So I have been thinking about Lot’s wife. Not about what she did wrong but about what it cost her.

She had already been freed. The angel had already come. She was already walking away from the thing that would have destroyed her, already mid-departure, already in the in-between space that is neither where she was nor where she was going. And still, she turned. The text does not tell us why. It does not give us her internal state or her reasoning or the quality of the moment before she made that choice. It just tells us she looked back. And I keep wondering what was in that look, whether it was grief, or habit, or simply the pull of the familiar even when the familiar was harmful. Whether she even knew she was doing it until she had already done it.

I think about that last part more than anything else. Because the look that costs us most is rarely the deliberate one. It is the one that happens before we have made a decision, the reflexive turn toward what we know, the way the body orients itself toward the familiar without asking permission from the rest of us. It’s not like she started running back; she just looked. And I have been sitting with the question of how many of us are doing exactly that, not returning to the thing, but keeping our faces turned toward it. We talked about it a little last week as well. We may still be watching the door we already walked through or still rehearsing the shape of what burned.

We do not always go back, but sometimes we just keep looking in that direction. And sometimes that is enough to keep us from arriving where we are going.

There is a passage in Isaiah 43 that I thought about reflecting on over the last three weeks. In this chapter, Israel is not being warned about an exile that is coming, because they are already in it. Babylon has already happened, and as such, the very thing they feared had already come to pass, and they are sitting in the aftermath of it. I suspect they are somewhere between displaced and disoriented, doing what people do when they have survived something devastating: rehearsing how they got there. Holding up the old story. Turning the former things over and over in their hands, trying to make sense of them, trying to locate themselves in relation to what was.

And into that specific grief, into that particular backward orientation, God says this:

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

The first time I read that as instruction, it felt almost unkind. I mean…"Do not remember?” How could they not remember? They are in exile. The former things are all they have left. And then I sat with it longer and realized God is not asking them to pretend the former things did not happen. He is not asking for amnesia, performed positivity, or tidy forgetting. He is doing something more precise than that.

He is telling them that their continued orientation toward the former things is costing them something they cannot afford to lose: their ability to perceive what He is already doing.

The Hebrew word translated perceive is yada - a word that carries the weight of intimate knowing, not just intellectual recognition. Do you not know it, the way you know something you have been close to, something you have let in? And the reason the question is necessary is that the new thing is already present. It is not coming. It is not on its way. Now it springs forth! This is present tense, already in motion, already growing, and realistically, the only thing standing between them and the perception of it is the direction their faces are pointed.

The word translated springs forth is tsamach. It means to sprout. To grow from the ground up, and I truly believe that God is describing something that has already been growing while they were looking the other way.

And this is where I have to stay for a moment, because I think this is exactly what Lot’s wife missed.

She was not missing a finished thing. She was missing a tsamach, a new thing already in its early, quiet, unhurried growth in the direction she was walking. The city behind her was burning in fire and spectacle and everything visible. And the life ahead of her was growing in probably the exact way that life grows, very rarely without announcement or drama, just slow and steady. But she turned toward the dramatic thing, the thing she already knew. And the growing thing, the new thing, the thing already springing forth in the direction she was walking, sadly, she never got to see what it became. That grieves me, deeply; the idea that my preoccupation with what was could distract me from seeing what God is doing in the present.

I genuinely am not judging her. I do not think she was foolish, but she was human. I think because the burning is loud and the growing is quiet, and we have been trained our whole lives to turn toward the loud thing.

Here is what I want to ask you, and I want to ask it carefully.

What are the former things you are still holding up to the light? And I mean this in the fullest sense -not only the painful things, though those too, but also the former versions of yourself that once made sense, the old architecture that kept you standing when nothing else would, the strategies that were genuinely useful before they became the whole of you. Sometimes the former thing we cannot help but orient toward is not a failure or a shame. Sometimes it is a self that felt coherent, a way of moving through the world that we understood, even when it was also costing us something we did not yet have language for.

The question is not whether those things were real. They absolutely were. The question is what your continued orientation toward them is costing your ability to perceive.

Because the new thing is already growing. I did not say, coming, but growing. Tsamach. Quiet but present, in the direction you are already walking. God is not waiting to begin. He already began and He is asking, with a gentleness that I find almost unbearable, whether you can turn your face far enough forward to see it.

Do you not perceive it?

I’ve always read it more like a rebuke or a disappointment, but now, I think that question is one of the most merciful things in all of Scripture. A genuine and open and tender inquiry from a God who knows that the burning is loud and the growing is quiet, and who is asking, not demanding, asking, whether you are ready to look.

You do not have to have it all resolved. You do not have to be finished with the former things. You just have to be willing to turn your face toward what is already sprouting in the ground ahead of you.

It is already there. It was there before you looked up. It will still be there when you do.

The Strong One: Redefined is a revised and expanded edition of the original 2018 book and is set for release later this year. If you want to be among the first to know when it is available, make sure you are subscribed.*

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. The Well Within is a space created for those of us who love God deeply, yet quietly wrestle with what it means to be strong or what it means to rest.

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I took it a bit farther in my musings and considered identity narratives, which are far more stable and enduring than situational interpretations. These aren't just stories about an event; they're stories about the self. I instantly thought about my own stories and the stories of so many I have interacted with. And I thought about Kaye.

