I recently finished Session Five, Worthless, in Jennie Allen’s The Lie You Don’t Know You Believe. She ended the teaching with one simple sentence that I have not been able to stop thinking about: You free changes the world. I have been thinking about those words a lot.

Looking back over my life, I have realized that I learned how to survive at a very young age. My parents divorced when I was 5. My birth mother was not consistently present in my life. I lost my grandma, who was the one constant in my childhood, when I was twelve years old. At fifteen, my life was completely uprooted when we moved across the country. At eighteen, I became pregnant, and my son’s biological father walked away. Later came years of raising children with Cystic Fibrosis, hospital rooms, fear, grief, losing Melanie, fighting for Rosie’s life, losing Rosie, and eventually discovering my husband’s betrayal.

I do not say any of that because I want people to feel sorry for me. I say it because when I look back, I can see that survival became my default way of living. I learned how to keep going, how to handle the next crisis, and how to push down what I was feeling long enough to figure out what needed to be done. I learned how to function while hurting. Somewhere along the way, survival stopped being something I did during hard seasons. It became the way I lived.

Then came September 8, 2023. When my husband’s addiction and infidelity was disclosed, every bit of my energy went into surviving again. Every day became about making it to the next day. I spent countless hours trying to make sense of what had happened, trying to understand why, trying to decide whether our marriage could survive, and trying to quiet the lies that suddenly seemed louder than the truth. I carried fear, grief, anger, confusion, and exhaustion all at the same time. I was doing what I had always done. I was surviving.

But eventually, survival was not enough anymore. One day, I drank so much tequila trying to escape the pain that I passed out. I couldn’t deal with the pain anymore, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I tried to numb it. I wanted relief, even if it was only temporary. Looking back, I see that day as a wake-up call. Escaping was not healing, and numbing was not freedom. I had reached the end of myself.

I had spent most of my life asking, “How do I survive this?” God began teaching me to ask a different question: What would it look like to be free? At first, I thought I was looking for freedom. What I know now is that I was looking for Jesus, and He was leading me toward freedom.

Over the last year and a half, God has been taking me down a different road. It is not a road where all the pain disappeared, every question was answered, or my marriage was instantly restored. It is a road where He has been slowly removing the chains I did not even realize I was carrying. He has been showing me the lies I believed about myself: that I had to earn my worth, that I had to perform, that I had to be useful, that if I didn’t measure up I didn’t matter, and that my value could be determined by someone else’s choices.

Instead, He has been teaching me who I really am. I am His beloved daughter. I am loved before I accomplish anything and before I get everything right. I am loved because of who He is, not because of what I do.

One of the other things that stood out to me in the session was the idea that a relationship can be better than it was before because the people in it have gone through conflict and worked it out. That really hit me when I thought about my marriage.

For years, I thought my husband and I were going through conflict. The truth is, we went around it. We moved on. We got quiet. We let time pass. But we didn’t really deal with what was underneath it. You can’t work through what’s been hidden.

Now, for the first time in our marriage, we are learning to tell the truth, face what is real, and work through conflict instead of simply going around it. It’s slow. It’s painful. It’s painfully slow. But it is different. We are not just going through conflict anymore. We are trying to work it out.

I don’t know exactly what the final outcome of our marriage will be, but I do know that God is doing a different work in us. Maybe that’s what redemption looks like. Not instant change, pretending the damage didn’t happen, or rushing back to the way things were, but faithful perseverance. One difficult conversation, one truth told, one surrendered heart, and one step of obedience at a time.

The other thought that has stayed with me is this: People who are still chained spend all their energy trying to survive, but free people have something left to give. That sentence stopped me because I have spent so much of my life using all of my energy to survive.

When you are chained by grief, fear, shame, striving, control, or lies, there’s not much left for anything else. Every day becomes about getting through the day. As I have allowed Jesus to set me free, I have noticed something changing. I am beginning to have room again. Room to notice other people, encourage someone else, dream, serve from love instead of striving, tell the truth about what I have walked through, and let God use my story.

I believe God can use the circumstances of my life and the things I have walked through to help someone else walk through them. But I can’t help another person find freedom if I am still completely chained to the pain. That doesn’t mean I have to be perfectly healed before God can use me. It does mean I have to keep allowing Him to lead me out of captivity. I have to keep surrendering what I can’t carry, letting Him expose the lies, and follow Him.

Second Corinthians 1:3–4 says that God comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort others with the comfort we have received from Him. God does not waste our pain. He frees us so we can point others toward freedom. He heals us so we can point people to the Healer.

I’m walking on the road called freedom now. I still have days when the old lies whisper, moments when fear feels familiar, and places where God is uncovering wounds I didn’t know were there. I still have a long way to go, but I don’t want to go back to the road called survival. Survival helped me endure things I had to walk through, but it was never meant to become my permanent home.

Galatians 5:1 says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Jesus did not set me free so that I could keep living as though I were chained. He did not bring me this far so I could return to the old road. He is teaching me how to live differently; not merely surviving, pretending, numbing, or striving to earn my worth, but rooted in Him, anchored in His truth, and walking toward freedom.

Maybe the free really do change the world, not because they are strong survivors, but because they know the One who broke their chains.

-Aimee
July 16, 2026