I reached a point where holding on to the life I thought I was supposed to live became more exhausting than letting it go. In that surrender, I found clarity, healing, and purpose. What once felt like loss became the very foundation of my calling. House of Rise & Pray was not built from perfection, but from obedience; born in quiet moments with God, strengthened through faith, and sustained by the courage to trust His plan over her own. "I had to release the life I planned to fully receive the life God purposed—House of Rise & Pray is the evidence of what happens when you surrender and still choose to rise."

I spent years building a career I thought I was supposed to have: safe, predictable, following someone else's blueprint. The moment I stopped performing the version of success other people expected and started building the one I actually believed in, everything changed. I let go of the title I thought defined me and started chasing the impact I knew I could have. That shift didn't just change my career. It changed who I was willing to become.

There was a point where the life I had built still made sense on paper, but no longer felt aligned in practice. It required me to move and operate in ways that didn't match how I actually think or lead. Letting go wasn't a single decision, it was a gradual recognition that I couldn't keep holding something that didn't fully fit. What followed wasn't immediate clarity, but the work of rebuilding with more intention.

I had a picture in my head for a long time. The house, the husband, the family that looked whole from the outside. Divorce has a way of stripping the picture from the frame. What I felt first was not grief for the marriage. It was grief for the story I thought I was in. Because when that version of my life ended, I did not yet know what the next one would be. I just knew I was standing in the rubble of something I had built my identity around, with four children watching me figure out what came next. The moment I realized the old vision no longer fit was not dramatic. I was sitting at my desk late at night, kids finally asleep, and I thought about going back to school. Not as an escape. Not as a plan B. But because for the first time in years, I was asking myself what I actually wanted. Not what fit the picture. What fit me. Letting go felt like learning to breathe in a different rhythm. It was disorienting and lonely and, underneath all of that, quietly clarifying. What I started building was not a replacement for the life I had imagined. It was something I had never let myself imagine at all. A life where my ambition was not something to shrink around the edges of someone else's comfort. A life where my children watched their mother choose herself, not out of selfishness, but out of conviction that she had something to give the world. I did not know who I would become; I just knew I was done waiting for permission to become someone.