Dilemma in Relationships Working Through

Dilemma in Relationships Working Through Working through some challenges with good health in mind striving to gain understanding

06/10/2026

The Longest Journey — Inward

by Glenda

We have mapped every continent. We have charted the ocean floor. We have sent instruments beyond the edge of the solar system and received their signals back across billions of miles of silence. We have climbed the highest peaks, descended into the deepest caves, split the atom, and decoded the genome.

And yet there remains a territory most people never fully explore.

It has no coordinates. It cannot be photographed from above or measured with instruments. No expedition has ever returned from it with a trophy or a flag. And the journey to reach it — though it requires no passport, no plane ticket, no physical endurance — is longer, harder, and more demanding than any geographical distance the human body has ever crossed.

It is the journey inward.

And it may be the most important thing a person ever undertakes.

Why We Avoid It

The world has made the outward journey extraordinarily easy to stay busy with.

There is always another achievement to pursue, another notification to answer, another distraction polished and waiting. Modern life has constructed an almost perfect system for keeping human beings on the surface of themselves — moving fast enough that the deeper questions never quite catch up, loud enough that the interior voice never quite breaks through.

This is not entirely accidental. Noise is profitable. Distraction is a commodity. And a person who has never learned to be still is a person who can be sold something in every quiet moment — because they cannot tolerate quiet moments.

But beneath the noise, beneath the motion, beneath the carefully curated image of a life well-lived, there is always a self waiting to be known. And that self — unexamined, unaddressed, unnamed — does not disappear because it has been ignored. It shapes decisions from the shadows. It drives patterns we cannot explain. It surfaces in the relationships we keep damaging, the habits we cannot break, the fears we cannot locate, the emptiness that persists despite every outward success.

The journey inward is not optional. It is only delayed.

And delay always carries a cost.

The Ancient Summons

Long before modern psychology gave us language for the interior life, scripture was already calling people inward.

"Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." — Psalm 139:23-24

This is not a casual prayer. It is an act of extraordinary courage — an invitation to the most honest examination possible. David was not asking God to confirm how well he was doing. He was asking God to go where David himself was afraid to look.

The Hebrew word translated search — chaqar — means to dig, to investigate thoroughly, to examine something with painstaking care. It is the word used for mining, for the careful excavation of hidden things. David was not asking for a surface inspection. He was asking God to mine him — to go deep, to dig through the layers of performance and self-justification and religious reputation, all the way down to the hidden places where the truest self resided.

This is the beginning of the inward journey. Not self-help. Not positive thinking. Not the careful management of one's public narrative. But the ruthless, courageous, God-accompanied descent into the actual truth of who you are.

What the Journey Requires

The inward journey is not passive. It asks specific things of those who dare to take it.

It requires stillness. In a world that equates motion with progress and silence with failure, the willingness to be still is itself an act of resistance. Elijah did not find God in the wind or the earthquake or the fire — the grand, dramatic, externally impressive manifestations. He found God in the still small voice. And to hear a still small voice, you must become still yourself.

The journey inward cannot be rushed. It cannot be completed over a weekend or resolved in a single season of prayer. It unfolds over years, in the recurring willingness to sit with oneself long enough for what is buried to surface. Many people begin this journey and abandon it at the first discomfort — because what surfaces is not always pleasant. But the discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something real is finally being touched.

It requires honesty. The examined life is not the celebrated life. What the inward journey reveals is rarely flattering — the selfishness underneath the generosity, the insecurity beneath the confidence, the resentment behind the gracious smile, the fear driving the control. These are not pleasant discoveries. But they are true ones. And truth, however uncomfortable, is always the foundation on which genuine transformation is built.

This is why so many people prefer the outward journey. Outward achievements can be shaped and presented. Inward truths simply are.

It requires patience with the process. Transformation does not announce itself. It does not arrive in a single breakthrough moment — or rather, the breakthrough moments, when they come, are only visible because of the long silent work that preceded them. The journey inward is not linear. There are seasons of clarity and seasons of fog, seasons of rapid stripping away and seasons where nothing seems to move. Faithfulness to the process — staying in the journey even when it feels unproductive — is itself a form of the transformation.

The Prophets Knew This Road

Jeremiah was given a word that few prophets received — and it was not about kings or nations. It was about the interior landscape of the human heart.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" — Jeremiah 17:9

This verse is not a condemnation. It is a diagnostic. Jeremiah is not saying the heart is beyond redemption — he is saying it is beyond self-knowledge. The heart cannot accurately report on itself. Left to its own accounting, it will construct narratives that protect its pride, justify its choices, and assign blame in every direction but inward.

This is the great danger of skipping the inward journey: we become the unreliable narrators of our own lives.

We tell ourselves stories about why our relationships fail that always position us as the wounded party. We explain our patterns in ways that preserve our self-image. We trace our problems to external causes because internal causes are too close, too uncomfortable, too demanding of change.

The inward journey — particularly when undertaken with God as the guide — dismantles this self-protective storytelling. It invites us to see clearly where we have not wanted to look. And in that seeing, something remarkable becomes possible: genuine change, rather than the surface-level adjustment that passes for it.

Jacob at the Jabbok

No figure in scripture better captures the terror and transformation of the inward journey than Jacob.

Jacob had spent his entire life in motion — deceiving, acquiring, maneuvering, running. He had outwitted his brother, manipulated his father-in-law, accumulated wives and wealth and livestock and a sizeable future. He was, by outward measures, a man of considerable success.

But he had never stopped moving long enough to face himself.

The night at the Jabbok river changed everything. Alone — stripped of family, servants, and the buffer of company — Jacob met a presence in the dark and wrestled until morning. The text is deliberately mysterious about who or what he wrestled with. But what is unmistakable is that Jacob, for the first time in his life, could not outrun, outwit, or outmaneuver what he was facing.

"And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." — Genesis 32:26

This is the cry of a man who has finally stopped running and turned to face the deepest thing — the encounter he had been postponing his entire life. The wrestling is not just with an angel. It is with himself, with God, with the accumulated truth of who he had been and what he had done and what he was being called to become.

He came out of that night limping. His name was changed — from Jacob, the supplanter, the one who grasps and deceives, to Israel, the one who wrestles with God and prevails.

The limp was the cost of the journey. The new name was the reward.

This is always how the inward journey ends for those who see it through — not unmarked, not unchanged, not the same person who descended into the darkness. The deepest transformations always leave a limp — the permanent mark of having been broken and remade by something larger than yourself.

Going Down to Go Up

There is a consistent pattern in scripture that the world finds deeply counterintuitive: descent precedes ascent.

Joseph goes down into a pit before he rises to a palace. Moses goes into the wilderness before he stands before Pharaoh. Elijah collapses under a juniper tree before he hears the still small voice. Paul goes blind before he receives his sight. Jesus goes into the ground before the resurrection.

The pattern is too persistent to be coincidental. It is the architecture of transformation — the design of a God who does not build on the surface but always from the foundation up.

The inward journey follows the same design. Before genuine elevation comes genuine descent. Before real authority comes the dismantling of false authority. Before the fullness of what God intends can be inhabited, the emptiness that was always underneath it must be faced.

This descent is what the world calls failure. What the world calls breakdown. What the world calls losing — losing ground, losing status, losing the version of yourself you had so carefully constructed.

But scripture calls it something else entirely.

"He must increase, but I must decrease." — John 3:30

The inward journey is, at its deepest level, the slow, willing, costly decrease of the self-constructed life — so that something truer, something more durable, something planted by God rather than engineered by ambition, can finally have room to grow.

The Territory Nobody Can Map for You

Here is what makes the inward journey uniquely demanding: no one can take it for you.

