Dawn of Valor

After losing my son and surrendering everything we knew—selling our home along with almost everything we owned and leaving all that was familiar—I’m learning what it means to become a woman of valor. Dawn of Valor is my raw and unfolding journey of grief, faith, and surrender, and an invitation to witness the quiet, extraordinary work of God in a life fully laid down.

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Dawn of Valor

008: The Weight of Glory and the Ache of Home | Recorded on My 33rd Birthday

December 10, 2025 • Mikayla Dawn Chaparro • Season 1 • Episode 8

Recorded on December 10th, my 33rd birthday, after nearly two months of silence. This episode is anything but polished. It is not triumphant. Its just honest.

I share what these last months have truly felt like beneath the surface: the homesickness, the continual pruning that does not pause, and the slow, unseen work of becoming a woman of valor in ways that look nothing like the epic transformation I once imagined.

In this episode, I talk about:

• What it has been like to live without any sense of home, stability, or familiarity
• The strange comfort I find in walking Target just to feel something familiar
• How the Lord seems to have removed even my natural sense of navigation as a living metaphor for how lost I truly am without Him
• The difference between pruning and discipline, and how both are signs of being heirs with Christ
• Why the Christian life feels so heavy: because glory itself is weighty
• How perhaps this life is strength training for what is to come
• Our recent Halloween and Thanksgiving

We are studying the “upside down” wisdom of Luke in Sunday school: how the Kingdom of God runs opposite of the world. It is one thing to know this. It is another thing to actually live it.

I also read from:

2 Corinthians 1:8–10
John 15, the Vine, the pruning, the abiding

And I close with a liturgy from Every Moment Holy for inconsolable homesickness.

This is not a story of arrival. This is the in between endurance.
Of learning that self sacrifice is not weakness but power.
That becoming may look like disappearing.
And that God is preparing us for a glory that has weight.

Thank you for walking with me through it.

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