The Mirror God Sent Me

When Allen came into my life, I knew almost immediately that this wasn’t going to be business as usual. My spirit settled that question quickly. There was no flutter of confusion, no wondering where things might lead. Instead, there was something deeper — a quiet awareness that this encounter belonged to another category entirely.

A spiritual one.

God has been trying to get my attention lately. Not through thunder or spectacle, but through small, undeniable moments that refuse to let me look away.

Allen was one of them.

He is gentle in a world that has been anything but gentle with him. A man navigating a home where love comes with conditions and safety comes with a price. When he tells me about his life — the tension with his mother, the weight of being misunderstood, the exhaustion of trying to exist peacefully in a place that refuses to offer peace — I listen, I feel, I see myself in the space he holds.

And somewhere in those moments, I begin to recognize something familiar.

Not his exact story.

But the spirit of it.

The loneliness of being misunderstood by the people who were supposed to protect you. The quiet resilience required to remain kind when life has given you every reason to become bitter.

One night he fell asleep during a movie, exhausted, still carrying the residue of the world he had stepped away from just hours earlier. When I woke him, he looked at me through that foggy space between sleep and consciousness and asked a question that stopped my heart.

“What am I doing here?”

Then he said something even heavier.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to want.”

At the time, I heard it as the cry of someone who had been surviving for so long that he had forgotten what it meant to dream. Someone whose life had been shaped more by avoiding conflict than by pursuing joy.

It broke my heart.

But later, when I sat with those words in prayer, they started to echo differently.

I realized something unsettling.

The question Allen asked might also be a question living inside me.

Because if I’m honest, there are places in my life where I feel the same uncertainty. I know who I am in many ways. I’ve survived things. I’ve grown. I’ve evolved. But there are still parts of my purpose that I hesitate to step fully into.

There are still moments where God seems to be asking me a question that feels just as piercing:

Why won’t you shine?

And I don’t always know the answer.

Maybe something in me is still healing.

Maybe something in me is still afraid.

Maybe some parts of my spirit are still learning how to trust the light they were given.

Allen says he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to want.

And if I’m honest, there are moments when I’m not entirely sure I do either.
That realization humbled me.

Because while I may be further along the path in some ways, I am not standing outside the mystery. I’m still inside it.

Perhaps that is the real thread connecting us.

Not just shared pain from the past.

Shared searching in the present.

Sometimes I wonder if the ache I feel for Allen is actually something deeper — something divine moving through me. The way my heart hurts when I hear him question his own worth feels almost parental, almost sacred.

It makes me wonder if that’s how God feels about us.

Maybe the compassion I feel for him is the same compassion God feels for me.

Maybe the grief I feel when he doubts himself is the same grief heaven feels when I hide parts of my light.

Or maybe what I’m feeling isn’t just my own emotion at all.

Maybe it’s God’s tenderness moving through me, hurting for both of us at the same time.

I cannot change Allen’s family.

I cannot erase the things he has endured.

But I can offer him something that once saved me — the presence of someone who sees him clearly and refuses to let him believe that his pain is normal.

Sometimes people don’t need rescuing.

Sometimes they just need a safe place long enough to remember who they are.

That might be the role I’m meant to play in Allen’s life.

And perhaps Allen’s role in mine is just as important.

Because his presence has forced me to confront something I had been avoiding.

The question of whether I’m fully living the purpose I claim to believe in.

Through my music.

Through my writing.

Through my voice.

Allen is learning that he has the power to choose a life different from the one he was given.

And maybe I’m being reminded that I have the power to choose courage over hiding.

Sometimes God doesn’t send a miracle.

Sometimes God sends a mirror.

And if that’s what Allen is — a reflection placed in my path so that I might see both my past and my unfinished becoming — then the assignment is clear.

I will not turn away from him.
 

Because in seeing him, I am also being asked to finally see myself.