Doing The Best I Can With What God Gave Me
- Hampton Law Firm ⚖️
- Jun 13
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 14
There are seasons in life when the hardest truth is not that you do not know what to do.
Sometimes the hardest truth is that you do know. You know the answer. You know the direction. You know the place you are standing in can no longer hold the life you are supposed to build. What makes it painful is not confusion. It is acceptance. It is the grief of realizing that the next right step may be the very step you never wanted to take, because knowing you have to leave does not mean you wanted to leave. Knowing something is necessary does not make it feel less devastating. It only removes the illusion that you can keep bargaining with reality.
I did not simply leave this small town once and then return to it in one clean circle. My relationship with this place has always been more complicated than that. I grew up here as a little girl, then my family moved to a neighboring city when I was around twelve years old. I grew up there too. I went to school there, then to college, then to law school, and over the years I was in and out of this town enough for it to feel both familiar and distant at the same time. It was part of me, but it was not the only place that made me. That is probably why coming back as an adult felt less like something I had to do and more like something I was choosing with intention. I chose to return. I chose to believe I could build here. I chose to believe that the place connected to my childhood, my father’s career, and my family history could also become the place where I built my own life, my own practice, and my own family.
That choice matters, because the pain now is not just about leaving a place. It is about accepting that the place I deliberately chose may still not be the place I am meant to remain. I came back with purpose. I came back believing that roots, hard work, family history, and determination could become enough to make a life feel settled. I believed I could take what I had seen growing up and build my own version of it. I believed that if I served people well, carried myself with dignity, worked harder than anyone expected, and kept showing up, then this town would eventually feel less like a place I was trying to prove myself inside of and more like home.
For years, I tried to make that true. I worked. I built. I raised children. I poured myself into a law practice, into clients, into responsibilities, into the belief that a life could be made stable by sheer commitment. I do not regret the work. I do not regret the people I have helped. I do not regret the strength this place required me to develop. I do not regret the version of me who believed she could come back and make something meaningful here. In many ways, she did. But there is a difference between honoring what a place has meant and pretending it can still be what it no longer is. A chapter can matter and still end. A place can shape you and still not be where you are supposed to remain. A decision can have been right for one season and still become wrong for the next.
That is the part I am having to face now. I do not have to sit here and wonder whether I can survive in this place. I already know I can. I have survived here. I have functioned here. I have succeeded here. But survival is not the same as belonging, and success is not the same as peace. Work can give a person purpose, but work alone cannot be the only reason to get out of bed in a town that has become tied to pain. There comes a point when you realize that being useful in a place is not the same as being alive in it. There comes a point when the life you built starts to feel less like a home and more like a structure you keep maintaining because you are afraid of what it would mean to stop.
It can happen on the most ordinary day. It can be a beautiful Saturday afternoon in the summer, the kind of day when other people are outside with their families, going to the lake, laughing, cooking, riding around, and living inside the normal rhythm of a life that still feels intact. And you sit there realizing that the life you tried so hard to build has come apart in ways other people may never fully understand. You remember that you chose this place. You chose to come back. You chose to try. You chose to believe that if you did the right things, a good life would eventually grow from them. Then one day you look around and realize that the choice that once felt brave now feels like something you have outgrown, even if outgrowing it breaks your heart.
That does not mean the past was a mistake. I think that is one of the lies that keeps people stuck. We assume that if we leave, then we are admitting we were wrong all along. But maybe leaving does not always mean the original decision was wrong. Maybe leaving means the original season has been completed. The younger version of me who came back here was not foolish. She was determined. She was hopeful. She was trying to take a place that had been part of her story since childhood and make it into a permanent home. She believed in work, family, service, and the possibility of building something meaningful in a place that already carried her history. She did build something. But the woman I am now is allowed to tell the truth that a place can be part of your roots without being the soil where you are meant to keep growing.
The hardest part of that truth is not professional. It is personal. It is motherhood. It is the guilt that comes when your pain is so heavy that you want your children to be with their dads most of the time because you do not want them watching you cry over the life that has broken open in front of them. It is the guilt of knowing you are trying to protect them from your grief, while also feeling like that protection looks too much like absence. It is wanting them spared from the sight of you falling apart, and then hating yourself for wanting space to fall apart. It is knowing they need a mother, and knowing you are still their mother, but also knowing that right now you are a mother carrying a level of pain that makes ordinary presence feel almost impossible some days.
That kind of guilt is vicious because it accuses you from both sides. If they are with you and they see the tears, you feel guilty. If they are not with you and you can finally collapse, you feel guilty. If you try to hold it together, you feel fake. If you cannot hold it together, you feel weak. But maybe the more honest truth is that a mother in pain is still a mother. A mother who is grieving is still a mother. A mother who needs time to become steady again is not abandoning her children; she is trying not to let her brokenness become the atmosphere they breathe every day. That does not make the guilt disappear, but it does give the guilt some context.