Every other journey can be assisted. A guide can show you the mountain path. A teacher can explain the subject. A mentor can model the behavior. But the inward journey is solitary in a way that no other journey is. Another person can walk alongside you, pray for you, speak truth into you — but they cannot descend into your interior on your behalf. They cannot face what only you can face, name what only you can name, surrender what only you can surrender.

This is why it is the longest journey. Not because the geography is vast — though the human interior is deeper than we imagine — but because every step requires a choice that no one else can make. The willingness to look. The courage to stay. The faith to believe that what you find there, however difficult, is not the end of the story.

God is a patient guide. He does not rush the inward journey or demand it be completed on a schedule. He meets us at whatever depth we are willing to reach and invites us deeper — gently, persistently, with a faithfulness that outlasts every resistance we offer.

But He will not take the steps for us.

The journey is ours.

What Waits at the Center

Many people fear that the inward journey will end in devastation — that at the center of themselves they will find only emptiness, or darkness, or something too broken to be redeemed.

This fear is understandable. The layers that must be crossed to reach the center are, in places, genuinely painful. There is grief there. There is failure there. There is the accumulated weight of choices made in blindness and wounds received before we had any defense against them.

But this is not the end of what waits.

At the center of a life surrendered to God — at the deepest point of the inward journey — what the saints and the prophets and the transformed ones have always found is not emptiness.

It is ground.

Solid, unshakeable, bedrock ground — the place where identity is no longer dependent on performance or reputation or the opinions of others. The place where the self, finally known and finally surrendered, discovers that it was always held by something that cannot be moved.

"He only is my rock and my salvation; he is my defence; I shall not be moved." — Psalm 62:6

This is what the longest journey leads to — not a destination that looks impressive from the outside, but a foundation that holds in every storm. A self that is no longer running from itself. A life built from the inside out, on ground that does not shift.

An Invitation

If you have been living primarily on the surface — if the noise has been constant and the pace relentless and the interior life a country you have not visited in a long time — hear this as an invitation.

Not to a crisis. Not to a collapse. Not to the dismantling of everything you have built.

But to a beginning.

The inward journey does not require you to have it together before you start. It does not require certainty, or courage, or even much faith. It requires only the willingness to turn — to stop moving outward for long enough to ask what is waiting within.

The God who created that interior landscape knows every corner of it. He is not surprised by what is there. He has been waiting, with infinite patience, for you to be willing to explore it with Him.

The journey is long. It is the work of a lifetime.

But those who take it discover, somewhere along the way, that they have not merely traveled far.

They have, for the first time, arrived.

"Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." — Psalm 139:23-24

06/10/2026

Undone: The Work Humility Does in Secret

by Glenda

There is a work that happens where no one is watching.

It does not trend. It does not photograph well. It produces no immediate applause, no visible milestone, no moment worthy of announcement. And yet it is arguably the most consequential work a human soul can undergo — because everything built afterward is only as strong as what this hidden labor produces.

It is the work humility does in secret.

And it begins, almost always, with being undone.

The Undoing Nobody Talks About

Isaiah was not a timid man. He was a prophet of towering intellect and extraordinary eloquence — a man whose words have echoed through three thousand years of human history. He had spoken with authority. He had delivered hard words to kings. He was, by any measure, a man of standing and spiritual credibility.

And then he saw the LORD.

"In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple." — Isaiah 6:1

What followed was not inspiration. It was not empowerment. It was not a vision that sent him out immediately with new confidence. What followed was collapse.

"Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts." — Isaiah 6:5

Undone. The Hebrew word — damah — carries the weight of being silenced, cut off, brought to nothing. Isaiah did not arrive at humility through a course of self-improvement or a quiet season of reflection. He arrived at it through an encounter so overwhelming that everything he thought he knew about himself simply dissolved in the light of what he saw.

