movement rather than escape.

What I didn’t anticipate was that as my body slowly stabilized, my spirit would begin to unravel. I had always believed in God, but I had never truly studied Him. My faith was more inherited than examined, more practiced than rooted. At that point, I wasn’t looking for answers so much as coherence. I wanted language for what I was experiencing and a way to integrate faith into the work I was already doing in health.

I enrolled in school because I believed a spiritual dimension belonged alongside the physical ones I was trained to address. At the time, I thought I was simply strengthening my professional toolbox. I didn’t yet realize how much of that education would turn inward. That story deserves its own telling.

What I can say here is this: as my understanding of faith slowly deepened, my body continued its quiet work of healing. Not dramatically. Not all at once. The migraines didn’t disappear. But they began to ease.

What brought the most relief wasn’t only fewer episodes, but less fear surrounding them. The constant vigilance, the scanning for early warning signs, the bracing for impact, gradually loosened. I stopped organizing my days around when the next migraine might strike. My nervous system, for the first time in years, seemed to exhale. And then just after Thanksgiving, something happened that felt ordinary and miraculous at the same time. I ran again.

Not a marathon. Not even a few miles. Just one mile. No pressure. No performance. Shoulders relaxed. Jaw unclenched. Steps steady. My new posture held, my breath cooperated, and my body remembered something it had not felt in years, how to move without bracing for pain.

When I finished, I stood on the treadmill with a feeling that was strangely familiar. It felt like the middle space where beginnings and endings blur. It felt like the same tenderness I wrote about in Ashley’s Whisper, where kids stand at the edge of childhood and carry questions they don’t yet know how to name. It felt like the bridge I lived on for so long, between pain and healing, doubt and conviction, exhaustion and renewal. And in that sense, the return to running was not about fitness. It was about freedom.

Since then, I’ve been running most days, five days out of seven when my body allows it. Some days feel good. Some feel strong. Others remind me to slow down. I’m learning to listen instead of push, to respond instead of override.

Healing takes its time. It often takes the long way around. We don’t always know which part God will rebuild first, or which part will be last. For me, physical healing came through persistence, through skilled providers, through tears, through discipline, and through a kind of surrender I had never practiced before. If this story is being read in January, I hope it offers permission to choose steadiness over reinvention.

It isn’t lost on me that the girl I was in middle school, the one who carried tension in her jaw and worked hard to fit in, is the same girl I now hold in mind when I write. What I lived with then felt less like a single stressor and more like a constant internal effort to belong.

Kids don’t always recognize the weight they carry. They don’t yet have language for quiet fears, unanswered questions, or the work of monitoring themselves just to stay connected. When that effort goes unnamed for years, it can slowly shape a body in ways no one expects.

That awareness is part of why I eventually wrote Ashley’s Whisper. Not as a solution, and not as a shortcut to healing, but as a gentle place for kids to begin naming what they feel and what they wonder, earlier than I ever learned how to.

If you’re curious about how that series came to be, I’ve shared more about it separately in “A Collection of 3:27 Life Stories: Changing the Narrative.”

For now, this post is simply about learning that healing doesn’t always arrive all at once. Sometimes it comes quietly when fear loosens, when the body exhales, when movement feels possible again.

Sometimes it arrives slowly.
Sometimes it surprises you in a single mile.
Sometimes it comes only after the pressure to rush has finally lifted.

All of it matters.
All of it counts.
And all of it is part of the story.