Since May 2025, I’ve been tracking my HRV (heart rate variability) with a Whoop device but the Whoop also tracks lots of other health metrics including sleep. The joke with my husband is whoever gets the best sleep score has to wake up the next night to let the dog out (Ranger has a Chihuahua bladder in his Great Dane body and wakes us up often). I quickly learned that my HRV was pretty much trash, yet my sleep numbers are really good! I joked with Cody that with as poor as my HRV numbers are, the only thing keeping me alive is my great sleep, haha! Needless to say, I didn’t have to let the dog out. š
Back to HRV. A quick definition is this: HRV is the distance between your heartbeats and it essentially shows your body’s ability to maintain balance between your sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) systems. High HRV means strong parasympathetic influence, while lower HRV suggests the sympathetic nervous system is overactive, signaling stress, illness, or poor recovery. HRV is very person-specific but generally, from what I understand, it’s safe to say scores lower than 30 suggest there’s a bit of work to be done. I don’t know too much about “good” scores because, well, I’ve never had them! Haha!
Over the last few months, my score has ranged between 12 and 33 with an average of 21. I have tried so many things to increase my numbers! Gardening, napping, exercise, vacation, paddle ball, lunch dates, prayer, reading, grounding, face plunges (admittedly, I did not repeat this exercise because it’s awful), red light therapy, supplements, getting off my allergy medicine, hugging horses, date night, getting 10k steps a day, cold showers, yard work, singing, retail therapy, organizing, taking breaks throughout the day, breathing exercises, and more. I even tried NOT tracking it on the off chance that monitoring it was stressing me out, haha.
Nothing has helped. On a really good day, I would experience a 1 day spike into the high 20s. Only 2 days in the last 4 months have I broke into the 30s.
Last week, life made a bit of an unexpected pivot and it brought my dad back into my everyday life. Let me back up…
When I was an infant, my parents got divorced so I never grew up knowing what the “normal” 2 parent household looked like, but God DID provide 2 amazing sets of grandparents for me. While my mom had custody, my dad always lived and worked out of city/state/country so every other weekend I got to go visit his parents. Living with a single mom meant I naturally spent a lot of time at my mom’s parents house being babysat and eventually, when I was 11, I lived with them full time. (This is the short version of my childhood.)
I got to visit my dad a couple times a year though. I always loved my dad; he’s a tough guy but I really think I got my tender heart from him. Loyal, loving, and a take-no-sh*t attitude. Great makings for a great dad. It was just his work that kept us from seeing each other regularly.
So here I am, almost 42 years old, and my dad is back in the picture. Without hesitation, my HRV shot up into the 30s after the second day of his arrival and has remained there all week! I changed nothing. In fact, I actually did WAY more from a day-to-day and schedule perspective than I usually do!
The Lord has brought me to so much healing over the last 5 years. SO much healing! Physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational. Healing that I didn’t think was possible! Healing that was immediate and radical and healing that has taken a lot of time and patience.
Someone once asked me, “How do you think growing up without a father around affected you?” And I honestly did not have any idea! I felt completely normal! There was no longing in my heart, no regret, no resentment. I knew my dad. I saw him once in a while. I knew he loved me. I loved him. We never had a strained relationship. I’m pretty good at self-reflection and even I couldn’t come up with any “deficiency” I had from not having a father in the home.
When I prayed to the Lord to show me the “abundant life,” He clearly had bigger things in mind. I was simply asking for physical healing: easy stuff, bad fruit, you know, the things I could see, yet He was aiming for the deep stuff; stuff I didn’t even know existed. Things only a deeply personal God would know.
I believe this week has been an eye opening experience for me in regards to God’s design for the family unit and why the enemy tries so dang hard to destroy it. Fathers are important. More so than I ever knew before.
Do I feel more calm with Dad around? Not necessarily, but just because I can’t feel it doesn’t mean my body isn’t affected. I do feel supported though. In all my chores between our daily home and the ranch, Dad is helping to pick up the slack and that gives me more room to breathe.
For some areas of healing, only God can provide what we need. No doctor, medicine, therapy, or other man-made solution. Only God.
For those of you who are without a father or are unable to reach reconciliation, all I know is that God knows your situation, and His grace surpasses every lack that you feel you have. I had a strained relationship with my mom and she passed away 10 years ago. No reconciliation to be had and I’m sure there are plenty of wounds still present in my life due to that relationship so if God chooses to lead me to the healing of those wounds, it will look completely different than how He has led me this past week.
There’s so much more to tell, so many answered prayers to share, but I’ll save those for another post.
Until then, I’ll encourage you and remind you to never stop praying. Pray about EVERYTHING! You never know which one of those prayers God intends on answering this side of Heaven.
These lyrics hit me deep:
What if I give up right before
Consumed By FIre, What If?
He parts the sea
But what if the door swings open
To all I’ve been hoping and praying for
And what if my season of waiting
Was changing and leading to something more, more
What if jumping leads to flying
And fear didn’t stop me from trying
What if God’s just waiting for me to start seeing
How big He is
What if?
Don’t give up praying for the heavy things on your heart. What if you quit right before He answers?
On May 25th, 2025, I was praying for my dad from the depths of my heart and the Lord gave me this verse in response to my prayers:
The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says theĀ LordĀ of hosts. AndĀ in this place I will give peace, declares theĀ LordĀ of hosts.
Haggai 2:9
So I war with this verse and I use it as the beacon of hope to encourage me when I feel afraid. If I begin to doubt God’s provision for my dad, I remind myself that if I truly believe the Lord gave me Haggai 2:9, then I MUST hold fast to it, believe in it, and continue to guard my anxious thoughts and heart with this promise from the Lord.