What If This Is Not the End of Your Story?

You and I both know what it’s like when a story turns in ways we never would have chosen, when what we hoped would hold instead falls apart. Vaneetha Risner has lived with that tension. I remember having coffee with her at a writers’ conference the week her divorce was final, hearing pieces of her story for the first time, and noticing how she kept holding onto Jesus in the middle of it. I couldn’t love or esteem this woman more — Vaneetha writes with an honesty that doesn’t rush past pain and a faith that doesn’t pretend easy answers. She invites us to look closely at the places we’d rather avoid and to consider where God might still be at work, even there. This piece is one of those reflections—on loss, on unexpected life, and on what God can do in places that feel beyond hope. It’s a joy to welcome Vaneetha to the farm’s front porch today…

Guest post by Vaneetha Risner

I still remember the day my husband told me he was in love with someone else.

He had been distant for a while, and I told myself it was just work. We needed more time together, more space to talk. I assumed things would get better. I didn’t suspect this. Never this.

As the days unfolded, I heard words that sliced through me. I don’t know if I ever loved you. We never had that spark. Can’t you just move on? I replayed those words endlessly, asking questions that had no answers. Why didn’t he love me? Why had he chosen her?

I was wounded but still hopeful, so I held on for years. In my mind, restoration was the only good outcome. It was the only thing I prayed for and worked toward. But over time I began to see that I was holding onto that outcome more tightly than I was holding onto God. I needed to release it to Him.

After three long years of going back and forth, hoping that God would redeem our marriage, I signed the final divorce papers. I was a mess, though relieved that the uncertainty was finally over. Three years of hoping things would change, only to be disappointed again and again.

By then, hope itself felt exhausting.

Around that time, I went to a writers’ conference, wondering if God might be leading me in a new direction. I had never written anything beyond private journaling. But at that conference, something began to stir. 

I had been living for years in winter, with my heart and dreams buried. At the conference, people would ask about my family, just making conversation. But that felt painful. Saying I was newly divorced brought questions—some spoken, others carried in the ensuing looks. I wasn’t ready for that. Even mentioning the divorce made me feel ashamed.

I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done; I was ashamed of what had happened to me. Somehow shame attached itself to my identity, suffocating any sense that something good could still happen.

During that painful season, God literally brought a dead bush back to life. It wasn’t just any shrub—it was the camellia we’d planted in memory of our infant son Paul. When we moved, I’d lovingly replanted it by our new front door, but the summer heat was merciless. Its leaves dried up and fell off until only brittle twigs remained.

The lawn guy eventually chopped it down, insisting it was an eyesore. All winter long, I cringed at seeing the decaying stump where the camellia bush used to be. It was the same winter that my husband left. The empty space represented layers of loss—painful reminders of what had been but never would be again. I usually looked away as I walked up the front steps; the dead shrub was an all-too-fitting picture of my life.

He “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17b)

But one spring day, I noticed a tiny green shoot pushing through the dead wood. Within weeks, glossy leaves unfurled. Though the summer’s heat had destroyed its branches, its roots had survived. After a brutal season of dormancy and pruning, it was regenerating. I moved the camellia to a cooler spot, and it flourished, eventually bursting into stunning white blooms—more beautiful than ever before.

Seeing that camellia gave me hope. If God could revive that seemingly dead plant, maybe he could do the same for me, since he “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17b).

Maybe one day, I would thrive again too.

Believing I would thrive again was a process, since at first, all I could see was what I had lost. I saw the empty chair, my king-sized bed, the family photos that now felt like painful reminders of another life. I tried to block out the conversations I wanted to un-hear. I saw the places in church where I didn’t know where I belonged anymore and all the ways I was failing.

Over time I began to see something else.

I once believed that hard work, sacrifice, and prayer would guarantee a good marriage. When that belief collapsed, I didn’t know what to trust anymore. When that happened, I saw God loosening my grip on outcomes. Rather than frantically asking, Will this all work out the way I want? I began asking a different question: Will I trust You if it doesn’t?

What if the absence you keep staring at is not the end of the story?

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, something changed. Not all at once. Not in a tidy arc. But in real ways I could not have orchestrated.

If you’re wondering whether anything good can grow after what you’ve lost, I understand that question. Maybe your story feels stalled. Maybe what you loved is gone, and what’s left feels like a stump in the ground, daring you to hope.

What if the absence you keep staring at is not the end of the story?

It may be that what looks dead is about to spring to life.

Not because your circumstances are easier. Not because the pain is gone. Not because your questions are all answered. But because resurrection is what God does. He sprouts green shoots out of bare stumps and cascading blossoms out of what we once thought dead. 

And if He can do that with a camellia, He can do it with you.