The first thing I considered about Kaye is that she has done the work. I start here because today’s reflection is not a story about a woman who doesn’t know better.

She has sat across from a therapist. She has read the books, underlined the passages, and recognized herself in the chapters on over-functioning and relational exhaustion. She has had the honest conversations… with God, with herself, maybe with a trusted friend… conversations about what it costs to be the one. She knows the language. She might have even used it to help someone else see what she couldn’t yet fully see in herself.

And still, when her mother calls about her brother, she answers. When her brother calls, sometimes with need, sometimes with the particular tension of a man who doesn’t fully want to need her but does anyway - she answers. When the distant relatives look in her direction, she steps forward. Not because she hasn’t thought about it. Because the story that says I am the one, they need me, it falls apart without me, it is older than her awareness of it, and it moves faster.

She has been sitting under teaching on freedom at church for weeks. The word keeps landing in the same place, not convicting her of something she’s never considered, but pressing on something she has considered but has not yet fully surrendered. She knows what freedom would require, but even with that knowing, she is not sure she can give it.

Then, one week, in the smaller room of a small group, someone mentions a situation offhand. While the situation wasn’t about Kaye, it was relevant, and before she realized it, she responded with the familiar position, the response that has always felt like wisdom, like responsibility, like love: “Well, I don’t know about you, but for our family, I’m the one, and these are the kinds of things that I carry.”

And someone asks, without agenda and without accusation: But why?

She opened her mouth to answer but there was no answer. At least, not a real one. Just another version of a story she had been living from for so long, it had stopped feeling like a choice.

Here is what I have learned about the stories that are hardest to put down: they are rarely the ones that feel like lies. The lies are easier because you eventually catch them and can challenge them. Once you identify the lie, you can find the evidence that contradicts it, and you build a case.

The hardest stories are the ones that feel like character. This is me.

Kaye’s story doesn’t feel like a distortion. It feels like her: her reliability, her love, her sense of responsibility toward people who share her blood. It feels like the woman she has worked to become. And that is precisely what makes it so difficult to examine. You cannot easily take captive a thought that doesn’t present itself as a thought. If it feels like who you are, it is not accessible for interrogation because it just runs.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 10:5 that we are to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. The instruction is active and demanding; do not notice your thoughts when they become obvious, but take them, apprehend them. Bring them somewhere. The implication is that there are thoughts currently running loose, thoughts that have not been examined, that are shaping decisions and responses, and eventually these thoughts will shape our lives without ever being recognized as thoughts at all.

For Kaye, the uncaptured thought is not I want to control my brother’s life. It sounds much more like faithfulness: I am the one. This is what love requires. Without me, things fall apart.

You see, that story has a long history. It has evidence behind it, real moments when she stepped in, and it helped; moments when she stepped back, and it didn’t go well. The story knows how to make its case because it has been making it for years.

And awareness, as it turns out, is not enough to stop it.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Greek word underneath Romans 12:2 - metamorphoō, and I want to return to it here, because this is exactly the kind of thing that needs more than one discussion. As an aside, science tells us that repetition is not laziness; it is actually how the brain builds new pathways, so consider this intentional support for new pathway construction. Be transformed, Paul writes, and that word captures process more than a transaction. A change of form from the inside out. It is less about a change of opinion. Not a decision made once in a moment of conviction and then permanently installed. The mind is still being renewed. Which means the old story can still be running while the new one is being written. This is the part that the church has not always known how to hold well; we tend to treat persistent patterns as faith problems. Pray more. Trust deeper. Surrender harder. None of that is wrong, but it is incomplete because it assumes the obstacle is primarily spiritual, even though the evidence suggests it is also structural. Kaye has been shaped, and what has been shaped does not simply yield to information, even very good, very true, very biblical information.

The renewal is ongoing. Which means the old story can still be running while the new one is being written. Both can be true at the same time. Kaye can know better and still reach for the familiar. I mean how many times has this been true for me (or you). She can have done the work and still have more work to do. Hear me clearly, this is a better description of formation, not moral failure.

The “but why” cracked something open not because it was a confrontation but because it was a question the story had never been asked to answer. The story had only ever been lived. And the moment Kaye reached for the answer and found nothing solid, just habit, just history, just this is how it has always been, was the moment a thought that had been running uncaptured finally came into the light.

That is where the work begins…your willingness to entertain the tough questions. To slow down and see that there is another path, even if it’s harder to discern because your way, your story has been so well-worn.

So here is what I want to ask you, and I want you to sit with it honestly.

What story are you currently living from?

Not the one you would say out loud in a small group. The one underneath that, the one that explains why you are the one, why you can’t step back, why things would genuinely fall apart without you. The story that has been directing your decisions so long has stopped sounding like a narrative and started sounding like a fact.

Is it true?

And if you pulled it into the light, if you held it up against what God actually says about you, about the people you love, about what faithfulness actually requires… would it hold?

John 8:32 tells us the truth will set us free. But truth can only do that work if we are willing to let it examine what we have been calling true. Freedom is not only about what we are released from. It is also about what we are willing to release.

Kaye is still in it, and so are most of us. The story doesn’t disappear the moment you see it. But seeing it is important. Seeing it is, in fact, where the renewal begins.

The Strong One: Redefined is a revised and expanded edition of the original 2018 book and is set for release later this year. If you want to be among the first to know when it is available, make sure you are subscribed.*

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. The Well Within is a space created for those of us who love God deeply, yet quietly wrestle with what it means to be strong or what it means to rest.

