“The God Who Wouldn’t Let Go”

That morning, I woke up knowing I was going to leave.

The past few months after giving birth to my first daughter had been heavy with postpartum depression, sadness, and thoughts that terrified me—thoughts of slipping away in the night and leaving everything, even her, behind. I can still see it clearly: me sitting in my maroon Ford Taurus, my two-month-old daughter asleep in her car seat, parked along the edge of a spring wheat field. I was waiting for my husband—her father—to finish seeding for the night.

To most people, my life might have looked steady. We were young, married, living on his family’s farm, surrounded by security and the promise of a simple life. I was getting ready to go back to work at the local bank, and my daughter would be staying home with her grandmother while I worked. It sounded ideal—safe, traditional, practical.

But inside, I was unraveling.

The thought of leaving her each morning made my chest tighten with a pain I couldn’t name. I feared she’d forget me. I feared she’d prefer her grandmother’s arms over mine. But deeper still, I feared I wasn’t enough—that even my own child wouldn’t choose me.

It sounds irrational now, but at twenty-five, those fears weren’t just postpartum hormones—they were old ghosts. The same voices that had haunted me since childhood, whispering that I was unseen, unchosen, and unworthy.

My dad was there, but not really. His first love was alcohol, and the chaos that filled our home imprinted something deep inside me—a constant ache to be wanted, to be worth staying for. That wound of abandonment would become the fabric of my soul. It would teach me how to chase love, how to twist myself into what a man needed, how to give until there was nothing left of me—because being loved, even falsely, felt safer than being alone.

I poured myself into people like water into broken vessels, trying to fill them so I wouldn’t have to face my own emptiness. Even my love for my dog, Cowgirl, carried that desperation. I clung to her because she never left, never rejected, never stopped needing me. The thought of losing her would spiral me into panic because in her eyes, I was seen.

And so I tried to fix, love, and earn my way through life. When my first marriage collapsed, I ran straight into another, desperate not to be the woman labeled “failed.” I was a mother fighting for her daughter, pregnant again, tangled in shame and custody battles, believing that if I worked hard enough—if I loved enough—I could create a picture worthy of redemption.

For 21 years, I carried that picture. The smiling family, the good wife, the faithful churchgoer. But inside, my soul still ached with the same old wound. I told myself I’d leave when my youngest finished high school, that I’d finally set myself free when it was safe to do so.

But God had a different plan.

Even in my rebellion, my running, my carefully constructed plans—He was there. I see now that His pursuit was relentless. He chased me through marriages, through mistakes, through the quiet moments in wheat fields and the loud ones in fights that left me hollow. He followed me through the chaos I created and the shame I tried to bury.

Every moment of abandonment in my life became a doorway for His pursuit.

And when I finally left my second marriage, thinking I was stepping into freedom, I was really stepping into His grace. Because even when I turned away, even when I lost myself trying to be everything for everyone else, He never stopped writing the story.

The wound of abandonment was never meant to destroy me. It was meant to lead me back to the One who would never leave.