I didn't arrive here with a plan.

I arrived with a suitcase, a heart full of hope, and a marriage I believed in — a young Brazilian woman stepping off a plane into a new country, certain that a fresh start meant a fresh life. My English was good enough to get by, strong enough to smile through. What it wasn't strong enough to do was protect me from what was already waiting.

The man I married had lied. To me. To the Church. To everyone who stood witness that day. I spent years trying to build something real out of something rotten at its foundation — the way you do when you're far from home, far from family, far from anything familiar. You hold on longer than you should. You convince yourself it's faith. Sometimes it's just fear.

When the marriage finally collapsed under the weight of its own lies, I made the only decision I had left in me: I left. I packed what was mine, drove away from New Jersey, and followed something I couldn't fully name toward a city I had visited only a handful of times. Austin, Texas. Something about it had always stirred in me — something that felt like possibility. So I stayed.

Austin gave me hope. Austin also gave me pain. Both of those things are true, and I have learned not to separate them.

I met someone. And in one of the most human mistakes I have ever made, I chose to build a life with him before I should have. What followed was not the life I imagined. It became dangerous. I was domestically abused. And one night, at what I can only describe as my lowest moment, I woke up surrounded by eight EMS responders. A respiratory panic breakdown had taken me all the way to the edge. I had almost not made it.

That night changed something in me permanently. I found a new part of the city, a new apartment, a new beginning that was really just me — alone, quiet, and finally safe. Those four walls became the most consistent thing in my life. My refuge. My reset.

The years kept moving. I moved with them — through corporations and startups, learning to read rooms, industries, people. Learning the difference between what is good and what only looks good. Learning, slowly and sometimes the hard way, to stand up for myself. I went back to school again, this time for Digital Marketing at McComb Business School at the University of Texas. I started building a side business. For the first time in a long time, my skills and my hunger to create something meaningful were beginning to align.

In 2019, I flew to Brazil to visit my grandmother. I didn't know it would be the last time. Six days after I said goodbye and came home, she was gone. Six days. I carry that visit with me everywhere — the grace of having been there, and the ache of how thin the margin was.

I graduated from McComb Business School in 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic. There was no ceremony that looked the way I had imagined. The world was shutting down and taking possibility with it. I had a degree, two unstable jobs in a single year, and security that was slim to none. To survive, I drove for DoorDash and Uber Eats — navigating empty streets, delivering meals to strangers, quietly asking God what any of this was for.

A steadier job eventually came. Ground beneath my feet again, at least for a while. I kept going. Kept learning. Kept telling myself that surviving is its own kind of faithfulness — even when it doesn't feel like enough.

Through all of it — the nannying years and the grief and the classrooms and the startups and the pandemic and every quiet Sunday in between — there was the Church. In and out. Back and forth. I would run toward God when the pain got too heavy to carry alone, and drift when life calmed and obedience started to feel like something I could put down for a while. I wanted faith. I struggled with consistency. I understood surrender in theory. Staying there was something else.

I had nearly stopped believing things could be different.

Then came 2024. A year that arrived as a challenge and quietly became a reckoning. And somewhere in the middle of it, God found a way through a screen.

I started watching The Chosen. And something in me cracked open — not dramatically, not all at once, but with a certainty I had never felt before. Scene by scene, I began to see Jesus not as a distant obligation or a God I kept failing, but as someone who knew me. Who had watched every wrong turn, every breakdown, every wandering Sunday, every empty table, every night I almost didn't make it — and who had never left. Who was still there. Still waiting. Still calling my name.

This time, I didn't drift back.

Since December 2024, something is different. The obedience is real. The dedication is consistent. The faith is no longer something I pick up and put down depending on how hard the season is — it is the ground I stand on. I know it in a way I cannot unknow. This time is the time.