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I read Ecclesiastes yesterday morning and got stuck on.. “He has made everything beautiful in its time”.

If you were here for my Mother’s Day post, you know that one was about generations. This one is too, just turned toward the men. The photo I’m thinking of as I write this is from April 25, 2008, both of my dads walking me up the aisle to give me to Dayton, one on each side, me in the middle.

Because of who I am, I’m keenly aware of special days, so it’s regular and normal that most of my prayer time this week has been directed to the people in my circle who no longer have their dads. I know these particular holidays are so hard. A sister-friend, another little sister, my adopted daughter, cousin... Also, colleagues, godchildren, friends, which I suppose works out to be almost 10 people in my orbit who’ve lost their fathers between in the last 20 months. These were dads who were deeply present, deeply involved, right up until they weren’t. Some of them are walking into their first Father’s Day without their dad this Sunday. I think about what that loss does to a day like this, and then I think wider, about how many people are simply fatherless, full stop, and never had the relationship to lose in the first place.

That’s been sitting against the backdrop of the work we’re doing right now in the Health ministry at Legacy Church to bring Father’s Matter to The Bahamas. It’s a program from Heartlines, a South African NGO led by Dr. Garth Japhet. The whole design of it is to teach men, fathers, and father-figures both, how to actually show up. How to be present, how to play, how to engage. Because so much of fathering is learned by watching it done, and for so many of us, particularly in the realities of The Bahamas and of Black culture broadly, that example simply wasn’t there to watch. I’m not saying that to indict anyone; I’m stating what the data and the lived experience have already said. We’re in the thick of finalizing locations and plans now, aiming for July, and it’s been on my mind all week alongside everything else.

So here’s where I land: with my own two dads, both relationships made beautiful in their own time, and neither story is simple.

Life with my biological father started out beautiful, from what the pictures show and what I was told. For all intents and purposes, a real father-daughter relationship in my early years, birth to 5… and then he was lured away by things that consumed his life, and there was pain inflicted on my mom and on our family because of it, and then there was separation, and then divorce. I hated him for a long time, just filled with deep disappointment, pain, and rejection. I wanted nothing to do with him. My stepdad came into my life not long after the divorce, and while I loved him and knew him to be a genuinely good man, what I did not love as a teenager was the structure he brought with him and all those children (we became Brady Bunch take 2). New rules, new expectations, a whole new shape to our home that I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. Side note, I wouldn’t trade our Worrell Bunch for anything!

But in its own time, for both of them, I believe God did the healing work in me and softened my heart as I learned to move past the sting of rejection, fear, and bitterness. My biological father and I walked a real road of reconciliation, and we are restored. My stepdad never gave up on me, not once, not even when I was actively pushing him away, and he loved me and championed me into the woman I became. That’s the picture from April 25, 2008. Both of them, side by side, walking me to Dayton.

I was fighting not to “ugly cry” at this particular shot. lol

Here’s where I have to be honest with you, though, because that’s what this space is for. While I still have both of my dads, one of them is slipping away. I am fighting the grief of losing a living parent. My stepdad has dementia, in its full state now, and most days when I sit with him, he is not present. He is not the man who raised me. He was a driver for a good chunk of his working life, and my sister and I used to joke that when we had kids, he’d be our designated pickup man, that we’d start our own little private bus system with our children as the only (or primary) riders, just so he’d have more time with them but also, because we knew our kids would be safe. Fast-forward to 2026: most days, we can see the loving “Papa,” as he is called, and I still find that he plays with my kids a lot, and there is real joy in it. But if you asked him who they were, he wouldn’t know. I think loving children is just his default setting, something beneath memory, something the disease hasn’t touched… yet.

I sit today, fully aware that he likely cannot even understand what Father’s Day is anymore. I also am fully aware (and heartbroken) that nothing we do for him this Sunday will register…and we have no idea what next year holds.

[I was in full weep writing this part, sitting with the dreams and the hopes we had that simply won’t get to be seen now.]

But here is what I’m choosing to sit in today. The beauty God brought. I know not everyone’s story is a restoration of the original father. For some of you, it was a stepfather who rose to it. For some of you, it was an uncle, a godfather, a big brother, a spiritual father, a cousin who simply showed up when no one made him. The design underneath all of it is the same good and faithful God who is the best father any of us has, who sees and knows and provides and protects even when we don’t understand it in the moment, whose “yes” amplifies our lives in fulfilling and beautiful ways, and whose “no” protects us more deeply than we know to thank Him for.

So today I salute every man who has stood in that role, courageously, despite their own insecurities and fears, because there is nothing easy about showing up for little people day after day. I start with my own. My biological father, for the bravery of an apology and a restoration neither of us was guaranteed. My stepdad, for never once giving up on me, even when I made it hard. My husband, who grew up without his own father in his life and against every odds, continues to stand, present, doting, and easily the fun parent in our house.

To the handful of men who are subscribed, fathers or fathering in whatever shape that takes for you: I salute you. To my female readers, for the men standing courageously in your life, your fathers, your partners, your friends, pushing against every norm that told them they didn’t have to: I see them too. And to the men I serve alongside in ministry, fathering your own children and so many more besides, my prayer for you today is that God’s grace keeps carrying you, that you keep seeing yourself in His image, that you protect fiercely what He’s entrusted to you, and that you keep walking in the blessing and releasing it onto everyone under your influence.