This is how the deepest humility works. It is not cultivated. It is encountered. And the encounter, by its very nature, must happen in a place most people never go — the interior, hidden chamber where the soul stands alone before God and all pretense falls away.

The Secret Place of Transformation

There is a reason Jesus connected humility to privacy.

"But when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." — Matthew 6:6

The closet is not merely a prayer technique. It is a spiritual geography — the place where the performed self cannot survive. When the door closes and the audience disappears, what remains is the truest version of who you are. And it is precisely there, in that unwitnessed space, that humility does its most transformative work.

The world shapes us to perform. From childhood forward, we learn to construct a self that is presentable, impressive, capable of earning approval. Layer by layer, the performed self is built — until many people have lived so long in performance that they have forgotten there is anything beneath it.

Humility, in secret, dismantles the performance.

Not cruelly. Not all at once. But persistently — the way water works on stone — it erodes the facades we have spent years constructing, until what remains is something far more durable than image: character.

What Humility Removes

Before humility can build anything, it must first take things away. This is the part of the process that feels like loss — and why so many people resist it or abandon it midway.

It removes the need for credit. The humble soul, shaped in secret, gradually loses its addiction to being seen. Work is done not for the audience it might attract but for the integrity it expresses. Seeds are planted that may not be harvested in one's own lifetime, and this no longer feels like tragedy — it feels like faithfulness.

It removes the fear of being overlooked. Pride is fundamentally anxious. It must constantly manage perception, guard reputation, and monitor what others think. Humility — the kind forged in secret, not performed in public — carries a deep settledness that has no need to be first, no compulsion to be noticed, no terror at being passed over. It has found its worth in a place no human opinion can reach.

It removes the brittleness of ego. A proud person shatters under correction. Criticism feels like attack; failure feels like annihilation. But the person humility has worked on in secret receives correction differently — not without pain, but without devastation. They have already been undone before God, and so being undone before people carries a fraction of the weight it once did.

It removes self-deception. Perhaps most importantly, humility done in secret is ruthlessly honest. In the private place, with no reputation to protect, a person can finally see themselves clearly — their motives, their patterns, their hidden selfishness, the gap between who they appear to be and who they actually are. This is not comfortable. But it is clarifying. And clarity, however uncomfortable, is always the beginning of real transformation.

What Humility Builds

Here is what the world misses about humility — it is not merely subtractive. Once the unnecessary is removed, once the false self has been quieted, the hidden work of humility becomes deeply constructive.

In secret, it builds integrity — the alignment of private behavior and public profession. The humble person does not need to remember what version of themselves they showed to which audience, because there is only one version. What you see is what is there. This consistency, forged in hidden places, is what makes a person genuinely trustworthy — not the trustworthiness of careful management but the trustworthiness of a life that has become the same all the way through.

In secret, it builds spiritual capacity. A proud vessel cannot hold much of God. Its own contents — opinions, ambitions, grievances, need for control — take up too much space. But humility empties the vessel. And an empty vessel, as any student of scripture knows, is precisely what God delights to fill. The widow's oil did not multiply in vessels that were already full. It multiplied in every empty vessel she could find.

In secret, it builds genuine authority. There is a kind of authority that comes from position — titles, platforms, offices. It is real but limited and ultimately dependent on external structures that can be taken away. And then there is the authority that comes from character — the kind that walks into a room and shifts the atmosphere without saying a word. That authority is never granted by institutions. It is forged in secret, in the years of hidden surrender and unseen faithfulness that most people never witness and history rarely records.

The Prophetic Witness

Hosea and Amos stood before a nation that had bypassed the secret work entirely.

Israel's worship had become public performance — elaborate, expensive, religiously impressive, and spiritually hollow. The altars were maintained. The sacrifices were offered. The feast days were observed with precision. But the hidden work of humility — the surrender of the private heart to the fear of the LORD — had long since been abandoned.

