Chapter One: Valley & Stone 1 of 5

THE VALLEY OF EARLY MEMORIES

I remember the sound before the sight—the quick, uneven pitter-patter of small feet across crumbling particleboard floors. I was running, searching. Sometimes for Daddy. Sometimes for Momma. Sometimes for Medaweh, my big brother. My diaper cover whispered and crinkled with every hurried step as I peered around corners, hoping to find someone who felt like home. Even then, before I understood the words for it, I knew that home could be a person—and that sometimes, they could be hard to find.

Those early years exist for me in fragments, like shards of a broken mirror—beautiful in their way, but impossible to hold without feeling the edges. Central Oregon was my backdrop, the wide skies and dusty roads of Tumalo stretched between Bend and Redmond. I was the second oldest of six, born into a rhythm of babies arriving almost like clockwork. My brother came just eleven months before me, and the twins arrived eleven months after. Five years later, my first little sister was born, and two years after that, our baby sister. We were close in age but would learn, over time, that closeness in blood doesn’t always mean closeness of heart.

Somewhere far away, in Fresno, California, lived two more children—my father’s firstborns from another life. A brother and a sister I had never met. Their faces lived in a single framed photograph on a shelf in our home. We knew their names. We knew they were ours. But they existed only in that picture—frozen smiles in a world I could not touch. I would come to understand, much later, that sometimes the people who shape you most are the ones you never really know.

THE STONE OF GRACE - The God Who Was Already There

When I think about those early memories now, the running and searching, what stands out to me most is not the chaos of a house full of babies. It’s the longing. I remember looking for someone who felt like home. I didn’t have words for attachment. I didn’t have language for stability or insecurity. I only knew that certain people made my body feel calm. And when I couldn’t find them, something in me kept moving until I did.

For most of my life, I interpreted that memory as neediness, or instability, or early insecurity that would later show up in other ways. But years later, sitting with my Bible open, God has begun to reframe it. I was reading Psalm 90, a Psalm of Moses, written by a man who lived in tents. A man who knew what it meant to wander without a permanent address. Verse one says, “Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.” I had to stop for a moment and just pause there, which I do often.

Moses wrote that before Israel ever had a homeland. Before stability, before brick and mortar. He was saying that God Himself had always been their residence. And something in me connected that to the toddler running through hallways. What if I was never as spiritually homeless as I felt? What if, before I ever found security in a parent’s arms, I was already held by God? That realization didn’t erase the fragmentation of my memories. It didn’t rewrite my childhood. But it did anchor it. I began to see that my longing for someone who felt like home was not dysfunction. It was design. God made us to seek dwelling. To seek covering. To seek presence. The problem was never the longing. The problem was looking for permanence in people who are temporary.

As I have grown, that early instinct to search hasn’t disappeared. It’s just maturing. I still feel it when I enter new leadership spaces. When I wonder if I’m truly understood. When I notice myself scanning relational dynamics in a room. The difference now is this: I know where home actually is.

Christ in me is not fragile. He doesn’t move in and out of emotional availability. He doesn’t disappear behind closed doors. He doesn’t exist only in framed photographs like distant siblings I never met. He is constant.

The little girl who ran across particleboard floors searching for someone who felt like home didn’t know she was already known. She didn’t know her story was already seen.

But I know it now. And that knowing has changed the way I live today.