Happy Father’s Day.

With deep gratitude and honor,
Gia

The Strong One: Redefined is a revised and expanded edition of the original 2018 book and is set for release later this year. If you want to be among the first to know when it is available, make sure you are subscribed.*

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. The Well Within is a space created for those of us who love God deeply, yet quietly wrestle with what it means to be strong or what it means to rest.

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A mentor said that to me about a decade ago, looked me directly in the eye, and said it like she meant it.

“Gia, there are no shoulds.”

I have been carrying those words ever since, working them through in the way you work through something that is simple to say, but oh so difficult to actually live. Realistically, my dedication to all the shoulds does not disappear just because I now know they exist. They do go quiet for a while, and then a situation arises that wakes them back up, and I find myself obeying rules I forgot I was living by.

That happened to me a couple of weeks ago, in a hotel room in Rome, over a plane ticket.

I was two weeks into back-to-back conferences, which means two full weeks away from home. Somewhere along the way, I learned that the final day of this second conference is a half day, sessions wrapping up around noon on Friday. My original flight home was Sunday. When I did the math, I realized I was sitting on a day and a half of unnecessary distance from my family, so I searched, found a Saturday flight that would get me home the same day, paid the difference, and booked it. Reasonable. Done. Except it was not done, not in my head, because there was still Friday sitting there. A Friday with two sessions I would miss if I left a day earlier. Two sessions on a half day, at a conference where I have no formal role. I was not a host, not a speaker, not a co-funder. I was an attendee. A willing, engaged, and grateful attendee, and I could leave on Friday. I knew I could, but oh how I struggled.

One of those mornings, a friend reached out to check on me, and I paused long enough to actually ask myself what was happening. I am not emotionally depleted. The first conference week was quieter than expected and gave me room to breathe, and I had two full days between the two conferences that were genuinely restorative. I feel good. So what is this? What is the thing you are feeling, Gia?

Rules. I found two of them running quietly underneath the whole decision.

The first served a master called people-pleasing: don’t disappoint anyone, don’t be the one who slipped out early. The second served a master called the Strong One: you finish what you start, you don’t bail, you show up straight through to the end. Neither rule presented with a label per say. They accumulated across years of being a student who was always present, always prepared, never ducking a class or an assignment. They served me well in the contexts where they were formed. In school, showing up mattered. In certain professional environments, your consistency is part of your credibility. The rules made sense where they were written. The problem is that rules have a way of traveling past the season they were meant for, settling in as identity when they were only ever supposed to be a strategy.

I am not in school, and nobody is taking attendance. Even without an author, the rules still had my obedience.

And here is what caught me more than the rules themselves. I realized I was waiting for permission. I caught myself composing a mental email or practicing the conversation to the conference host. I wanted someone to release me, to hand me an excused absence slip with their signature on it, confirming that my reason was valid, that I was not a slacker, that the choice was acceptable. If someone had said, of course, go home to your family, it’s been wonderful having you, I would have changed that ticket without a second thought.

But I am an adult. And the waiting itself was the tell.

Paul writes to the church in Galatia, to people who have been freed and keep reaching back for the old system anyway: It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. He is writing about people who know they have been released but keep self-imposing the old requirements, keep submitting to structures that no longer have authority over them, and keep living as though the old rules still govern them. The yoke he is describing was not placed on them by anyone. They were picking it back up themselves.

That is what I was doing in that hotel room. Nobody told me I had to stay. Nobody was tracking my attendance. There was no consequence waiting if I left. The rules had masters, but those masters no longer had jurisdiction. And I was the one still reporting for duty.

What I eventually got honest about was simpler than all of it. Two values were sitting across from each other, and I needed to actually look at them. One is work ethic: I am here, I showed up, and I do not leave early. The other is family: they are not asking me to come home, nobody is struggling, but they matter to me, and an unnecessary day away from them costs something deeply important TO ME, even when no one is counting the cost out loud. When I set those two values side by side, honestly, without the noise of the rules and the waiting for permission, the answer wasn't hard. It just required me to stop outsourcing a decision that was mine to make.

I changed the ticket, started my journey on Friday, and arrived home on Saturday, just in time to watch my son lead his team as captain to victory in his final tournament soccer game. #worththeharddecision

My mentor was right. There are no shoulds. But knowing that and actually living free of them are two different things. The shoulds do not argue with you openly. They dress themselves in words like responsible and committed and the kind of person who finishes what she starts, and they are convincing enough that you can spend days obeying them before you realize they stopped being true a long time ago. Every rule serves a master. The real question is whether that master still has any claim on you.

So the question I want to leave with you is not about plane tickets. It is about the rules you are living by right now, today. Not the commitments you have genuinely made, not the values you have chosen. The unspoken ones. The ones nobody handed you explicitly but that you picked up somewhere and have been carrying forward without ever deciding to keep them. The ones that feel like integrity but might actually just be an old yoke you forgot you were wearing.

You are allowed to put it down; you don’t need anyone’s permission to do so. That, actually, is the point… it was never yours to carry from the start.

