So What Are We Doing Here?

For a long time, I didn't have dreams. I had survival.

If you had asked the sixteen-year-old girl who left high school with nothing but a GED what her future looked like, she never would have said "advocacy." To her, DCF was a beast, cold, gray, and so massive she couldn't imagine it ever seeing someone like her. I didn't study trauma in a lecture hall. I lived it for decades. And somehow I crawled out of it and built something.

And here I am at forty-three. Still building. Still fighting. And doubting every single move I make.

I watch other nonprofits, led by people with the degrees, the pedigree, the access I've never had, move through this field like they belong to it. They land the major contracts while I'm over here in the "under $500k" gap, doing million-dollar labor on a shoestring. Every year I hold my breath and perform my pain for a contract renewal. Every year I have to beg permission to keep doing work that nearly killed me to learn. Every year I have to prove, again, that the girl the system failed is qualified to serve the kids the system is failing right now.

And I am tired of it.

Not sleepy tired. Not "I need a vacation" tired. I mean the kind of tired that lives in your marrow. The kind that comes from fighting the same battle, against the same machine, for your entire life and one day you look up and ask yourself, is anything actually changing? Or am I just getting older inside the same war?

I've reached a full-circle moment that has left me more weary than I've ever been. I was a child in the system. I founded a nonprofit for the system. My husband and I became foster parents. I am surrounded, literally surrounded, by the walls of this machine. I gave it my childhood. I gave it my twenties and my thirties. I gave it the parts of me that were still healing while I was giving them away.

And I want out of the walls.

I tell the kids who leave residential care to find me on social media because I want to be their bridge. But I have to be honest about what that bridge looks like from where I'm standing. I am watching sex trafficking in real time. I am watching self-harm. I am watching grief spiral into things I don't have words for. And the question I keep running from finally caught me....

Am I actually a bridge, or am I just someone they cross on their way back to the fire?

I prayed for years for more capacity. Begged God to make me a bigger vessel so I could hold more of this community's pain. I didn't understand what I was asking for. More capacity just meant a heavier cross.

I was so busy building room for everyone else's wounds that I became a stranger to my own healing. I was tending to everybody's garden and letting mine go to drought.

Here is the confession I've never said out loud....

I don't know if I want to do this anymore.

And right behind that confession is the question I keep bringing to God, the one I ask every other day, sometimes every other hour, sometimes in the middle of the night when the house is quiet and I can't pretend anymore,

So what are we doing here?

Not in anger. Not in rebellion. In the most naked, desperate honesty I have. Because I am not ungrateful. I know what He has done through me. I have watched Him take a girl who had no business surviving, no safety net, no roadmap, no one in her corner, and use her to fight for hundreds of others. I do not take that lightly. I never have.

But somewhere along the way, I started losing the fire. The passion that used to wake me up in the morning started feeling like obligation. The calling that once felt like oxygen started feeling like a weight I couldn't put down even when my arms were shaking. And I had to face the question that terrifies every person who has ever built something in God's name,

What if my desires and His desires for me are not the same thing right now?

What if this season is closing and I've been too afraid to admit it because I don't want Him to think I'm ungrateful? What if wanting rest, wanting home, wanting something soft and ordinary and mine, what if that's not me abandoning God, but God trying to lead me somewhere I've never let myself go?

What if I've only ever known how to recognize God in the suffering, and I don't know how to recognize Him in the rest?

I don't have a clean answer. I am still in the middle of the question. But I am learning that losing your passion is not always a sign that you've lost your purpose. Sometimes it means you have completed one assignment and God is trying to hand you another, and you keep refusing it because it doesn't look like sacrifice. Because it looks too much like peace. Too much like joy. Too much like something you actually want. And nobody ever taught you that God's will could feel like that.

I am facing the decision of whether to shut Unashamed down at the end of this year.

Sit with that for a second, because I had to.

There is a grief in letting go of something you bled to build. I already feel it, the youth we've touched, the dreams I had for this mission, the version of the future I mapped out in faith. I am mourning something that isn't even fully gone yet. And underneath that grief is something I almost don't want to name because naming it feels like betrayal.

Relief.

A quiet, unexpected, terrifying relief. And instead of running from it, I am finally trying to sit with it long enough to ask God,

is this You giving me permission, or is this me giving up?

I haven't gotten the full answer yet. But I'm staying in the room with the question.

Because here is what I didn't plan for.

I didn't plan for Syer to climb into my bed at night, crawl up under me with absolutely no regard for personal space, and just lay there watching TV like there is nowhere else in the world he would rather be. I didn't plan for Arayla to not want to go with her mommy because she just wants to sit with Nani while I tickle her. I didn't plan for the night last week when Josh and our kids and grandbabies were all crowded in the kitchen just talking, about nothing, about everything, and I had this moment where I just stopped. And watched. All of it. And something in me went completely still.

Like nothing outside of that kitchen existed.

Like this, this loud, ordinary, beautiful, nothing-special moment, was the thing I had been working toward my whole life without ever knowing it.

I grew up without a home that felt like that. I didn't have a kitchen full of laughter. I didn't have the safety of ordinary. I spent so many years surviving, then so many years fighting, that I never left room for the possibility that one day I might actually get to live. That I might get to watch my kids navigate parenthood and adulthood and get to be present for it, not the mother who was always on her way to save someone else's child, but actually, fully, completely here.

I never thought I was allowed to want something this quiet.

That's the thing nobody tells you when you build your life around a calling. One day you might look up and find that the life you were saving everyone else from having, the ordinary one, the small one, the one without the mission and the platform and the weight, is the one you would give anything to have for yourself.

I haven't been showing up here lately or even on social media like I normally do. Now you know why.

You are allowed to be tired. The kind that lives in your bones. The kind that comes from giving everything you had to something that kept asking for more. That tired is not weakness. It is not faithlessness. It is the evidence of how much you have poured out, and it is a signal from God, not a failure of character.

You are allowed to question God without being ungrateful. Bringing Him your honest confusion is not rebellion. It is relationship. He is not fragile. He can handle your "So what are we doing here?" In fact, He's been waiting for you to stop performing your faith long enough to actually talk to Him.

And you are allowed to want something soft. Peace is not a consolation prize for people who couldn't handle the mission. Sometimes peace is the mission. Sometimes God is not asking for more.

Sometimes He is just asking you to finally receive what He has been trying to give you all along, and the only thing standing in the way is you believing you deserve it.

You don't need a permission slip. Not from an institution. Not from a board. Not from the people who built their hope on your strength. You do not owe the world your permanent exhaustion.

I am no longer praying for more capacity. I am praying for alignment.

Matthew 11:28 in The Message doesn't politely invite you to rest. Jesus asks you directly, "Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me." And Ecclesiastes 3:6 keeps rising in me: there is a time to keep, and a time to cast away.

Maybe this is my season to cast the hero aside so I can finally keep the peace.

I'm choosing it. Slowly. Scared. But choosing it.

Ya'll be encouraged in these Unashamed streets.

xoxoxo Sana