God's response through Amos was not anger at their lack of activity. It was anger at their abundance of activity without transformation:

"I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." — Amos 5:21

What God rejected was not worship. What He rejected was the substitute for worship — the public performance of devotion by people who had refused to be undone in private. They wanted the honor of being known as God's people without the humbling that genuine relationship with God always produces.

Hosea named the same disease from a different angle. Israel had filled its life with the noise of religious and political activity — alliances with Egypt, treaties with Assyria, multiplied altars, busy priests — while the inner life quietly starved. Like a silly dove, Hosea said, they fluttered between options, never landing, never settling, never going deep enough to be genuinely changed.

The undoing they needed could not happen in public. It never can.

The Reward That Comes Openly

There is a promise threaded through all of this — quiet, patient, and absolutely certain.

What the Father sees in secret, He rewards openly.

The work humility does in the hidden place does not stay hidden forever. It rises. It surfaces. Not in the way pride imagines — not in a sudden dramatic moment of public vindication — but in the slow, undeniable emergence of a life that carries weight, that endures pressure, that remains standing when lesser structures have collapsed.

Solomon named the reward in Proverbs 22:4 — riches, honor, life. Not as prizes dispensed to the well-behaved, but as the natural harvest of a transformed soul. A person remade by humility in secret carries those qualities the way a healthy tree carries fruit — not straining for it, not performing for it, but simply producing it because the roots go deep and the source is clean.

This is the paradox at the heart of the gospel and at the heart of all genuine wisdom: the way up is always down. The way to fullness runs through emptying. The way to being built up requires first being undone.

An Invitation to the Hidden Place

If you are in a season that feels like unraveling — if something in your life is being stripped away, if familiar certainties are loosening, if you find yourself in a place of unexpected smallness — do not be too quick to call it loss.

It may be the beginning of the secret work.

Isaiah was undone before he was commissioned. Jacob wrestled in the dark before he was renamed. Joseph was forgotten in a prison before he was elevated to a palace. David spent years in caves before he sat on a throne. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidental.

God does His deepest work where no one is watching. He shapes what the world will eventually see in the places the world never has access to. And what He is shaping, in those hidden seasons of being undone, is not a smaller version of you — it is the truest, most durable, most genuinely fruitful version of who He always intended you to be.

Let humility do its work.

In secret. In surrender. In the quiet courage of staying in the hidden place long enough to be changed.

What comes out of that place will be worth the undoing.

"Before honor is humility." — Proverbs 15:33

"Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time." — 1 Peter 5:6

06/10/2026

The Gate Called Humble

by Glenda

There is a gate that most people walk past without noticing. It does not gleam. It carries no inscription of greatness. No crowd gathers at its entrance to applaud those who pass through. In fact, to enter it, you must do something the world has spent centuries teaching you not to do — you must bow.

The gate is called Humble.

And on the other side of it, Solomon tells us, are riches, honor, and life itself.

A Verse the World Misreads

"By humility and the fear of the LORD are riches, and honor, and life." — Proverbs 22:4

Most people read this verse as a transaction. Behave humbly, reverence God, and He will reward you with prosperity and reputation. But Solomon is not writing a formula. He is describing a transformation — a complete reordering of the inner person that makes them capable of carrying what God desires to give.

Riches given to an arrogant heart become weapons. Honor bestowed upon a proud soul becomes poison. Life handed to someone who has never bowed before the LORD becomes a long exercise in self-destruction. This is precisely what the prophets watched happen to Israel — a people who received every blessing God offered and turned each one into an instrument of their own ruin.

The gate called Humble is not the entrance to comfort. It is the entrance to capacity — the ability to hold what heaven releases without being destroyed by it.

What Humility Actually Is

We have flattened humility into a personality trait — quietness, self-deprecation, the habit of deflecting compliments. But the Hebrew concept of anavah is something far more seismic. It is a settled, internal surrender of the self-sovereign life. It is the decision — made not once but daily — to stop being the center of your own story.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less.

