By Tenn-Lai Frame 
I never wanted kids. Let me just start there. It almost ended my relationship with my now-husband because I was so certain motherhood wasn’t for me. Funny how God works, isn’t it?
Fast forward to me pregnant with our first, and suddenly I wasn’t worried about whether I wanted to be a mom. I was worried about whether my baby would survive. The ultrasounds kept revealing new concerns, new issues, new reasons to hold my breath. I prayed prayers I didn’t know I had in me, the kind that come from a place so deep you don’t recognize your own voice. He was born, and we thought we’d made it through the worst. But then came more diagnoses, more specialists, more questions than answers.
Five years later, he’s healed from most of it. The doctors don’t have explanations for how. They shrug and call it remarkable. But we know. We know exactly who did the healing.
You’d think that would be enough of a story, wouldn’t you? Enough testimony to carry me through anything. But God’s plans rarely fit into the neat boxes we create. Two miscarriages followed, each one three months apart, each loss happening at the three-month mark. There’s something particularly cruel about losing a baby at 12 weeks, when you’ve just started to exhale, just started to believe this one would make it. I read my Bible. I prayed. I did everything you’re supposed to do. But I needed something more, something that spoke directly into my specific ache. The devotionals I found were beautiful, but they felt like they were written for someone else’s pain.
So I started writing my own. Just for me. Just simple words on paper that helped me process where I was and where God was meeting me. I dug into Scripture with a desperation I’d never known before, and I wrote what I found there mixed with what I was feeling. Over time, I started sharing what I’d written with other women who were walking through their own valleys. They told me the words helped them. They told me they felt less alone. What started as my own survival mechanism became something that transformed other people’s journeys, too.
Then God did what He does best. He redeemed what was lost. After two miscarriages, He carried us through another pregnancy, and we welcomed another son. Today I have a one-year-old while homeschooling my five-year-old son, who’s heading into second grade, might I add. The woman who never wanted children is now elbow-deep in lesson plans and diaper changes, teaching phonics while bouncing a baby on my hip. If you’d told me ten years ago this would be my life, I would have laughed in your face.
And then, in the middle of the beautiful chaos of managing a newborn, a homeschooler, a marriage, and a household that always seems one step away from complete disorder, God told me to start a business. Not just any business, but one built around the very thing that saved me in my darkest seasons. He asked me to take those devotionals I’d written for myself and others and turn them into something more, something personalized for women who needed what I had needed.
I didn’t know how I’d manage it. I barely had time to shower most days, let alone launch a business. But then I remembered 1 Samuel 15:22, where obedience is called better than sacrifice. God wasn’t asking me to figure out the how. He was asking me to be obedient to the call. So I said yes, even when it made no logical sense. I’ve been obedient, and He’s been faithful to open up the time, the opportunities, the doors I couldn’t open myself.
Here’s what I’ve learned through it all: God doesn’t waste our pain. The sleepless nights wondering if my son would be okay, the grief of holding loss in my body twice, the desperation that drove me to write when I had nothing left to give—none of it was wasted. It all became the foundation for something I never could have planned or created on my own. My pain became a ministry I didn’t know I was building.
If you’re in a season where you don’t know where to turn, I want you to know that God sees you there. He’s not waiting for you to have it all together or to understand the plan before He starts working. Sometimes He asks us to build something right from our breaking point, not in spite of it. Sometimes obedience looks like taking the next small step, even when you can’t see the staircase. Sometimes the very thing that brought you to your knees becomes the thing that helps someone else stand.
I still don’t have all the answers. My house is still chaotic. I’m still figuring out how to balance everything God has put on my plate. But I’m learning that obedience isn’t about having the capacity or the plan. It’s about trusting that the One who healed my son, who brought life after loss, who called the woman who never wanted kids into motherhood—He’s the same One opening doors I never knew existed.
Your pain isn’t the end of your story. It might just be the beginning of someone else’s hope.
by Christina Levandowski 
by Winnie Munroe 
by Angela Anagnost-Repke 
