Faith That Got Road-Tested
Some things I thought I believed turned out to be habits more than convictions. I had to let those go. What was left — what didn’t shake loose no matter how hard the road got — that became the real thing.
Suggested tags: faith, trucking life, road reflections, women in trucking, personal essay
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I’ve been a woman of faith for a long time. But I’ll be honest with you — the faith I drive with now doesn’t look exactly like the faith I started with.
The road changed it. I think for the better. But it had to break some things first.
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There’s a version of faith that works fine when life is manageable. When the variables aren’t too extreme and the losses aren’t too close. It’s real faith, but it’s untested faith. It hasn’t been put in a situation where it was the only thing left standing.
Long-haul trucking has a way of creating those situations.
You’re alone at 3 a.m. on a stretch of highway with no signal and something’s wrong with the load and dispatch isn’t picking up. Or you’re sitting at a shipper that’s four hours behind and the clock is running and there is nothing you can do about it. Or you’re weeks into a stretch that was supposed to get easier by now, and it hasn’t, and you’re running out of road to wait it out on.
What you reach for in those moments — that’s your real foundation. Not the theoretical one. The actual one.
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I found out what mine was made of.
Not all of it held up the way I expected. Some things I thought I believed turned out to be habits more than convictions. I had to let those go. What was left — what didn’t shake loose no matter how hard the road got — that became the real thing.
Smaller, maybe. But solid.
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I don’t talk about faith constantly on this channel. It’s not a preaching channel. But it’s not invisible either, because it’s part of how I drive and why I drive and what I think safety is actually about.
Caring about the people on the road with me isn’t just professionalism. It’s something that runs deeper than that.
Eleven years of hard miles will either hollow you out or ground you. For me, faith is part of what kept me grounded when everything else was moving.
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I don’t know what you reach for out there on the road. But I hope you’ve got something real to hold onto.
The miles have a way of finding out.
