I am a West Texas woman who learned to name her truth long after she lived it, because during the decades I survived my first marriage there were no words for the quiet erosion happening behind closed doors. I did not stay silent because anyone told me to; I stayed silent because humiliation has its own muzzle, and women of my era were given no language—no doorway, no sign pointing the way—to help us recognize what was being taken from us piece by piece.

I speak now from the other side of that life, with the clarity that only comes from having walked all the way through it. Twenty-three years removed from that marriage, I am whole, healed, and married to a man whose steady, unwavering love dismantled every lie I once carried about myself. I never set out to write a book. On July 2, I sat down with a single memory, and in seventeen days sixty-five thousand words came through me—unforced, unpolished, unmistakably God-led. Bones Beneath the Prairie became the story I carried alone for decades, written in the long, wide-open sentences I learned under Texas skies.

I speak plainly, without performance or religious varnish. I have known God since I was two years old, and even in the seasons I drifted, He never loosened His hand or stopped steadying me. I speak from that place now—clear-eyed, grounded, and accessible to women whether they have spent their lives in church or would not step inside one at all.

My story did not begin with courage. It began in the kind of silence women were raised to keep, especially in the South, especially in the church. I smiled, kept the house, prayed the prayers, and begged God to fix what was breaking me. I never lost sight of Him, not once. But I believed He wanted me to stay. No one ever taught me that the God who hates sin also hates what is done to His daughters.

I did not stay silent to protect an image; I stayed silent because the truth was too heavy to carry out loud. If spoken, it would have detonated my life, and I did not believe the people around me had the capacity to hear it. A truth like that does not remain contained. It grows. It hardens. It becomes its own kind of prison.

I did not survive because I was strong. I survived because I walked with God inside the fire. I leaned into Him daily, asking for wisdom, for clarity, for a way to reconcile the life I was living with the faith I clung to. I was not waiting for God to arrive—He was already there. What I lacked was not faith; it was truth. I believed endurance was obedience, and leaving would mean failure.

Then came the moment when God did not simply comfort me—He corrected me. The breaking open was not God finally reaching me; it was me finally hearing Him.

I did not come out of that fire empty-handed. I came out carrying authority—not to preach, not to perform, but to speak plainly and loosen the chains of women still living in the silence I left behind. Our stories were never meant to be buried. They are meant to bear fruit—quiet fruit, steady fruit, the kind that only grows when truth is finally spoken.

I did not choose this path. God chose me to carry this story so it would bear fruit that lasts.
And if you are carrying your own unspoken story, hear me—God will meet you where the truth breaks open.
He will meet you there.