The White Dog and the Expiration Date of Endurance
Maltese dog running on promenade.
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.
When Survival Becomes a Skill
I’ve been quietly observing something lately in myself, and honestly, also in people I love. The way we cope when life gets hard. Some people escape into busyness. Some go quiet and numb. Some turn everything into a project, a goal, a distraction. I’ve done all the above, depending on the season. And it’s not that any of those things are inherently wrong. Sometimes they get us through. But lately, I’ve been wondering: at what point does coping become pretending?
Because things have been hard.
The Machinery of Getting By
Back in May, when I wrote this, my son broke his leg, and it turned our whole routine upside down. I’m still trying to build what God put on my heart. Money is tight. The emotional weight of dealing with certain people in my life hasn’t let up. And I’ve had these moments where I catch myself thinking, “Am I okay, or am I just good at surviving?” Not in a dramatic way. Not in a crisis-y, “the sky is falling” kind of way. More like… that slow realization that even your endurance has an expiration date.
I started asking myself a question we don’t ask often enough: What does it actually mean to be okay? Is it when the circumstances settle down? When we smile more days than cry? When we stop trying so hard just to feel normal? Or is it when we stop avoiding the hard stuff and finally admit what’s true without feeling like admitting it means we’re failing?
The Performance of Being Fine
I think, for a long time, I confused “faith” with forced optimism. Like if I just kept speaking life over everything, if I kept moving forward, if I kept smiling and trusting and saying the right things… then maybe I’d feel better. And sometimes I did. But sometimes I was just pushing myself past the point of honesty.
And here’s the thing: I don’t want to build a life—or a faith—pretending I’m okay. I want a faith that can handle real emotions. I want a walk with God that’s rooted enough to carry both peace and grief at the same time.
Because pretending doesn’t make pain go away. It just buries it. And buried things don’t heal. They fester.
The more I’ve sat with this, the more I’ve realized: God never asked me to pretend.
Even Jesus Had Hard Days
The Bible is full of people who were not okay. David poured out his anguish in the Psalms and didn’t filter it. Elijah was so overwhelmed he asked God to take his life, and God’s response wasn’t correction, it was rest and food. Even Jesus, fully God and fully human, wept at loss, flipped tables at injustice, and sweat blood in Gethsemane.
He didn’t hide His emotions to model spiritual maturity. He embodied spiritual maturity by being honest with the Father in every moment.
And yet somehow, we’ve turned Christianity into this performance of positivity. We equate peace with cheerfulness. We think if we’re not “walking in victory,” something must be wrong with our faith.
But the real victory? It’s still showing up before God with your eyes swollen from crying. It’s still praying when the answers haven’t come. It’s letting Jesus into the parts of your soul that aren’t tidy or strong or inspirational.
Where Honesty Meets Grace
So, here’s where I’ve landed, for now, at least.
I’m learning that being “okay” isn’t the absence of pain or the presence of control. It’s not even about having a good day or the right mindset. It’s about being honest with where you are… and letting God meet you there.
Some days, I still feel like that white dog on the boardwalk, running, searching, unmoored. But I’m not lost. I’m known and held. And so are you.
There’s space in the heart of God for your exhaustion. For your unfiltered thoughts. For the versions of you that don’t have it all together. And there’s grace for the fact that sometimes your coping mechanisms helped you survive when nothing else could.
But there’s more than survival, friend. There’s rest, there’s rebuilding, there’s real peace. And maybe it starts here: when we stop pretending and start telling the truth.
If you related to this reflection, you may also enjoy reading the whole three-part series: The Unexpected Gift of Falling Apart and How to Be Honest Without Getting Stuck in Pain
