honest & hygge

---

It is finished. It is the end.

That breaking inside came in March and just weeks after I turned 41 — but it wasn’t how I expected it. I bookmarked this in TerKeurst’s book. I believe all our journeys are different but same like this.

For most of us it begins in the mid-thirties through the forties.

I was 34 when that violent unearthing began in 2019. It climaxed between 37 to 38, before coming through to the other side between 40 to 41.

(The reason I am documenting these is what I had wished back at 34 to have known better. I am only about seven years along, I do write this with both absolute caution, and also an unwavering hope in Him alone I will continue to cling on to with all of my life. I’ve been very encouraged by my Spiritual Director, she’s 20 years ahead in a similar journey.)

I wrote in my 2025 year end post, my 40th year:

2025 was a rollercoaster ride of emotions of every kind. If you have followed my journey in recent years of my dark night, it was like the five stages of grief since the dark night of 2022 beginning from denial then anger in 2023 then bargaining in 2024, and ah, comes the deep sorrow of 2025. But may I take heart that 2026 could likely be a completion in acceptance.

I’ve been processing-journeying this with my Spiritual Director the past year as I awaited the breaking, the end. Last month, we touched on forgiveness. How I learned it wasn’t an active “doing” but rather a deep forming — like there was a healing in the full breaking of.

The moment of “I knew” came (per Lysa TerKeurst’s book above), I got to the end. But it wasn’t the end, or the end that I had thought. It was something… else deeply unique to me.

That for the first time in a very long time, I’ve dared to wonder: maybe… I am healed?

The toughest part about the dark night of the soul is learning how even as this stage of life is often triggered by the onset of an external hard thing or a mix of things, it isn’t quite it?

How it ends isn’t the end of the hard but the absolute acceptance of the hard until our life on earth is completed. This is why the process, the journey through it takes this very long.

Some calls this ‘choose your hard’.

(Along the journey, I was musing to my partner, I probably lost many friends. As this is counter-intuitive to the way of our world that optimizes for success, comfort or victory.)

The journey from breaking to breakthrough takes not fighting the profound loss(es) each will face their own, where the loss is necessary and unique to each get on a cruciform path.

Yet it is absolutely human to deny it, reject it, to run away from the overwhelming pain.

That very pain that will intimately take us to perfectly see both the cost of Calvary and the Grace that relentlessly holds us. Unlike Jesus, as the darkness envelops you in that path of cruciformity, if we examine closely, we will also identify the abhorrence of dark within us, that we can’t unsee it but to let the stripping and purging of the deep-rooted idols begin.

The latter is critical. I remember so clearly at 34, I was at a crossroads and felt I was given a choice that may have spared me from this hard… Or I always wondered if it really would. It wasn’t that I had chosen the hard, I definitely did not have the maturity at 34 to. I was just drenched in confusion and hoped it would go away? Alas, that last 7 years have formed me.

---

---

The Good Part: The Good Thing

“When you are forming into suffering well, now, this is the point where I want to challenge you to stay in solitude but begin asking Him for good things”, my Spiritual Director would press me in my homework after our last session before we meet again later this month.

I was stumped.

It hit me the gravity of the dark night — of the disappointment and its radical acceptance gnaws at you to no longer dare or know how to imagine or ask for “good things” anymore.

If anyone else who relate to this — the ultimate end and the ultimate good of that journey is to get to be anchoring all our hope in Him alone — by way of letting pain be formative.

That is the cross. Like Peter’s absolute denial of Jesus’ death that Jesus had to summon him as the devil to get behind Him. And Jesus died indeed. He departed from earthside and the disciples had to still live the rest of their lives on earth in hard.

But came also the good part Jesus promised: the Helper, the Advocate in overcoming hard.

I picked up Beth Moore’s study on David for my 2026. In it, Beth shared about asking her mom how did she not die from the pain of a tragic suffering; how did her mom survive it?

“I didn’t. I just kept waking up”, said her mom.

Me too. That was where I was at. When I awoke from my surgery in 2023, I was hit with the saddest thought of: Oh I didn’t die? But also: now then, I have to live this well.

The scars write the stories my journal had no words for. That 3.5 years on, for the first time since the dark night engulfed, and 7 years since its reckoning, I know I now stand at an end.

“I didn’t only survive it but thrived with a new vision.” I wrote of my 2024 year end post, and the caption of its IG, of the cruciform art to suffer well and to live well. For the hard has been — and continues to be my formation — and that’s a very good thing indeed.

I haven’t found it fully in me to seek “good things” in solitude per my Spiritual Director — in part I truly do not feel a lack and in part for those who understand the journey, you truly get to the place of nothing can ever be as good as being restored to Him (Psalm 73:28).

Even so, this week, I am at the point of my bible study on David’s life, in 2 Samuel 7 where David fully arrived in the promise as the king in Jerusalem after a chronically relentless near (or over) two decades of a death-pursuit by King Saul, followed by camping out at Hebron.

David survived Saul, he made it out alive. It was an end, and it was. Yet it also wasn’t, as his life from there on continued to be full of color, pain, and drama. Still, in 2 Samuel 7, David was given Rest (v1) just as the Lord made him a covenant. My spirit leapt at 2 Samuel 7:28:

Sovereign Lord, you are God! Your covenant is trustworthy, and you have promised these good things to your servant.

It gently hit me it is not about the asking but about Him as the good Father who (out)gives above and beyond all we can ask — to continue to suffer well doesn’t negate good things of the Good Father. For it is the end, and also isn’t. That the road to The End is still very long.

The eternal tension of formation.

Make no mistake, the road ahead is still intense. But I behold His good thing. For now, like David celebrated with all his might surviving and coming through in 2 Samuel 6, so will I.

Selah.

---

Of my journey through the dark night documented in real time:

---