“Remember the Lord, great and awesome, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses.”

Nehemiah 4:14

I was already standing. Already reaching for my keys. Already doing the math on the drive.

“Mom,” he said. “Wait. Come in the morning.”

So I waited.

I’ve thought about that night a hundred times since. I should have gone. Even if there was nothing I could do. Even if all I did was sit on the floor of that hospital hallway next to my son, shoulder to shoulder, outside her door. Sometimes love doesn’t fix anything. Sometimes love just sits in the hallway.

They told us she’d be moved to another hospital that night. Then it was later. Then it was morning. All night long, I lay there waiting for news that kept not coming, holding on to a promise: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5).

At first light, I got in the car.

Four and a half hours

It is four and a half hours from my driveway to where she was.

I didn’t turn on the radio. I didn’t make calls. I talked to God, out loud, the whole way. Some of it was begging. Some of it was crying. But somewhere along that highway, the begging turned into something else.

I started declaring.

“You will also declare a thing, and it will be established for you; so light will shine on your ways” (Job 22:28).

I declared His mercy over her. I declared His victory over every bit of it. Over the hospital room. Over the fear. Over every lie she’d ever believed about herself.

You need to know something about my granddaughter. She has always been a highly spirited girl. Big feelings. Big opinions. Big heart. The kind of spirit that makes some people tired.

It’s exactly why I love her so much.

She and I have a bond. I don’t fully know how to explain it. I just know that when she looks at me, she knows she’s safe with me. And I have prayed every day of her life that what we have will last through all of it, every season she will ever walk through.

The thread

My granddaughter carries a wound she didn’t choose.

Her mother made a decision, before this baby was even born, that she would not do what was needed for her child. So my granddaughter grew up knowing of her mother. Never really knowing her. A rejection from someone she’s never truly met. A question she can’t even put into words: What was wrong with me?

Nothing, baby. Nothing was ever wrong with you. You are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

But I know that question. I know it from the inside.

Because the thread didn’t start with her. It started with me. Before me.

I was born to a mother who had almost nothing. We were the poorest of the poor, always one step from losing even that. She had children she never cared for, and instead of protecting us, she hurt us. The people who were supposed to be my parents were the complete opposite of what that word means. So many horrible things happened in my childhood. Things no child should ever have to carry.

For most of my life, I carried them anyway.

I grew up, built a life, raised my children, went to church, read my Bible. And somewhere underneath all of it, I still believed I was just her daughter. That little girl. The one nobody wanted.

That’s how the enemy works. He doesn’t need new weapons when the old ones still cut. He reaches back into a family’s history, picks up a wound that should have stayed buried, and presses it into the hands of the next generation. Same lie. New voice.

You’re not wanted. You’re not enough. The people who are supposed to love you will hurt you instead.

Jesus told us exactly what the enemy is after: “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.” But He didn’t stop there: “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).

What God said on the highway

I wasn’t praying for myself on that drive. Not once.

I prayed for my son, sitting in that hallway without me. I prayed for his wife. I prayed for my granddaughter in that hospital bed, and for every one of my grandchildren, one by one, by name. Mile after mile, I was knocking on the doors of heaven for them.

And somewhere in the middle of all that knocking, God took me back to a morning a few years ago.

I was out on a run. Just me, the road, and my breath. And God started talking to me about my bloodline.

He told me I was not just the daughter of a woman who had nothing to give and gave us hurt instead. I was not just that poor little girl. I was His. He told me that when I truly gave my life to Him, my bloodline had been changed. What ran through my family would no longer be what ran through me.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

I had heard those words before. I’d read them, sung them, even taught them. But on that run, past fifty years old, I finally believed Him. All the way down, in the place where that little girl still lived.

I am free from that past only by a miracle I will never fully understand. God looked at me and decided I was worthy of something more, when I couldn’t even imagine it for myself.

And now, on that highway, with my hands on the wheel and tears running down my face, He reminded me of every word.

Because it was never just for me.

The same miracle He did in me, He can do in them. They are my blood. And my blood has been bought.

Peter wrote that we were not redeemed with silver or gold “from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19). What was handed down to us is not stronger than what was poured out for us.

Maybe yours looks different

Maybe for you it isn’t a hospital room.

Maybe it’s the son whose bedroom still looks exactly the way he left it. The one who used to call every Sunday, then every other Sunday, and now just doesn’t.

Maybe it’s the man across the dinner table. Twenty years of marriage, and tonight you can hear every scrape of his fork because neither of you has anything left to say.

Maybe it’s a diagnosis. A word the doctor said that you’ve been afraid to look up.

Maybe it’s grief. The empty chair. The coat still hanging by the door, because moving it would make it real.

Maybe it’s doubt. You still sing the songs, but lately your prayers feel like they hit the ceiling and fall back down on you. If that’s you, you’re in good company. A desperate father once cried out to Jesus, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). Jesus didn’t turn him away. He healed his child.

Or maybe it’s the distance.

Sometimes it’s miles. Hours of highway between you and the people you love most. Holidays that get harder to coordinate. Visits that turn into once a year, then once in a while.

