The Long Way Home
A twenty-eight-year journey through heartbreak, disappointment, shame, and the slow work of learning to trust God again.
I watched The Odyssey last week, with my girlfriends Maria and Linda, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
To be honest, any movie with Matt Damon in it already has my undivided attention, so perhaps I wasn’t the most objective viewer, but that’s beside the point.
I had never actually read The Odyssey. My knowledge of the story pretty much began and ended with the Trojan Horse. I had no idea that after the war ended, Odysseus spent twenty years trying to find his way home to his wife, Queen Penelope, and his son.
Twenty long and tumultuous years. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to go home or because he forgot where home was, but because life kept placing one impossible obstacle after another in his path. This sounded eerily familiar to me.
As I watched, I found myself wondering if most of us are on our own version of a long journey home… not always to a particular place, but back to some part of ourselves that we left behind long ago.
For me, it's been twenty-eight years since my marriage ended. But the story didn't begin there. It began with deep childhood wounds I had never fully healed from and, eventually, led to what felt like a divorce from God.
When my marriage dissolved, followed by years of emotional exhaustion in the New York City family court system over custody arrangements for our son, my faith quietly unraveled too. What I didn’t realize then was how tightly I had tied my hopes and dreams to the idea that a good marriage was proof of God’s goodness and provision for my life. Somewhere along the way, I had confused God’s faithfulness with my expectation of how I thought my life was supposed to unfold. In other words, I was in the driver’s seat.
So naturally, when my complicated marriage ended, I blamed Him.
It certainly wasn’t overnight or particularly dramatic; my real feelings hid beneath layers of shame and disappointment. I didn’t stop believing God existed. I simply stopped believing He really loved me. In my mind, He had broken His promises, just as other men in my life had.
Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t just grieving the loss of my marriage. I was grieving the loss of the future I thought God owed me because I had done everything “right.” I was the obedient pastor’s kid. I followed the rules. I tried to please everyone. I genuinely believed.
Only years later did I realize that somewhere deep inside me, I had made an unspoken agreement with God: If I’m faithful, You’ll protect me. If I obey, You’ll make my life turn out the way it’s supposed to.
When my marriage fell apart, and with it the future I had imagined for my son and me, that agreement fell apart too.
Resentment has a way of making itself comfortable and at home in our hearts. Mine settled in as one disappointment after another crashed over me, until it no longer felt like anger. It became distance, silence, ambivalence, and hiding.
Life, of course, kept moving. I raised my son, built a career, cared for countless patients, coached leaders, served in my church, and later cared for both of my aging parents. I checked all the boxes that responsible adults and good daughters are supposed to check. From the outside, my life looked full, productive, and even successful, but appearances can be deceiving.
Underneath my many masks, there was a large part of me that slowly wandered away. I hadn’t meant to get lost. I think I had missed a trail marker somewhere along the way, and before I knew it, I was standing on the other side of the mountain, so far from home that I wasn’t even sure which direction to start walking to next.
It would take twenty-eight years before I even considered turning around.
The funny thing about long journeys is that you rarely recognize the moment you stop wandering and start heading home. I certainly didn’t.
The journey home is rarely a single moment. It is a collection of small steps, tough questions, painful realizations, and unexpected discoveries.
In the second half of this essay, I share what those steps looked like for me—the continuous unraveling of shame, disappointment, and the beliefs that kept me at a distance from my faith, the Church, and God for so many years.
If you’d like to continue walking this path with me, I’d be honored to have you here.
Thank you for supporting Not a Bad Korean Daughter and allowing me to keep creating a space for stories that explore faith, family, healing, and becoming.
Become a Storykeeper:
If these stories have encouraged you, challenged you, or helped you feel a little less alone, you’re welcome to support my writing with a one-time gift.
Your support allows me to keep writing the stories that matter most to me—stories about identity, shame, faith, family, and the search for belonging.
For me, the turning point didn’t come because someone handed me all the answers all at once. It came because I grew tired of carrying disappointments for so long and challenging my long-held belief that if God truly loved me, my story should have looked different… better, a whole lot better than it did.
Last week, I began re-reading a book that my friend Jim gave me, The Cure: What If God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, and one idea has followed me long after I closed the book. The authors suggest that our greatest struggle isn’t simply that we fail; it’s that we hide.
That thought wouldn’t leave me alone because that’s exactly what happened in the Garden. Adam and Eve didn’t stop believing God existed. They hid because they were ashamed. They covered themselves because they were afraid of being fully seen and believed, perhaps like many of us do, that their failure had changed how God saw them.
I realized I had spent decades doing the very same thing.
Hiding my nakedness.
Not just the parts of myself I was ashamed of, but the deeply wounded places, the disappointments, the questions, and the parts of my story I didn’t want anyone, including God, to see.
I don’t think I was running from God because I hated Him. I was hiding because somewhere deep inside, I believed He was disappointed in me.