💖💖

The Strong One: Redefined is a revised and expanded edition of the original 2018 book and is set for release later this year. If you want to be among the first to know when it is available, make sure you are subscribed.*

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. The Well Within is a space created for those of us who love God deeply, yet quietly wrestle with what it means to be strong or what it means to rest.

Subscribe now

What I didn’t anticipate was how much I still had to learn about what I’d written. Because I knew it was most (versus surrendering all), I was the brilliance behind last week’s title for the piece last week, and as hard as it was to admit, I meant it, even though my soul longs to surrender all. But there is a difference between meaning something on the page and understanding what it actually requires when you close the laptop and walk back into your life. I am still learning the distance between those two things. I don’t say that as a confession of failure. I say this because I think you may be standing in the same gap, and I want you to know it has a name: it is not hypocrisy. Its formation.

That gap is exactly where I was sitting when I opened Kings. I’ve been in 1 Kings as part of my daily Bible study, and I want to tell you what found me.

Solomon is now firmly established on the throne. The drama of his ascent is behind him, the political maneuvering, the threats neutralized [he had to kill his older brother], the kingdom secured. He is hearing his people’s requests and serving them well. The famous scene of the two women and one living child is here, Solomon’s wisdom on full display, the kind of discernment that cuts through what people say to what is actually true. And then there is the earlier moment, the one that stopped me: God appears to Solomon and asks what he wants. We all know the story. Solomon could have asked for anything, and he asked for wisdom. And God, moved by the request, gave him wisdom and added what Solomon hadn’t asked for.

It is a beautiful moment. But it is not the moment I want to stay in.

What arrested me was the fuller picture that we easily miss, even though the text doesn’t soften it. Solomon, at this point, is already intermarrying in direct violation of what God had made plain. He is already keeping the lower-gods of other religions alongside the God of Israel. His heart is, by any honest reading, divided. The text doesn’t hide this. It names it plainly and moves forward, which means God’s response to Solomon’s request sits right next to the evidence of Solomon’s non-compliance. They are in the same passage. The faithfulness of God to David’s lineage holds. The promise tracks. The answer comes. And the man receiving it is a man whose house is not in order.

I could not have seen that the way I saw it six weeks ago... I’ve read Kings before, many, many times (and the same story is in Chronicles, so I’ve definitely read it). I’ve sat in Solomon’s story in other seasons. But I came to it this time having just written about surrender, having just spent two weeks inside the theology of weakness and strength and what it costs to mean it. The eyes I brought to the text were different because I was different… fractionally, imperfectly, still-in-process different. And what I saw in this text was a God who answered the pure request inside the impure life.

That is the God-shot. That’s what I want you to sit in with me.

There is a version of faith formation that operates on a delayed timeline. It goes something like this: get yourself together, close the gaps, align the divided parts, and then bring your whole and presentable self to God and expect him to respond. This version is so deeply embedded in some of us that we don’t recognize it as a theology. It feels like common sense, or basic respect, or simple logic. Of course, you get your house in order before you invite someone in.

But Solomon didn’t do that, nor did God didn’t wait for him to.

The ask was pure, even when the man wasn’t. Solomon asked before he had arrived, before he had resolved the contradiction living in his own household, before the divided loyalty was addressed. And the faithfulness of God, to the promise, to the lineage, to the genuine request in that genuine moment, was not contingent on Solomon’s full alignment. whew

I want to be careful here because this is not a blank check to trample on grace. In fact, may I never cheapen the cost of His grace. Solomon’s story is long, and the divided heart has consequences that play out over chapters and generations. The text that shows God’s faithfulness is the same text that eventually shows the cost of the division Solomon never fully resolved. This is not a word that says do what you want and expect to be blessed. That’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying and really chewing on is narrower and I think more useful. The pure moment in the impure life was honored. Let’s put it another way, the genuine ask from the genuinely cracked person was received. Which means the cracked state is not a disqualifier. It is, in fact, the only state any of us ever ask from. :Insert praise music:

Potters fire their work in a kiln.

The process is not gentle. The temperature in a kiln during a high-fire session can reach over 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, and the clay that goes in is not the same clay that comes out. Something fundamental has changed in the heat. The molecular structure of the clay itself is altered, it literally becomes harder, denser, capable of holding things it could not hold before.

Just like the pottery, we are “the piece” that is in the potter’s hands the entire time.

I think about that when I consider what formation actually feels like from the inside. It does not feel productive. It does not feel like progress. It feels like heat and disorientation and the particular frustration of a person who knows better and is still not fully doing better, who wrote the piece, meant it, and is still learning what it cost. That feeling is not evidence that nothing is happening. That feeling is the kiln doing what kilns do.

Hear me, and hear me clearly. Wherever you are in the process, you are being made capable of holding something you cannot hold yet.

That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the whole thing.

What I know now, having been in this for weeks since I wrote that piece, is that formation sharpens what you can see. The more you’re in the Word, in the process, in the honest and uncomfortable work of letting God have the divided parts, the more your eyes adjust. You begin to catch things in the text you passed over before. You begin to hear things in a sermon that didn’t land the last three times it was preached. You begin to see Solomon not as a cautionary tale about compromise, though he is that too, but as evidence that God meets the genuine ask wherever it’s offered.

That’s what I saw in Kings. And I saw it because of where I was standing.

So if you’re in the heat right now, if the last two weeks of writing left you somewhere tender and unresolved, if you said most and are still working out what you meant -I want you to hear this: ASK ANYWAY.

