A Gift I Didn't Earn

August 4, 2026 

I used to roll my eyes at the phrase "justice impacted."

It felt like one of those terms — soft, careful, a little too on-the-nose. I'd hear it and think of it as something abstract, a category that belonged to other people's lives. My empathy for incarceration lived in small, safe doses: a sad story on the news, a line in a Sunday sermon about visiting the imprisoned. It never asked anything of me. It was a feeling I could have and then set down.

Then I met Brandon.

Falling for him felt like hopping onto a moving rollercoaster and trying to strap myself in as we hurtled toward the first loop. I remember one early phone call in particular — he was reading me an excerpt from a book about the realities of the prison system, describing his own experience as being in "the belly of the whale." I mumbled something about having to go, hung up, and sat there taking deep breaths, trying not to panic as the sheer size of what I was stepping into finally landed.

I had no idea, in that moment, what was actually awaiting me.

What I didn't understand yet — what I've come to understand deeply now — is that incarceration doesn't happen to one person. It happens to a family. For better or worse, the families are the ones left absorbing the impact, quietly and constantly. We're the ones sending money so a loved one can afford food or a tablet to take a class. We're the ones paying for phone minutes and video visits, driving hours upon hours for a single hour on the other side of the glass. Rehabilitation asks something of the person inside — but it asks something of us too. The families are a core foundation of the judicial system, even though no one designed it with us in mind.

Almost two years later, Brandon is still incarcerated. We're blessed to know there's an end in sight, but I won't pretend that makes the day-to-day easier. Being married like this — really married, not just in name — takes a kind of depth and commitment I didn't know I had in me until I had to find it. It's hard. It's also, somehow, one of the most beautiful things I've ever been part of. I wouldn't change a single piece of it. The love it's asked of me has felt, at times, like nothing short of a gift I was handed rather than one I earned.

I don't roll my eyes at "justice impacted" anymore. I am one. And more and more, I feel it pressing on my heart to find others who are too — to build something out of what we're each carrying alone. Support. Encouragement. A place to be honest about how heavy this is, and how much love can still fit inside it.

If that's you, I see you. And I'd love to connect.