Redemption

"...and I see my reflection in a snow-covered hill till the landslide brought it down." Fleetwood Mac

Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

I’ve been working on a creative project for a while now, one that I didn’t realize had a deeper, perhaps misplaced, emotional need behind it. You know how sometimes you throw yourself into something with your whole heart, and it’s only later that you understand what it was really about? Yeah, that’s where I was.

On the surface, the project was about creating something meaningful, something I believed in. But beneath the surface, I was asking it to do something much bigger. This project became the thing that, in my mind, would redeem a whole lot of pain I’ve been carrying for the past 16 years. Life threw some punches—things that shook my foundation, wreaked havoc on my sense of control, and left me feeling like no matter how hard I worked, the rug could still be pulled out from under me. These weren’t failures born of laziness or lack of talent. No, life just decided to play the role of a bully.

And so, this project became a way to make sense of all that suffering, to find some meaning in it. I wanted it to be the thing that redeemed those hard years, to show me that the pain had a purpose, that it was all leading somewhere good. This wasn’t just about getting recognition or feeling accomplished—it was about validating the struggle, tying a neat bow on years of difficulty, as if to say, “See, it all worked out.”

But then, it didn’t. The project wasn’t accepted. Instead of my usual response—dusting myself off, standing up again, and saying, “I’ll keep pushing”—this rejection slayed me at a deep level. It wasn’t just the project that didn’t land; it was that I needed this project to redeem the tough stuff. When it didn’t, the emotional weight I had placed on it came crashing down.

And that’s when I realized: I had been asking for something that this project—or any project—could never give me. I had been asking it to buy back all the losses, the time, the dreams that life had interrupted.

The Meaning of Redemption

The word “redemption” comes from the Latin redimere, meaning “to buy back.” When we seek redemption, what we’re really asking for is to buy back what we’ve lost. In this case, I was trying to buy back more than just lost time or opportunities—I was trying to buy back years of personal struggle, heartache, and disappointment. I wanted this project to give meaning to the hardships, to show me that they had been worth something. That the parts of myself that I had pawned in the service of a future that never came could somehow be reclaimed.

Of course, if we’re talking biblical redemption, that usually means someone’s got to die. (No wonder it feels so heavy, right?) But I wasn’t asking for that kind of redemption—just, you know, for the universe to give me a break and show me that all the mess meant something.

But the problem is, some things can’t be bought back. We can’t buy back the happy carefree childhood we deserved but didn’t get. We can’t buy back the time we lost with our kids because we were too busy keeping everything afloat. We can’t buy back the years we spent being responsible and choosing the safe path when part of us longed to backpack around Europe without a care in the world. We can’t buy back the feeling of being in love with the co-parent of our children when that love has faded. No matter how hard we try, there’s no redemption for some losses.

And that’s the hard truth I’ve been wrestling with. The deep, uncomfortable realization that not everything can be fixed, or reclaimed, or wrapped up with a satisfying conclusion. Some losses are just that—losses. And no amount of creative success, personal achievement, or outside validation can reverse them.

Photo by Adam Bixby on Unsplash

The painful truth is that some things simply can’t be bought back. No project, no achievement, no external validation will ever give us back the things we’ve lost or the time we can’t rewind. And for a while, that realization stings—it feels like life has dealt us irreversible losses. It’s tempting to believe that something out there—a project, a career, a relationship—could somehow make it all better, could redeem everything we’ve endured.

But maybe redemption isn’t about buying back what’s lost. Maybe it’s about how we choose to carry those losses forward.

What if the purpose of the pain isn’t to be redeemed in the way we imagined, but to reshape us, to add depth, to grow something new in the soil of what’s been broken? Perhaps real redemption is found not in trying to fix the past or undo what’s been done, but in learning how to live fully despite the losses, despite the missed chances. Maybe the redemption we seek comes from the meaning we make, not from the things we reclaim.

We can’t buy back lost time or missed opportunities, but we can stop trying to bargain with the past. We can let go of the idea that redemption comes from the world giving us a second chance to live it over. Instead, maybe the most profound redemption is the one we find within ourselves—the quiet, steady decision to live fully and deeply with what is, not what could have been.

We may not get to rewrite history, but we can still write the present. And in doing so, we discover that our relevance, our meaning, is not tied to what we’ve lost but to how we continue to show up, to create, to love, and to live, even in the face of all that remains unredeemed.