Real Life With Katie Marie

Many of you have been following along and have seen that 2026 has been a difficult year for my family.

Some of you may even know just how difficult it has been.

But even fewer of you know what we walked through in the year before 2026 had even come to pass.

Around this time last year, I had just lost my job, in large part because of absences that were due to a high-conflict co-parenting situation and because I was dealing with the effects of CPTSD, something that I didn’t yet have language for or know how to cope with.

I was also in the very beginning of perimenopause. That dreaded word our mothers never talked about, perhaps because they didn’t have the language for themselves.

Hot flashes. Mental fog. High emotion. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If you know, you know.

On top of that, there was my health.

I was taking care of all of my well checks, trying to get my body healthy, and I found out that I would need surgery for something on my reproductive organs that would also require a biopsy.

Then my routine mammogram showed something that needed extra attention, something that needed additional diagnostic testing that would take months.

I should have been broken.

I felt like my womanhood was being attacked from both ends.

I remember feeling like I brought this on myself.

That I had spent years having pride in my breasts. Showing them off in my youth. Using my womanhood in ways to seek out the love that I was so desperately searching for in unhealthy ways.

I remember thinking that the enemy was trying to take out my womanhood.

My womanhood was attacked as a child.

My womanhood was attacked as a teenager and as a young adult, both in part by the behaviors of others and by my own behaviors.

And now it felt like it was under attack again.

I went through a gamut of emotions.

Frozen in the unknown, unsure of what to do.

Flight, fight, or freeze.

I was in a place where I felt like I could only turn to God, that there was nothing else I could do except surrender it to God because it was too much.

It was too heavy.

It was too scary.

Cancer runs in my family.

And I just knew that it was in my future.

Every annual doctor’s appointment I had gone to as an adult, I always brought my family history up.

Screen everything.

Run whatever you can. If I have cancer, I want to know. I want it caught as early as possible.

And so I thought we had finally come to the thing I had spent years preparing myself for.

I thought it was my turn.

And I was making peace with it.

This was part of my story.

If I had cancer, God would work through it.

He would either heal me on this side of heaven, or He would heal me eternally.

They could take my reproductive organs.

They could remove every piece of womanhood that was on my body, and yet I knew that I would be okay.

Because I had God.

I knew that I would be okay, that I would still be me, because I was a daughter of God.

My outward womanhood may be removed, but that didn’t change that I was His.

And it didn’t change who He created me to be.

I could make peace with what might happen to me. What I couldn’t make peace with was what it might mean for my children.

Because if I went home to be with Jesus, I would be fine.

But I was heartbroken at the thought that my children would grow up without their mom, because I knew the pain that held.

I tried to imagine my daughters having to grow up without me.

Not only would they have had to go live with their dad, which was not a good situation, but then to live without their mom.

I knew that they would be okay because I turned out okay.

And I knew that they would be okay because God has them.

Once I surrendered to it, I found peace that surpasses all understanding.

I remember a friend of mine asking, “How are you dealing with this?”

I was preparing my mind to go into yet another doctor’s appointment, and I remember telling her I was okay.

That I was simply sitting with my Father.

I remember telling her, “I just want to be with Him.”

There wasn’t anything I wanted more than to simply be with Him.

And I was thankful.

So overwhelmed by His love, that He would allow me to walk through this hard thing so I would stop and sit at His feet.

That regardless of what the test results showed, He was with me.

And that was where I wanted to be.

At His feet.

Psalm 34:18 says:

“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

It’s not just a verse in the Bible.

It is something that I have lived.

That I’ve experienced.

When I look at my life, the ebbs and the flows, and I look at my relationship with God, I can see when I was closest with Him.

And it has always been in my greatest times of pain.

In my greatest times of crisis.

My greatest times of need.

When I fall flat on my face and completely surrender because I have no other choice than to look up to Him.

That kind of love is overwhelming.

That He would love me so much to bring me to my knees.

To just have me sit with Him.

God, in His sovereignty and His mercy, spared me from what I had been preparing myself for.

My biopsy came back clean.

My diagnostic exams eventually came back cleared.

But the peace came before the results did.

It came when I finally stopped trying to hold everything together and surrendered what I could not control.

Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

The Hebrew word translated be still is raphah. It carries the sense of letting go, releasing, loosening your grip.

In my mind, I’m playing a mean game of tug-of-war. Trying to hold on, pulling tight, not even realizing that I’m holding on so hard it’s hurting my hands.

And then I let go.

The rope goes slack.

I stop fighting for control over something I was never in control of to begin with.

That is what being still means.

It isn’t simply being quiet.

It is surrender.

It is loosening my grip on the outcome and trusting the One who already holds it.

That was what I was doing when I was sitting with my Father.

I didn’t know what the test results would say. I didn’t know what would happen to my body. I didn’t know what the future would look like.

But I could let go.

I could sit with Him.

I could be still.

And that is where I found peace.

Maybe you find yourself facing something painful or scary. Something you cannot fix, predict, or control.

Maybe you are facing something that just feels too big.

Too heavy.

Too scary.

Too much.

Maybe you have reached the place where you don’t know what else to do, because there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do.

Maybe this is your invitation to loosen your grip on what you cannot control and surrender it to the One who can.

To sit with your Father.

To be still.

Not because you know how it will turn out, but because you know who is sitting with you in the unknown.

What if the thing you are facing right now isn’t calling you to hold on tighter, but inviting you to let go and simply sit with your Father?