One Year…

It’s been one year this week since my back surgery.

I remember going into it believing this would be the turning point—the moment things would start getting better. I thought I would fight through recovery, put in the work, and slowly get my life back. I held onto that picture tightly.

But here I am, a year later, and I still can’t walk without support. The pain is still constant. Not occasional. Constant.

There’s a kind of exhaustion that comes from that—one that isn’t just physical. It’s the kind that settles into your thoughts, your emotions, your sense of who you are. It changes how you see your days. It changes what “normal” even means.

Some days, the hardest part isn’t even the pain itself. It’s the waiting. The wondering. The quiet question that creeps in:

Is this as good as it’s going to get?

I’ve been thinking a lot about 1 Peter 5:10 lately:

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.

I’ll be honest—“a little while” is hard to swallow right now.

Because a year doesn’t feel little.

A year of limited movement.

A year of dependence.

A year of pain that never fully lets up.

If I’m being real, there are moments I want to push back on that verse and say, This doesn’t feel small. This feels like my whole life right now.

And maybe that honesty matters more than pretending.

What I’m starting to understand, slowly and imperfectly, is that restoration doesn’t always look like what I expected.

I thought restoration would mean:

• walking freely again

• living without pain

• getting back to the person I used to be

But maybe restoration, at least right now, looks different.

Maybe it looks like:

• getting through another day I didn’t think I could handle

• finding small moments of peace in the middle of discomfort

• not giving up, even when everything in me feels worn down

That doesn’t make this easy. It doesn’t make the pain okay. But it does mean something is still happening in me, even if I can’t see a full recovery yet.

There’s also this strange tension I’m learning to live in:

I feel incredibly weak.

And yet… I’m still here.

Still moving forward.

Still hoping, even if it’s quieter than it used to be.

Still holding onto faith, even when it feels fragile.

Maybe strength doesn’t always look like standing tall.

Maybe sometimes it looks like refusing to quit when everything hurts.

I don’t have a clean ending to this.

I don’t have a testimony that wraps everything up with, “And then everything got better.”

What I do have is this:

I’m still in the middle of it.

Still learning what it means to trust God in a timeline I don’t understand.

Still believing this isn’t the end of my story.

And maybe that’s where faith actually lives—not in having all the answers, but in staying when the answers don’t come.

If you’re in your own “long while,” not a “little while,” I see you.

If you’re tired, frustrated, or questioning things you thought you were sure about—you’re not alone.

And if all you did today was lean on God to make it through, that counts more than you think.

I’m learning that, too, Living in the White Space.