But the deeper truth was this: I was the one who was deeply disappointed in Him.
I don’t remember ever saying, “I’m done with You.” It was much more subtle than that. It sounded more like this in my head and in my heart:
“You could have stopped this, or one better- prevented it altogether.”
“I trusted You, but you couldn’t be trusted either.”
“You didn’t protect me as you promised.”
For years, those deeply buried beliefs became the quiet hum beneath the surface of my daily life. Like a generator running in the background, they weren’t loud enough for anyone else to notice. I kept going to church. I kept serving and wearing the mask everyone expected to see. But beneath that “Christian girl” face was a woman quietly struggling with shame, disappointment, and questions I didn’t know how to voice.
Then another question began tugging at my heart…
What if I had spent twenty-eight years angry at a version of God I had created from my own disappointment, rather than the God who was actually there all along?
That question didn’t erase my hurt or answer all my questions. But it made me curious enough to start looking again.
The way back home hasn’t looked anything like I had imagined. There wasn’t one prayer, one sermon, a life-changing retreat, or a miraculous moment that changed everything. It’s been much slower than that. More like learning to trust someone again after years apart, after disappointment, and after a relationship has been deeply ruptured.
Most days, I still find myself bargaining with God. If I do enough... If I help enough people... If I write enough... Old beliefs have deep roots. They don’t disappear overnight, but they do begin to loosen their death grip when they are finally brought into the light.
Perhaps that’s why The Odyssey affected me so deeply. Odysseus wasn’t simply trying to reach a destination. He was becoming someone different along the journey. Twenty years changed him. Twenty-eight years changed me in ways I never expected, or necessarily wanted. The home he longed for wasn’t exactly the home he returned to.
And neither was mine.
The faith I’ve come back to isn’t the same faith I left. It’s different. Less transactional. More honest. I’ve stopped asking, Why didn’t You save me from this? Instead, I find myself asking, Where were You while I was walking through it?
Little by little, I think I’m beginning to see the answer. He never abandoned me. I was the one who had stopped looking for Him because I was too hurt, disappointed, and deeply afraid to trust again.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s what coming home really means. It’s not about arriving with every question answered or finally understanding why suffering happens. It’s about realizing that the One we thought had abandoned us never actually left.
Maybe the longest journey isn’t across oceans… perhaps it’s the distance between the person we became after life broke our hearts and the person we’re slowly becoming as we learn to trust again.
Twenty-eight years later, I’m still walking. I still miss trail markers from time to time. I still have days when old hurts and disappointments whisper familiar lies. But now, when I realize I’ve wandered, I no longer assume God has disappeared.
Instead, I reach out to a trusted friend and share the doubts and fears I once kept hidden beneath shame. Other times, I take a long walk without my phone or earbuds, creating space to listen and talk to God. I still approach Him nervously sometimes, unsure of what to say, unsure if He’s really listening, and unsure if I’m ready to trust again.
But I’ve learned that trust isn’t built by pretending I have no doubts. It’s built by bringing the doubts to Him… all of them.
Then I pause, take a deep breath, and choose to believe a different narrative than the one I carried around for nearly three decades.
And every time I do, I am slowly discovering that home was never waiting somewhere in the distance, unreachable and lost.
The One I kept at arm’s length for so many years has been drawing me closer all along, ever so gently. He knows the places where I have hidden. He knows my fears, my disappointment, my questions, and the cynicism that grew from years of hurt and disillusionment with the Church and religion. And still, He never abandoned me and kept coming toward me.
Just like I used to sing as a little girl in Sunday School:
“Jesus loves me, this I know...”
The words are familiar. I have sung them hundreds of times.
But after all these years, I am realizing that knowing something and truly believing it are two very different things.
And maybe that is what coming home really means.
Not simply remembering what we once knew.
But finally allowing ourselves to receive it.
Thank you for choosing to walk alongside me. I am so grateful for you!
New essays every Sunday and Thursday.
From Reading to Reflection…
Sometimes a story reminds us that we’re not alone. And at times it stirs up questions we’ve been carrying around for years.
Personalized coaching offers a place to stay with those questions a little longer.
Together, we’ll explore the experiences, beliefs, and relationships that have shaped your life, uncover what still serves you, and gently make room for what comes next.
If you’d like to learn more about my background and approach to coaching, you can read more about me here.
If you’re ready to spend some time exploring your own story,
Wow! Your writing continues to conjure up so many things in my mind and heart. It truly gives me a starting point from which to start thinking, feeling and growing - like a catalyst to be brave enough to think about buried thoughts and feelings. The one line that truly resonated with me was "What if I had spent twenty-eight years angry at a version of God I had created from my own disappointment, rather than the God who was actually there all along?" Thank you for the gift of your beautiful writing - it is truly brave and thought-provoking, and you are helping others start to find their own path back home, too.