A Quiet Kind of Healing

When I began my healing journey in 2020, my marriage wasn’t falling apart, but it wasn’t thriving either.

There was distance. A quiet lack of trust. We weren’t arguing, but we weren’t connecting.

Matt and I met years ago through music ministry. But shortly after he signed a recording contract, I found myself newly pregnant, and, without explanation, no longer invited into that ministry space. I felt abandoned. Rejected. So I did what many ambitious women like me do in the face of pain: I got to work.

I threw myself into building a business to prove I still had value. By 2020, I had built a successful online wellness business generating over a million dollars annually.

That same year, I signed up for Freedom Academy, thinking I was just getting coaching training to support my business. But as I sat in that three-day training, the Holy Spirit began lifting a veil that had covered my eyes for years.

I didn't just need new tools for coaching. I needed the deep soul restoration Jesus invited us all to in Matthew 11:28.
 

Beneath my restless activity was unhealed trauma. Cynicism toward the Church. A wall I’d built between myself and intimacy—not just with others, but with God. I told myself I was efficient, strong, dependable. But I had rejected the creativity, warmth, and color that once made me feel fully alive.

I remember leaving that training and telling Matt: “I think I’m standing at a fork in the road.”

Would I keep striving to prove my worth or would I follow God’s invitation into curiosity, compassion, grief, and grace?

The years that followed brought a long process of healing—one that involved honesty, repentance, and repair in our marriage. The work is never finished on this side of heaven, I’m still in the messy middle in some ways. It took time to rebuild what had been lost, not only in our relationship, but in my sense of self.

Then one quiet afternoon last year, I saw the fruit of that healing in the most unexpected way. 

Our kids were with grandparents, and Matt and I had the house to ourselves. I was reading in the sunroom when he came to the doorway and asked, “Do you want to go down to the basement and play some music together?”

He’d asked me this before—many times, actually—and I’d always declined. The piano had become a place of pain for me, a reminder of what I had lost.

But this time, without hesitation, I said:
“I’d love to.”

We spent hours downstairs. I stumbled through old chords. Matt gently reminded me how to play. We wrote a song no one will ever hear. But when we came back upstairs, I looked at him and said, “That was really nice.” And we both knew: this was evidence of healing.

The restoration of shalom in your life doesn't always come with fireworks or fanfare. Sometimes, it looks like quiet joy in a place that used to ache.
 

It’s not about turning your pain into a platform.
It’s not about proving you’ve healed by building something impressive.

It’s about the restoration of your soul.
The return of presence.
The slow, steady recovery of delight.

God’s healing in your story is less about what you produce and more about who you’re becoming.

If you’re in the thick of rebuilding, wondering if it’s working—take heart.
He’s not finished yet.

And you just might be closer to restoration than you think.

Tori
Freedom Coach & Director of Marketing & Strategy