You Don’t Need a Fixed Moment to Be Seen

 A line from a song sat with me this week: “You don’t have to fix the moment to be worthy in my pain.”It made me pause and reflect, gently uncovering truths I hadn’t noticed before.

All my life I thought faith needed a certain kind of proof. Growing up sickly, I expected one spectacular sign: the illness gone, the miracle obvious. When that didn’t happen, I felt cheated and small, like God’s attention was measured by how loudly He intervened. I kept waiting for the scene to be “fixed” so I could finally feel known.

This year I’ve been writing my first book, and the process forced me to meet those old expectations again. Putting pieces of my life on the page revealed a pattern: I had been looking for large, tidy moments that would prove God’s nearness, instead of learning to recognize the quieter ways He shows up. Writing changed how I remember. It didn’t manufacture miracles — but it shifted what I count as one.

Here’s what I learned along the way:

Being seen is not the same as being fixed

There’s a difference between the moment changing and your knowing that someone is with you in it. I can’t tell you that every hard thing turned into a story with a bow. What I can tell you is that some of the most tender revelations of God came while He stayed in the mess with me. Presence didn’t always change the facts. But it changed how the facts shaped me.

Telling the small, true story

When we talk about our lives we often skip the messy middle. We jump to the fix or the moral. But people connect when we say the small things: the nights I cried and didn’t know how to pray, the friend who showed up, the moment I kept reading one sentence of scripture and something softened. Those details don’t make you weak — they make your story human.

If you want to reach someone with your story, try this: name one ordinary moment from the hard season and one small way you noticed God (or hope) there, when things were still messy, the mistakes you made as well. Not the grand miracle only, because that’s the kind of honesty people lean into.

Your story matters not because of how heroic the ending is, but because it is real. People don’t connect to perfection; they connect to the cracks where honesty can come through.

What writing taught me

Working on the book this year was a slow, stubborn lesson in trusting small revelation. I realized I had been waiting for a headline instead of paying attention to paragraphs. Putting my life into chapters made me notice patterns — the ways I looked for signs, the times I mistook absence for silence, and the ways God’s presence didn’t look like I expected.

It also taught me that telling your story is part of the healing. When I wrote about being sick and about the seasons where healing didn’t come how I wanted it, something shifted: I began to name what I had learned, not just what I had lost. That change wasn’t dramatic. It was patient, like someone rearranging a room while you sleep.

I’m still learning how to believe without a headline. I’m still finishing chapters. But I’m less convinced now that a fixed moment is the only way to be seen. Sometimes being seen is enough — and sometimes that’s the miracle.