I was going through a hard season and on the inside of that storm, I felt isolated. Even though I knew people cared about me. It was during the COVID pandemic. Most people kept to themselves anyway, which somehow made the loneliness feel even heavier. One morning I was taking my usual walk around the condo complex where I lived. The buildings were quiet, doors closed, blinds drawn on every window. There were no windows on the doors, so there was no way anyone inside could have seen me walking by.
I was walking down the sidewalk when suddenly a door flew open and out came a little girl, maybe two or three years old, with her arms wide open like she was running straight toward an old friend. She ran right for me. I stopped walking, knelt, and she wrapped her little arms around my neck. A second later her mother appeared at the door, calling her back inside, but that brief encounter lifted the weight of the world off my shoulders, flooding my eyes with tears. I never saw that little girl again after that day. But at that moment, I knew I wasn't alone. It felt like Divine Spirit, like something bigger than me was saying, "We're with you. You are loved."
That little hug stayed with me. To this day, I still feel it. Because I realized something I believe we all forget…
Here's what I learned when I felt most isolated: when you're drowning in the hard stuff, it's easy to forget the support and guidance that's always there.
We Forget Because We're Drowning
When life gets hard, our attention narrows. We're pulled into the bills, the diagnosis, the breakup, the loneliness, whatever the chaos is that week. And the more we focus on the chaos, the smaller our view of everything else becomes. It's not that we lose our connection to something bigger than us. It's that we are so consumed by what's right in front of us, we forget to look up, or down, or wherever you feel that steadiness living in you.
I think about that little girl a lot. I wasn't asking for a sign that morning. I wasn't praying for one. I was simply putting one foot in front of the other, trying to make it through another hard day. And somehow, the sign came anyway.
The Power Never Shuts Off
A while back, a weekly email message from Ann Albers said something like this: even when you don't have cell service, you have soul service. Even when you don't have electricity, you still have inner power.
I love that, because it reminded me of something so simple. When the power goes out, the power plant doesn't stop running. The electricity is still there. You've just lost your connection to it for a bit.
That's how I think about it now. Whatever you call it, God, the Universe, Source, Spirit, your higher self, it doesn't turn off when you're going through a difficult period. You might lose the signal for a while. You might feel like you're standing in the dark flipping a switch that won't respond. But the power is still there. It never stops.
Finding Your Way Back to the Signal
So how do you reconnect when you feel like you're standing by yourself in the dark? For me, it rarely looks like some big spiritual breakthrough. It looks like small moments. A billboard on a road I don't normally take that said, "You are loved," right when I needed to hear it. A child's hug I never asked for and will never forget.
I think the invitation is just to slow down enough to notice. Not to force a feeling, not to manufacture peace, but to create just enough space that if a sign shows up, you're not too buried in the noise to feel it.
You don't have to solve everything today. You don't have to figure out the whole storm. You just need to remember that beneath it, the power is still running. It always has been. Sometimes it shows up as a whisper. Sometimes it shows up as a billboard. And sometimes, it looks like a tiny girl running full speed toward a stranger with her arms wide open.
What if the hardest moments in your life aren't proof that you're alone, but an invitation to remember that you never were?
In The Driver's Seat Podcast
Every week I show up on my podcast the same way I show up here, with real stories, honest conversation, and the kind of talk that makes you think about your life differently. Come find me wherever you get your podcasts.
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