When you sit still with God long enough to see that your days are spent wrestling back and forth with the mom guilt that comes from that deep emotional pain, he may show you that the life you are currently living isn’t the life he planned for you. God didn’t intend for anyone to live a life of constant pain. When you realize you are, God may do things to force you to move into the direction he had planned for you, even if it’s not where you wanted to go.
The truth is…you aren’t supposed to be living a life that has you hurting so bad that you don’t want your kids to see you for fear of ruining them. You’re supposed to be living a life of love, with your children beside you enjoying their childhood. If that’s not the life you’re living, you may be like me, you may find God moving you in a direction you didn’t want to go. Not because you’re running away, but because you realize that you’re only way through the mess is to take the next step forward, and let God lead the way.
I keep thinking about something my mother told me when I was younger. As a teenager, I was very focused on being thin, the way many young girls are before they understand how narrow and unkind that measurement can be.
One day, I asked my mother if I was skinny, and she told me I was toned. At that age, I took it as an insult. I wanted the exact word I had asked for, not a different one. But my mother sat me down and explained that she was not criticizing me. She was telling me that God had given me one body, and she saw me working hard every day to do the best I could with what I had been given. I did not understand then how much wisdom was in that. I understand it now.
Maybe that is the only real instruction I have at this point. I cannot take someone else’s choices and turn them into the family I thought I was building. I cannot force someone to be present for the family God entrusted them with. I cannot take a town and force it to feel like home when everything in me knows it is time to go. I cannot take the past and make it become the future simply because I invested so much in it. I cannot take a life that has stopped fitting and keep calling it obedience just because leaving feels terrifying. But I can take what God gave me. I can take my mind, my education, my children, my work ethic, my experience, my instincts, my resilience, my fear, my grief, and whatever strength is still left underneath all of this pain, and I can do the best I can with that.
Doing the best I can does not mean pretending I am fine. It does not mean making a dramatic decision overnight or acting out of panic. It means taking the next responsible step toward the life I already know I have to move toward. Maybe the next step is a business meeting.
Maybe it is a lunch with someone who can see a door I have not seen yet. Maybe it is discussing a new market, a new structure, a new professional role, a new business idea, or a new way to use the skills I have spent years developing. Maybe it is looking honestly at whether the practice I built has to remain tied to the place where it began, or whether it can evolve into something broader, freer, and better suited for the person I am becoming now.
That is the part I can control. I can take the next meeting. I can answer the next call. I can sit down at the next table. I can brainstorm the next business model, the next career decision, the next place, the next version of a life where I am not merely surviving the day but actually moving toward belonging. I can stop requiring myself to know every detail before I begin. I can stop confusing fear with warning. Sometimes fear means stop, but sometimes fear simply means the next step matters. And this next step does matter. It matters because staying is no longer the answer, even if leaving hurts. It matters because my children need a mother who is not slowly disappearing inside a life that has become too painful to inhabit. It matters because God did not give me gifts, training, endurance, and discernment so I could spend the rest of my life mistaking survival for obedience.
I know I have to go, even if I do not want to. That sentence is simple, but living inside it is not. There is grief in it. There is fear in it. There is anger in it. There is disappointment in it. There is the ache of realizing that something you chose with hope may now have to be released with wisdom. But there is also clarity in it. There is a strange mercy in finally knowing the truth, even when the truth breaks your heart. I may not be able to make the whole plan today, but I can make the next move. I can put one honest decision in front of another. I can let the life I built here be part of my story without letting it be the end of my story. I can grieve what did not become what I hoped, and still refuse to make grief my permanent address.
When we are down, it is easy to turn on ourselves. Human beings do that. We take pain and grief and rejection and loss, and somehow we let those things become evidence against our own worth. I am no different. I am absolutely no different. When I am grieving, I can feel worthless. I can feel like the pieces of my life that did not work somehow say something final about me. But deep down, I also know better than that. I know how to work. I know how to think. I know how to read a room. I know how to build. I know how to plan. And, damn it, I am a good attorney. Those things do not disappear because I am hurting. They do not disappear because my life has changed. They do not disappear because I have to leave a place I once thought I could make permanent.
So for now, I am taking what God gave me and doing the best I can with it. Not with the life I imagined. Not with the version of the story I wish I could still believe in. Not with the place I tried so hard to make permanent. With this life. This truth. These children. This work. This pain. This ability to think, plan, build, and begin again. I can take my skills wherever I need to take them. I can take the next meeting, the next idea, the next plan, the next opportunity, and the next step toward a life where I am not forcing myself to belong where I no longer do. And maybe that is how leaving becomes something more than loss. Maybe it becomes stewardship. Maybe it becomes obedience. Maybe it becomes the first step toward a life where I do not have to force belonging, because I finally have the courage to go where I actually belonged in the first place.
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Judith L. Hampton
Attorney-at-Law
Hampton Law Firm
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