Beauty, Part Two: Exposure
To read Part One, click here.
When the light comes on, it does not ask permission to reveal what has been hiding in the dark.
When it comes, it simply shows what has already been there.
In 2025, Beauty did not just illuminate my life. It exposed it.
And what the light revealed was not just pain, but a pattern that I had lived inside of for far longer than I realized.
I had not been safe.
I was not safe in my body, in my boundaries, and in the way I carried responsibility, leadership, or love.
When the light of God’s truth shone into my life, it showed me a picture of myself that was hard to look at: standing exposed, heart and body open, allowing anyone and everything access. Words could enter unchecked. Expectations could press in beyond what I was capable of giving. Demands could take what they wanted. People could say what they wished, and I absorbed it all.
I mistook openness for faithfulness.
I mistook endurance for obedience.
I mistook availability for love.
Maybe it was my upbringing, or simple osmosis within church culture, but I came to believe that giving everyone access to my heart, mind, and soul was “godly.” That letting people back in, people who had hurt, abused, or defiled me, was restoration.
But in 2025, Beauty revealed how deeply I had misunderstood that call. Through my faith, my formation, my own instincts to survive, and even my longing to be Christlike, I had learned to live without protection. And I had learned to call that holiness.
The exposure of 2025 made something undeniable: I had been living without the safety of walls.
The Safety of Walls.
Scripture never treats the Tabernacle or the Temple casually. God is intentional about what enters, what remains, and what must stay outside. But I had allowed my body, my voice, and my calling . . . My Temple . . . to be handled without reverence by others, and by myself. (1 Corinthians 3:16)
As the year unfolded, the cost of that became visible.
My body began to collapse under the weight it had carried in silence. Pain spread, settled, and deepened in my bones and joints. My nervous system told the truth my mouth had learned to withhold. My mentor always says, “Whatever doesn’t come up and out of your mouth through words will come up and out of your body through actions.” I was living this out through 2025.
Words that had been buried inside surfaced as panic.
Exhaustion became unavoidable.
Old wounds I had survived but never tended began to ache for attention.
This was not weakness.
This was truth finally speaking.
The light revealed the ways I had learned to survive by over-functioning, by being dependable and strong. It revealed how often I ignored my limits in the name of service and ministry, and how often I abandoned my own safety to preserve connection with others. It revealed how early I learned that being useful was safer than being protected.
And once those things were visible, they could not be unseen.
Once those truths were brought into the light, something else began to happen.
A Stripping Away.
What followed exposure was stripping.
Stripping is rarely gentle and is very painful. It removes what once felt necessary. It lays bare places we learned to reinforce instead of heal. It brings into view what we would have preferred to mend quietly, out of sight.
In Scripture, stripping often comes before rebuilding. This is not a punishment, but a mercy. God does not restore what is unsafe without first telling the truth about it.
In the Book of Exodus, Israel leaves Egypt. This is the stripping. They left not just physically, but spiritually. Their identity as slaves to Pharaoh, their false sense of security, and their power were stripped away in the wilderness.
God didn’t give the instructions for the Tabernacle before they left Egypt.
He didn’t give the instructions for the Tabernacle for the first three months of the wilderness journey.
The wilderness wasn’t delay.
It was deconstruction before dwelling.
A year after Egypt started being stripped away from Israel, the Tabernacle of Moses was constructed, and God had a dwelling place in the center of His people.
It Needed to Go
What was stripped in 2025 was not my faith. Oh no. That got stronger.
It was my false identities.
The need to be perfect.
The need to be strong.
The need to keep everyone comfortable.
The need to manage other people’s emotions.
The need to carry what was never meant to be mine.
Layer by layer, those structures came down.
Because a sanctuary cannot be built until what makes it unsafe is removed. Walls are not signs of fear; they are signs of care. Boundaries are not a lack of love; they are how love is preserved.
As boundaries began to form in the year of Beauty, not everything and not everyone could remain. The loss was real, and the pain of it was sharp. But it confirmed what the light had already shown: some things only stay when there is no protection.
Beauty revealed what was broken.
Beauty revealed what was unsafe.
Beauty revealed what could no longer remain.
And in doing so, it pointed me toward what comes next.
If 2025 was a revelation, then the work ahead is to create a tabernacle in which the Lord is pleased to dwell. Our physical bodies are the Lord’s tabernacle.
His Temple.
The heaven-on-earth space that He chooses to dwell.
2025 revealed that this tabernacle had become grossly defiled.
In 2026, we start rebuilding according to His pattern.
If you find yourself in a season where light has revealed more than you expected, where what is being stripped away feels costly, confusing, or painful, you are not alone.
What is being uncovered is not evidence of failure, but an invitation to rebuild with care. If something cannot remain once truth and boundaries are present, it was never meant to be part of the sanctuary.
The God who reveals is also the God who dwells, and He is patient in showing us how to live as a people, and a place, where His presence is safe to remain.
With Grace and Peace,
ERIKA