And sometimes the miles turn into something harder. The calls get shorter. The texts get further apart. Then one day you realize you don’t really know them anymore. You don’t know what’s keeping them up at night. You don’t know what they’re dreaming about, or what they’re struggling with today. You’re on the outside of their life, catching bits and pieces from a social media post or a secondhand update.

So you call. And the conversation is hard. Not because anyone is angry, but because there just isn’t much to say. You ask how work is going. They say fine. You talk about the weather. And when you hang up, you feel farther away than before you dialed.

You love your people. They love you. But love that can’t find its way across the distance starts to ache.

Or maybe it’s your own childhood, still following you around at fifty.

I know these seasons. I’ve lived in more of them than I care to count.

Whatever your thread is, it does not get the last word. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you” (Isaiah 43:2).

He goes

In my family, when one of ours is in crisis, we go. We drop everything. Nobody asks if it’s convenient. Nobody asks if they deserve it. They’re ours.

There isn’t anywhere I wouldn’t go for the people I love. In any circumstance. In any situation.

That’s what I learned from God, not from my parents.

Jesus said a good shepherd with a hundred sheep will leave the ninety-nine and go into the mountains to find the one that wandered off (Matthew 18:12). He doesn’t send someone else. He goes Himself.

And He told a story about a son who blew everything and came crawling home, rehearsing his apology the whole way. But his father didn’t wait on the porch with his arms crossed. Luke 15 says he saw his boy while he was still a long way off, and he ran. An old man, robes flying, sandals slapping the dirt, running down the road to throw his arms around a son who smelled like the pig pen.

That’s our God. He doesn’t wait until morning.

And to my granddaughter, and to the little girl I used to be, and to every one of you who has been wounded by someone who should have protected you, Psalm 27:10 makes a promise: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.”

When the people who should have loved us hurt us instead, He takes care of us.

Shout at the walls

Picture the walls of Jericho. Thick enough to race chariots across the top. Tall enough to block the morning sun. Israel had no business winning that fight.

And God told them to walk. Just walk around it. Six days of silence, feet in the dust, the walls looming over them.

Then on the seventh day, the trumpets blew. The people shouted.

And the walls came down (Joshua 6).

“By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they were encircled for seven days” (Hebrews 11:30). Not by strength. Not by strategy. By faith.

That drive was my Jericho march. Four and a half hours of circling a wall I couldn’t see over. And somewhere along the way, I stopped whispering and started shouting.

Some of us have been walking around our walls for years. We’ve been faithful in the walking. But we forgot the walking was never the end.

At some point, we’re supposed to shout. Not because we see the walls cracking yet. Because we know who is going to bring them down.

Remember who He is

So when the wall feels taller than your faith, remember who your God is.

He is the God who looked out over darkness and nothing, and spoke, and light came pouring out (Genesis 1:3). If He can bring a universe out of chaos, He can bring something good out of yours.

He is the God who walked Abraham outside one night, an old man with no children, and said, Look up. Count the stars if you can. That’s how many will come after you (Genesis 15:5). He has always been the God of generations. He was thinking about your grandchildren before you were born.

He is the God of Nehemiah, who stood in the rubble of Jerusalem’s broken walls, mocked from every side, and rebuilt them in fifty-two days (Nehemiah 6:15). Some walls God tears down. Some He builds back, stone by stone. He knows which is which.

He is the God of David, the overlooked shepherd boy, the one left out in the field when everyone else was invited inside (1 Samuel 16). God chose him. And when David failed, and he failed big, God didn’t throw him away. He still called him “a man after My own heart” (Acts 13:22).

And He is the Father of Jesus Christ. He watched His own Son carry a cross up a hill. He could have stopped it. He didn’t. Because of you. Because of me. Because of my granddaughter. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16).

A God who would give up His own Son will not give up on yours.

He loves us. Everything else stands on that.

Grateful in the middle of it

“In everything give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Not for everything. In everything.

So here I am, in the middle of it, grateful.

All my life, I wanted a family. A real one. I wanted to do it differently than it was done to me. And by the grace of God, I did.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t fail. I did. Many times. There are days I’d give anything to go back and do it over. That night I stayed home instead of sitting in the hallway is one of them.

But grace grows things in ground we thought was ruined. I’m living proof. “Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22–23).

New every morning. Even the morning I finally got in the car.

My declaration

My children are grown now. My grandchildren are teenagers, finding their way in a world that tells them every day who they’re supposed to be. Some days, loving them from the sidelines is the hardest thing I do.

But no one is ever too grown, or too far gone, to be prayed over.

So I’m done just walking around the walls. I’m shouting.

The enemy will not have my children. He will not have my grandchildren.

They have been prayed over since before they could walk. They have been named before the Lord. They have been set apart for the work of God. The bloodline He changed in me, He is changing in them. The thread that ran through this family before me stops here, cut clean at the feet of a Father who has never once walked away.

He is “the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments” (Deuteronomy 7:9).

“All your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children” (Isaiah 54:13).

That’s my shout.

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Now it’s your turn. What wall are you walking around today? A child, a marriage, a diagnosis, an empty chair, the distance, a childhood you’re still carrying? Name it in the comments. Let’s shout together and remember who our God is. I’ll be praying over every name.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.