Ask from inside the mess, from inside the division, from inside the gap between what you articulate and what you actually live. Ask for wisdom. Ask for clarity. Ask for whatever genuine request has been forming beneath everything else.

The Strong One: Redefined is a revised and expanded edition of the original 2018 book, set for release later this year. If you want to be among the first to know when it is available, make sure you are subscribed.*

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. The Well Within is a space created for those of us who love God deeply, yet quietly wrestle with what it means to be strong or what it means to rest.

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Side note, for whatever reason, Substack wouldn’t let my “strikethrough” show up on the title, which is why you see it twice.

Somewhere around 1999, CeCe Winans released Alabaster Box; I loved that album, and one of my faves from it was His Strength Is Perfect.

I was a freshman in college. I was in the dance ministry, and I remember dancing to that song and weeping while I danced. It was the kind of weeping that surprises you, because you aren’t sure why. I’m pretty visual in my learning (and living), so even today, when I hear the song, I imagine the lyrics literally: almost unable to move, broken, depleted, barely standing. Strength gone. And then, lifted. Carried. Restored.

Even back then, I felt it completely, but honestly, I only partially understood it.

Looking back, I can see exactly what I was doing with that lyric. I was receiving the resolution, but was setting aside the condition. The part that moved me was the being carried. The part I filed away, the part I did not yet have permission to embrace or even explore, was the strength being gone. Because even then, in the prime of what I would later recognize as my Helper mask forming in real time, high school had been the germination, college was when I started seeing the leaves, the early flowers, the shape of the thing I was becoming - even then, weakness was not something I was available to own. It was a state to be moved through quickly, if at all. It was not a place where I could find anything good.

I knew the theology in my head: somehow, God became stronger when I was not. But I could not reconcile that with anything actionable. He is God. Immutable, omnipotent, omnipresent. What does it mean that He is more powerful in my weakness? He is already everything. The math did not make sense to me, so I took comfort in the song and left the paradox alone.

This, I suspect, is pretty common for Christian coping, and I say that with full awareness that I have done it more than once. You take the peace a scripture offers and then set aside the disruption it also carries. I did it with Isaiah 30:15 for years. Leaned into “in quietness and trust is your strength” while moving past “in repentance, and rest is your salvation.” Half the verse. Enough to feel steadied. Not enough to be changed.

I did the same thing with this one.

It was not a Bible study or a sermon that finally made me stop and actually look at this scripture. It was a 6am prayer call on a random Monday, and the three scriptures the leader offered did not even explicitly include 2 Corinthians 12:9. They were Zechariah 4:6–7, 2 Corinthians 12:9, and Hebrews 4:16, a thread about grace, about the Spirit’s sufficiency, about approaching God’s throne not when you are prepared but when you are in need.

I felt the Paul passage almost immediately as I prayed. Not for the first time, but for the first time differently.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.”

I have known those words for twenty-five years. It was not until that Monday morning, sitting with three scriptures that formed a kind of theological case for something I had been resisting my entire adult life, that I finally asked the question I should have asked much earlier: What does weakness actually mean here? Not as a feeling. Not as a metaphor. In the Greek. At the root. What is Paul actually saying?

What I did know (or thought I knew) is important context…2 Corinthians 12 is not Paul at his most composed and pastoral; what we do see is a very vulnerable and transparent Paul. In my recent study, I found that some scholars refer to Chapters 10 through 13 as the Fool’s Speech, one of the more raw passages he ever produced. False teachers had infiltrated the church at Corinth. They were measuring apostolic credibility by the standards of the surrounding culture: rhetorical brilliance, ecstatic spiritual experiences, impressive credentials, and personal charisma. And they were using Paul’s apparent lack of these things to undermine his authority.

Paul’s response is to turn their entire value system upside down. He catalogs not his accomplishments but his sufferings, beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks, betrayals, exhaustion. He boasts, sarcastically and deliberately, in precisely the things his opponents considered disqualifying. And then, at the center of it all, he discloses something deeply personal: there is a thorn. Something he has asked God to remove three times but it had not been resolved.

We do not know what it was and scholars have been debating it for centuries, a physical ailment, a persistent opponent, a spiritual affliction. What we know is the answer he received.

My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.

Three times he asked. The answer was not yes, and it was not no. It was: this is how it works. The word translated as weakness is astheneia. And the root underneath it, sthen, is where it gets precise in a way that literally stopped me.

Sthen means to hold together. To not come undone. To be the one who keeps everything from falling apart when everything is falling apart.

Astheneia is its opposite. Coming undone. Losing your grip on the composure that has been keeping everything in place. Falling apart at the seams.

The Strong One, if she has a defining characteristic, it is this: she is organized around sthen. Holding it together is not just what she does; it is, at some level, who she understands herself to be. The Helper holds together the emotional world of everyone around her. The Protector holds the structure from collapsing. The Performer holds the image intact. The Invisible One holds herself together so completely that she has made herself nearly unreachable.

And God says: " My power reaches completion in astheneia.”

This is still taking me out because my M.O. is to seek help AFTER I process, figure it out, and pretty much have a better perspective. But the promise Paul offers about God’s intervention is that it occurs in the coming undone itself. In the loss of the grip. In the place you have spent the most energy making sure no one ever sees.

