I Walked into The Flames

I need to tell you something I haven't fully said out loud yet.

 

Not as a founder. Not as a brand. Just as me, somebody who was lost before the name DLVRD ever existed, and if I'm being honest, still has mornings where the lost feeling knocks like it never left.

 

But I know something now that I didn't know then. I know what it means to walk into the flames on purpose.

 

There was a season... and I lived in it for years... where I had everything the world says should be enough. A very large salary. A title. A plan. And I was chronically, quietly ruined. -$40 in a bank account that should have been full. Not because of bad luck. Because of me. Because of the cycle I kept waking up inside: manic highs where money felt limitless and spending felt like proof, I was finally okay, followed by depressive crashes where I'd stare at the receipts and feel like a fraud. Over and over. The same loop. Different amounts. Same shame.

 

I've been homeless. More than once. Not sleeping-in-a-shelter homeless — though I have some stories there too, but the kind where you're couch-surfing and telling yourself it's temporary while your soul is screaming that something is fundamentally broken. I ate pride for breakfast because I had nothing else. I told myself the story that smart people don't end up like this, and then I'd go look in the mirror and wonder what that made me.

 

I was fighting addiction. Depression. A body that felt like it was staging a protest against everything I was trying to force it through. The weight, the health stuff, that wasn't separate from the rest of it. It was all the same wound wearing different clothes.

 

And underneath all of that, there was a question I was terrified to look at directly: "Who am I, really?" Not just financially. Not just physically. I went through a season of trying to understand what love looks like, my own sexuality, what I was reaching for, what I was running from. The church said one thing. The world said another. And I was somewhere in the middle, trying to figure out if God still had a claim on me after all of it.

 

Spoiler: He did. He does.

 

I found New Hope Baptist Church in Boston when I didn't have much else. And I won't romanticize it and say everything clicked immediately, it didn't. But what I found there was consistency. People who kept showing up. A God who apparently doesn't check your credit score before deciding you're worth pursuing. "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God." (Romans 8:38-39) I had to keep going back to that verse because I kept forgetting it applied to me.

 

The church and God became my constants when everything else was variables.

 

The DLVRD started from that place. Literally from that wreckage.

 

I built the first version of this brand with -$40 in the bank. Not as a metaphor. I mean the number on the screen was -$40. And I had this thing stirring in me, this collection I was calling "Lost", because I needed to make something out of the chapter, I was still living in. The Phoenix-Cross hoodie. -The DLVRD Essentials. Pieces that were designed to say, "I was here in the dark and I'm still standing." Because sometimes you need to wear the testimony before you can speak it.

 

Then came "Loved" — the Sanctuary collection — which I don't think I understood until I was actually inside it. Being loved well, receiving it without immediately dismantling it — that's harder than it sounds when you've spent years believing you have to earn every good thing. "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God." (1 John 3:1) That lavish part used to make me uncomfortable. Now I'm learning to sit in it.

 

And "Delivered" — Glory Days Collection — is where I'm walking toward. Not where I've arrived. I want to be careful about that. This is not a story with a neat ending because the ending hasn't happened yet. The Glory Days collection isn't about glory I've already received. It's about the one I believe is coming. It's faith with receipts that haven't printed yet.

 

I've lived through all three of these seasons in real life, not once but in cycles, the way the same test comes back around until you finally pass it. Lost. Loved. Delivered. Repeat. Each time the spiral comes tighter. Each time I recognize it a little sooner. Each time God is standing there like He's been waiting for me to notice He never actually left.

 

Here's what I want you to know about The DLVRD:

 

This brand is not a product line that found a cool faith-based angle. It is a testimony that learned to make clothes. Every piece that ships from us carries something I couldn't say in a press release, that the person who built this was broken in ways that should have been final. That the finances were catastrophic, the mental health was in crisis, the body was failing, the identity was fractured, and God sat in all of that with me and said, "I'm making something new out of this."

 

"He who was seated on the throne said, 'I am making everything new!'" (Revelation 21:5) Everything. Not just the good parts. The whole thing.

 

I'm not at the end of this story. I want to be really clear about that. The negative balance account turned into something, yes. But I'm still in the fire. The phoenix doesn't come out looking clean — it comes out "ALIVE". There's a difference.

 

I decided a long time ago that I wasn't going to wait until I was fully healed, fully delivered, fully on the other side before I started building. Because I think some of us are called to build "in the fire" — not after it. Not once we've got everything figured out. Right now. Shaking hands and all.

 

So, if you're somewhere in your Lost season — financial wreckage, depression, addiction, identity confusion, the cycle you can't seem to break — I want you to know this brand exists because someone was in that exact place and decided to make something anyway. You are not a customer. You are the whole reason this exists.

 

Lost. Loved. Delivered.

 

In that order. In God's time. And I'm still rising.

 

— The Founder, The DLVRD