Welcome Home Sugas!

For years my heart had no home.

Not a real one. I had places I lived. I had people I stayed for. But that deep, settled, safe kind of home, the kind where you can exhale all the way down, I did not have. What I had was confusion I had learned to call normal. What I had was silence I had learned to call peace. What I had was a version of myself that had been quietly disappearing for so long I had almost stopped noticing she was gone.

I allowed mistreatment to become my shelter. I allowed fear to speak for me when my own voice had gone quiet. And the thing about it is — I did not even fully see it while it was happening. That is what makes it so heavy to carry. You are not stupid. You are not weak. You just loved in places that were not built to hold you.

But God saw me in all of it. Every single moment I smiled through something that was wounding me. Every prayer I whispered into a ceiling in the dark. He saw me flawed yet fearfully made. Broken yet beautiful. Scarred yet sanctified. In pain but still full of purpose.

He sees you that way too. Right now. Right where you are.

Your Pain Was Not the End of Your Story

If you are reading this and you feel like hope is something that happens for other people — I need you to stay here with me for a moment.

Your life is not over.

What you have been through is real and it has been heavy and I will not rush past that. The toll it takes — on your mind, on your body, on your spirit — that is real. Some of you have been carrying things in silence that would break most people if they only knew.

But pain that just sits there is only suffering. Pain that gets surrendered — that becomes something. That becomes the thing that makes you reach back for the next woman still in the middle of what you already walked out of. That becomes the reason somebody else finds their footing again.

Your suffering was never meant to be stagnant. God wastes nothing. Not one tear. Not one sleepless night. Not one version of you that had to be broken open before she could be made whole.

Those Emotions Were Just Rentals

The fear of what life looks like on the other side — rental.

The shame over how long it went on — rental.

The confusion about who you even are now — rental.

None of that belongs to you permanently. It was never yours to own. It belonged to a season. And that season does not get to follow you into what God has next.

You may have been living inside fear, inside rejection, inside the wreckage of an identity that somebody else had a hand in dismantling. But those were temporary quarters. You were not built for that address.

Home — the real one — is where you are accepted as you are. Where healing is not just possible but expected. Where God restores the years, the voice, the sense of self that got lost somewhere in the trying.

That home has always had your name on it.

It Is Time to Come Home

So today is not a pep talk.

It is an invitation.

Come home to who God created you to be before anyone told you different. Come home to the self you set aside to keep the peace. Come home to the dreams that felt too fragile to carry through everything you were going through — pick them back up. God is still concerned about the things that concern you. That has not changed.

And if you are not sure what any of this looks like practically — start here.

Acknowledge what happened to you. Name it before God. You do not owe the world an explanation but you owe yourself the truth.

Give yourself grace for the work. It is not fast. Healing moves at its own pace and every single day of it counts.

Ask God for the wisdom and the strength to do the work on yourself first. Not to go back. Not to make sense of what they did. But to step forward — clear, rooted, and so settled in who you are that you can recognize what does not belong in your story long before it takes up residence.

And then place your hands in His.

Every last care. Every unanswered question. Every piece of you that is still tender.

He has never once dropped what was placed in His hands.

He is not about to start with you.

"Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you." — 1 Peter 5:7

"I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten." — Joel 2:25

Welcome home, Suga.

Kashmire Kay | Shine Suga Shine Ruby Slippers — Awakened to the Power Within