The word translated as power is dunamis, miraculous capacity, the kind that operates beyond natural means. I know this word well from years of sermons about resurrection power. The same force that raised Jesus from the dead. Didn’t realize it was the same power here. And the word translated as “perfected,” teleitai, is a passive verb. God is the active agent. We are not doing something to access this power. We are not achieving the right posture or summoning the right faith. The passive voice means: God completes it. In us. When we are coming apart.

The verse, with all of that underneath it, sounds like this:

When I was nineteen, dancing and weeping to His Strength Is Perfect, I was moved by the image of being carried. That part was available to me. What was not yet plausible, was the permission to actually be in astheneia, to stop the sthen, to release the holding together, to let the thing I was gripping fall.

Part of that was age. I was still in the early formation of the very patterns I would spend the next two decades examining. The Helper mask was just beginning to show its leaves, as I said. I did not yet have the distance to see what I was building.

But part of it was something the church does not always help us with: we celebrate the rescue without examining our resistance to the condition that makes rescue possible. We sing about being carried without asking ourselves why we find it so difficult to stop walking. We receive the comfort of the promise and set aside its disruption.

And that place…that is where the power is.

I do not know that I could have gotten that at nineteen. But I can receive it now. And I think, if the responses to one of my earlier posts are any indication, many of you are in a season where you can receive it too.

The surrender we actually mean

The title of this post is a confession I suspect many of us share. We sing I Surrender All in full voice, with genuine feeling, and what we are functionally practicing is I Surrender “Most”...or “some”. The parts that feel spiritually appropriate to surrender. The parts that are tired enough to release. But what have we typically resisted surrendering? Holding together, competence…the sthen that has kept everything from falling apart for so long that we have mistaken it for faithfulness.

Paul did not want his thorn either. He asked three times, and something about this suggests to me that it wasn’t a casual request. You know the kind you offer, then walk away from because it’s not really important. I suspect his three requests are aligned with the posture of someone who genuinely wanted a different answer, who had made his case before God with full sincerity, and who instead received an invitation into a different understanding of how power actually operates. #ouch

The answer, however, was revelatory: This “thorn”, that you are asking me to take away, this is where I do my best work.

Oh, how this revelation changes things, and in that short time since I paused and began chewing on this, how I have changed. Thinking about the nineteen-year-old who wept without fully knowing why. Thinking about what it might mean to stop managing the astheneia and start letting it be what God says it is, not a deficit to overcome, but the very condition in which something that could not happen any other way finally gets to happen.

His strength is perfect. Not when we get strong again, but actually when our strength is gone.

The Strong One: Redefined is a revised and expanded edition of the original 2018 book and is set for release later this year. If you want to be among the first to know when it is available, make sure you are subscribed.*

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. The Well Within is a space created for those of us who love God deeply, yet quietly wrestle with what it means to be strong or what it means to rest.

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I’ve been sitting with this because that gap between what we confess and what we actually do is one that the church has historically treated as a faith problem. Pray more. Trust harder. Surrender deeper. And there is nothing wrong with any of that, except that it assumes the obstacle is primarily spiritual, when the evidence suggests it is also structural. We have been shaped. And what has been shaped does not simply yield to information, even very good, very true, very biblical information.

Paul knew this. And in a letter that is as vulnerable and transparent as a Psalm of David, Paul told us this:

The word translated as “power” is dunamis, miraculous, resurrection-level capacity. The word translated as “weakness” is astheneia, and the Greek root beneath it, sthen, means “holding together,” not coming undone.

So astheneia is its opposite: the state of coming apart. Falling apart at the seams. Losing your grip on the composure that has been keeping everything in place.

And God says: that is exactly where my power reaches completion…when you ARE weak.

When I found this word- astheneia, I was stunned. It truly provides a rich description of the thing that the Strong One has spent her entire life refusing to become.

As I sat with this, I appreciated that most of us were already coping before we had a theology of surrender. Before we understood what it meant to cultivate a relationship with Jesus, before we had worked out the depths of what salvation asks of us, we were already learning. Watching. Filing away the answers to questions every child is asking: What does it cost to be loved here? What do I have to be to stay safe? Which version of me gets to remain?

In my book, I argue that the answers to those important questions became patterns. And when practiced long enough, patterns become identity. And identity, even when it is borrowed and adaptive and exhausting, does not yield easily, because the nervous system cannot identify a strategy that once kept you alive but has now become unhelpful. It just knows the strategy worked and keeps reaching for it.

While it may have traditionally been framed as a failure of faith, it’s actually more about formation. And formation, Scripture tells us, is precisely God’s domain. Do not get me wrong: this isn’t about Him causing or being okay with the wounding, but about His being in the business of remaking what has been made wrong.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12:2 says transformed. The Greek word is metamorphoō, a change of form from the inside out, not a change of opinion.

When The Strong One was first released in 2018, I introduced four profiles: the Counselor, the Rock, the Savior, and the Socialite. The framework landed. Women saw themselves in it. However, the profiles read like personality, which implies something intrinsic, something that belongs to you by nature. What I was actually describing was something else entirely. I was trying to capture how we responded. Adapted. Ways of moving through the world that developed because the world required something before we were ready to give it.

While it may look, sound, and feel like personality. It is not. It is coping, and in the new version of the book, I’ve redefined strength in the language of masks.

