Welcome to Steadfast Sanity

Where ancient wisdom meets modern truth

A Note from Rachael

Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome to my corner of the internet—a place I’ve named with intention and deep meaning: Steadfast Sanity.

Perhaps you knew me from my old blog, “Rachael Around The World,” where I documented my missionary adventures with the wide-eyed wonder of youth. That girl—that brave, broken, beautiful eighteen-year-old—wrote with a heart full of questions she wasn’t allowed to ask and pain she wasn’t permitted to feel. She apologized for her own breaking, blamed herself for the cracks others had carved into her spirit.

I stopped writing on June 29, 2014. Not because I ran out of words, but because I had run out of ways to make sense of a God I thought had abandoned me and a faith that felt more like prison than freedom.

Ten years of silence. Ten years of healing. Ten years of learning that sometimes the most sacred thing you can do is walk away from what everyone else calls holy, so you can find what actually is.

Why Steadfast Sanity?

I am thirty years old, and I have lived a thousand lives. I carry ancient knowledge that defies my years—not because I’m special, but because I’ve been held by the Real Jesus through fires that would have consumed a lesser love. The Jesus they tried to box, sell, and weaponize against me? He was never the Jesus who whispered peace into my 3 AM panic attacks and taught me that questions aren’t rebellion—they’re the language of the seeking heart.

Steadfast because some truths are worth holding onto, even when everyone around you is letting go. Even when holding on feels like drowning. Even when the cost of truth is exile from everything familiar.

Sanity because in a world that calls your deepest wisdom crazy, that labels your healthiest boundaries selfish, that mistakes your authentic self for rebellion—sometimes the most radical thing you can do is trust your mind. Your own heart. Your relationship with the Divine.

This space is for the square pegs trying to fit into round holes. For the ones who’ve been told their questions are dangerous and their needs are too much. For anyone who’s ever felt like the problem in rooms full of people claiming to love like Jesus while acting nothing like Him.

What You’ll Find Here

In these first posts, I’m excavating my story—not with bitterness, but with an archaeologist’s precision, uncovering treasures buried beneath years of shame. You’ll read about Y.W.A.M. (Youth With A Mission), about that eighteen-year-old girl who entered their college program carrying suitcases full of hope and came home with a heart full of questions no one wanted to answer. You’ll also journey with me through those earlier missionary adventures—like Bulgaria in 2012—that shaped my faith before Y.W.A.M. entered the picture.

I’ll share the diary entries I wrote then—raw, unfiltered, honest in ways that might make you uncomfortable. Because sometimes discomfort is the price of truth, and truth is the price of freedom.

This isn’t just my story. It’s a love letter to everyone who’s ever been made to feel like their authentic self was somehow wrong. It’s proof that the God worth knowing isn’t threatened by your questions, intimidated by your complexity, or put off by your refusal to shrink.

The Girl Who Became

I am no longer that eighteen-year-old apologizing for her existence. I am married now, living far from that small Georgia town where I learned to make myself small. I have found my way back to Jesus—the real one, who never asked me to diminish my light so others could feel comfortable in their darkness.

I write now not as someone seeking permission to exist, but as someone who has learned that the most profound act of worship is becoming exactly who God created you to be—especially when that person doesn’t fit anyone else’s definition of holy.

Some stories take a decade to tell correctly. Some truths require the perspective that only comes from walking through the fire and emerging with gold in your hands instead of ashes in your mouth.

This is my story. But more than that, it’s an invitation—to anyone who’s ever felt like the problem, the difficult one, the square peg in a world of round holes. You’re not broken. You’re not too much. You’re not the problem.

Sometimes the most sacred thing you can do is trust that still, small voice that sounds nothing like the crowd.

Welcome to Steadfast Sanity. Welcome home.

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” —Rumi