The Road That Goes On

There is a strange quiet that settles over a home after crisis. Not peace—peace feels too clean, too resolved. This was something else. A quiet that made room for both sorrow and survival. A quiet that felt like the house itself was exhaling after months of holding its breath.

Life did not snap back to normal.
There was no normal to snap back to.

Instead, there was the long road forward—the road that doesn’t announce itself, doesn’t offer a map, doesn’t promise an arrival date. It simply unfolds one day at a time, whether you feel prepared for it or not.

In those early months, everything moved slowly. The days felt heavier than they looked. Morning routines resumed, but they felt different—fragile, like glass that might crack under the wrong kind of pressure. We made breakfast. We cleaned the house. We went to work. But beneath the surface, we were learning to walk with new wounds.

Priscilla’s journey was not linear. Some days she laughed—really laughed—and for a moment, we saw the girl she had been before the fire. Other days she retreated into silence, exhaustion wrapping around her like a blanket too heavy to remove. Healing rarely announces progress. Sometimes it looks like simply getting through another day.

My wife carried her own hidden ache. I could see it in the way she watched our daughter, as if memorizing her breathing, afraid that if she looked away too long, something inside our daughter might collapse again. We would talk late at night—soft voices, dim lights, long pauses. We were both trying to process a world that had changed without our permission.

The other children learned to carry their own confusion and compassion. They didn’t know the full story, but they understood enough to be gentle, patient, protective in ways I had never asked them to be. Families bend under the weight of suffering, but ours—by the grace of God—didn’t break. We shifted, adjusted, leaned on each other, each one taking a piece of the burden without ever naming it.

And me? I kept walking.

I preached.
I prayed.
I served.
I showed up.

But I showed up differently—slower, quieter, more aware of the people in front of me. Trauma had cracked something open in me, something that made room for other people’s pain, even when I still didn’t know what to do with my own.

The hardest part of the road wasn’t the big moments—it was the small ones.
The mornings when I woke up and remembered everything all over again.
The drive to work when the grief hit without warning.
The quiet evenings when the house felt too still, too aware, too changed.
The countless times I wondered how long healing would take, and whether I myself would ever feel whole again.

But there were also glimpses of grace.

A day when our daughter smiled without forcing it.
A moment when my wife laughed at something silly, and the sound felt like sunlight.
A family dinner where the conversation flowed without dipping into heaviness.
A Sunday morning where I lifted my hands in worship and felt—if only for a breath—free.

Healing is not the absence of pain.
It is the slow transformation of pain into something you can carry without losing yourself.

And that was what God was doing in us—not erasing what happened, but weaving Himself into every remaining thread.

I learned that the road after suffering is not a staircase you climb; it’s a path you walk. You don’t conquer it. You endure it. You don’t sprint through it. You move at the pace of grace—which is slower than we like, but wiser than we know.

There were days when I wanted closure.
Days when I wanted to feel “better.”
Days when I wished God would hurry.

But God does not hurry healing.
He stays with us in it.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the road became less dark.
Less heavy.
Less suffocating.

We were still broken, but not shattered.
Still tender, but not undone.
Still grieving, but not hopeless.

The fire had changed us.
But it had also revealed a God who did not abandon us in the flames.

As I look back now, I see that the road did not end.
It still continues.
Healing is ongoing.
Grace is ongoing.
Life is ongoing.

And so we walk—steadily, quietly, faithfully—trusting that every step forward is a step carried by the One who promised to be with us always, even on the road we never wanted to travel.

The road goes on.
And so do we.

Faith in the Dark is Jesse Velez’s true story of enduring faith, costly obedience, and discovering God’s presence in seasons of grief and silence. Best to read the 12-Part Series in order: