When I think about David, I not only imagine the heroic highlights—Goliath, the Psalms, the throne of Israel. I also picture the man who failed in devastating ways and made some of the worst decisions a person could make.

Yet God still called him “a man after His own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14). That phrase always stops me because David’s story holds both real failure and a genuine return to God.

I thought I was learning how to trust God. And in many ways, I was. But lately, I’ve realized He wasn’t just leading me into trust. He was inviting me into something lower.

Lowly.

The posture I didn’t know I needed, but the one my soul was starving for. It’s been like a slow unraveling of self-sufficiency, an undoing of everything I thought I had to hold together.

It started with layers of pressure, financial strain, emotional weight. And then my son broke his leg. Just one unexpected accident, and suddenly the thin scaffolding I’d been standing on collapsed.

And it hit me: I’m not strong. I’ve never been strong. I’ve just been good at keeping it together.

I was out walking the other day, just trying to clear my head, when a white dog came barreling down the boardwalk. No leash. No owner in sight. It looked exactly like mine. For a second, I thought it was my dog. I tried to catch it, but it kept running. He was fast, and he was lost.

It was one of those moments where the outside world mirrors something happening inside you, and you don’t even realize it until later.

Because the truth is, I’d already been thinking about that feeling of being untethered. I wasn’t a wreck or falling apart, but I think I’d slowly lost my anchor recently without even noticing. Holding things together, kind of. Functioning, mostly, but at the same time, wondering if “I’m okay” still means what I think it means.