It is the posture of a person who has stood in the presence of something infinitely greater than themselves and been permanently rearranged by the encounter. Moses came down from Sinai with his face shining — but also with sandals worn from bowing. David, the king who conquered nations, described himself as a worm before God. Isaiah, the most eloquent prophet in Israel's canon, opened his mouth in the throne room of heaven and said only one thing: "Woe is me, for I am undone."

These were not weak men. These were men who had passed through the gate — and come out the other side carrying authority that no self-promotion could manufacture.

The Fear That Opens the Gate

Humility does not stand alone in Proverbs 22:4. It is always accompanied by the fear of the LORD — and this pairing is not accidental. They are two sides of the same spiritual reality.

The fear of the LORD is not dread. It is not the cowering of a servant before a tyrant. It is the breathless, stabilizing awe of a creature who has genuinely encountered the Creator — and chosen to live every subsequent moment in the light of that encounter.

When you truly fear the LORD, lesser fears lose their grip. You stop fearing what people think of you. You stop fearing the loss of status, of comfort, of relevance. The opinions of the crowd — which drive so much of human pride — simply shrink in the shadow of the One before whom every knee will eventually bow.

This is why humility and the fear of the LORD always travel together. Fear of God is what makes humility sustainable. Without it, humility collapses into performance — a carefully managed image of lowliness that is, at its core, just another form of pride.

What Israel Chose Instead

The prophets Hosea and Amos stood at the gate called Humble and watched their nation walk past it — generation after generation — choosing the wider road of self-sufficiency and religious theater.

Hosea watched a people grow fat on God's provision and forget the hand that fed them. "When I fed them to the full, they were filled — and their heart was exalted; therefore have they forgotten me," God declared through him. Prosperity without humility had produced exactly what Solomon warned against — riches that destroyed rather than blessed, honor that corrupted rather than refined.

Amos watched the wealthy of Israel construct entire lives on the labor of the poor — ivory beds, summer houses, elaborate feasts — while crushing the needy at the gates. They still brought their offerings. They still observed their festivals. But the gate called Humble had never been entered. Their religion was loud and their conscience was silent, and God's response was devastating in its clarity: "I hate, I despise your feast days."

What neither nation nor individual can afford to miss is this: God does not reject abundance. He rejects abundance untransformed by humility. The vine that bears fruit only for itself — Hosea's haunting image — is not blessed. It is barren in the deepest sense, no matter how heavy its branches appear.

The Gate in Every Generation

This is not ancient history. The gate called Humble stands at the entrance of every life, every generation, every civilization — and the choice to enter or bypass it shapes everything that follows.

We live in an age that has built entire industries around self-elevation. Social platforms reward performance. Culture applauds the loudest voice, the boldest claim, the most curated image of success. To suggest that the path to true riches, genuine honor, and abundant life runs through a narrow gate marked Humble is to speak a language the age finds almost incomprehensible.

And yet — look around. The evidence is everywhere. Leaders who could not bow have fallen publicly under the weight of what they could not carry. Institutions built on pride have fractured from within. Individuals who climbed every ladder available have arrived at the top and found it hollow.

Solomon was not writing poetry. He was writing physics — the spiritual laws that govern how a life holds together or falls apart.

The Invitation

The gate called Humble is still standing. It has never been locked, never been moved, never been replaced by something more modern or more comfortable. It looks the same today as it did when Solomon described it, when Hosea wept through it, when Isaiah fell on his face before it.

To enter it, you must release your grip on your reputation. You must let God be the architect of your honor rather than engineering it yourself. You must bow — not because you are worthless, but because you have finally understood what you are worth and Who assigned that worth to you.

On the other side of that bowing is not smallness.

On the other side is riches, and honor, and life — the kind that does not fade, does not corrupt, and cannot be taken away by any shift in culture, circumstance, or crowd.

The gate is open.

It is narrow, yes.

But it leads somewhere the wide road never will.

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