The distinction is not cosmetic, and I need you to feel why. Personality says this is who you are. A mask says this is what you learned to do. One closes the conversation; the other opens a door. Because if it was learned, it can be unlearned. If it was formed, it can be reformed. That is not self-help language, it is even deeper. It is the logic of sanctification, and it is why Paul can write, in the same letter where he speaks of weakness and power, that he has learned contentment. “I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content.” (Philippians 4:11) Formation is the mechanism. Experience is the teacher.

So this revision identifies four masks. The same four patterns I have watched for years, in counseling rooms and ministry conversations, and my own mirror, but more accurately named:

The Helper is the Strong One whose worth became fused with usefulness. She learned early that love was something you secured by being needed, the one who always had the right words, who made space for everyone else, who absorbed the weight of every room she entered. Her wound is not that she loves too much. It is that she learned to love in a way that kept her hidden. Astheneia, coming undone, needing, not having it together, is the thing she fears most, because early evidence told her that need is what gets you left.

The Protector became strong because the situation demanded it. Chaos, loss, instability, something required composure before maturity was formed sufficiently to support it. She held everything together because someone had to, and she was there. Control became her language of safety, even if it came off as cruel or rigid, it wasn’t about that, it was all survival. She has been carrying weight that was never solely hers, for so long that setting it down no longer feels like rest. It feels like abandonment of her post.

The Performer built her identity on being seen, and specifically, on what she was seen doing. Excellence became armor. Perfection became proof of worth. Whether the pressure came from family expectations, public visibility, or professional standards, she learned that the version of herself that was loved was the composed, capable, high-functioning one. The threat was never failure exactly, it was exposure. Astheneia is the thing she performs against every single day.

The Invisible One never set out to disappear, she simply got used to not being found. And in that invisibility, she built something that looked like strength: self-sufficiency, competence, the capacity to function without asking anything of anyone. What she called independence is actually a very long act of self-protection. It costs her connection. It costs her the very thing God keeps offering -to be fully known and fully held- because being known requires the risk of being seen, and being seen once cost her something she has not yet stopped paying for.

Last week, when we explored why it is so hard to let God shepherd us, to follow rather than lead, to release the map rather than just the credit for reading it, what we were really circling was this: most of the women who struggle most with surrender are not struggling because of weak faith. They are struggling because they have years of evidence, written into their nervous systems and their patterns and their muscle memory, that astheneia is not safe.

The Helper’s history tells her that rest invites rejection. The Protector’s history tells her that release invites chaos. The Performer’s history tells her that imperfection invites exposure, judgment, and shame. The Invisible One’s history tells her that dependence invites abandonment.

And then God says: My power is perfected in weakness.

He is not asking us to become weak as a spiritual exercise. He is giving language to the condition that is already true of us, the places where we are genuinely coming undone, where the composure is costing more than we have, and saying that those exact places are not obstacles to His power. They are the site of it.

The mask is not the problem to be solved before God can work. The mask is evidence of what God is working toward.

This is why formation matters more than information. You can know 2 Corinthians 12:9 by heart, have it underlined in three translations, have heard it preached twenty times, and still reach, almost reflexively, for the mask. Because the nervous system is not updated by knowledge. It is updated by repeated experience of something different. By actually allowing yourself to be held in the place where you are falling apart, and discovering, not just believing, but discovering in your body, that the bottom did not drop out.

That is the slow work. That is what the book is really about.

So, I want to go deeper into the Paul passage with you because I really found it helpful and you know I love sharing my selah moments with you. So next week, we’ll chat some more about what astheneia actually means at the root, into the context that surrounds it, into why a man who had seen heaven was still asking God three times to take something away. Because I think when we understand what Paul was actually navigating, it stops being an inspirational verse and starts being a companion for the specific kind of tired that the Strong One carries.

More on that next week.

The Strong One: Redefined is a revised and expanded edition of the original 2018 book and is set for release later this year. If you want to be among the first to know when it is available, make sure you are subscribed.*

Note, this is different than subscription to Substack which is below.

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Be their shepherd and carry them forever.

I am currently moving through the Bible Recap reading plan, and each day Tara-Leigh Cobble offers what she calls a “God Shot”, a snapshot of God’s character drawn from that day’s scripture. Her God Shot that morning was this same closing verse. I love it when the place I land overlaps with hers, and I love it even more when it doesn’t, because then I walk away with more than one revelation for the day. That morning we did not land in the same place, and so after sitting with my own God shot, I was challenged to sit with hers. This last verse of Psalm 28 really had me chewing.

As you know, I’m deep in the rewrite of The Strong One and we are almost there…I am twelve interviews into the conversations I’m having for this next book, and the stories are distinct. Each one is its own. But there are threads that keep surfacing across all of them, and one of them is this: whether we chose to be strong or strong was chosen for us, there comes a point — usually as we mature, as we grow older, where we can see clearly that God has sent help, and we have refused it. For most of us, the refusal is so automatic we don’t even register it as a choice.

David is writing this psalm from inside the kind of betrayal most of us will never know. Many scholars place Psalm 28 around the time of Absalom, his own son raising an army to kill him, the people he led turning against him, the throne under threat from inside his own household. If you have not read 2 Samuel recently, it reads more like a modern soap opera than ancient history. And from inside that fight, after pleading with God not to be silent, not to drag him away with the wicked, not to leave him among those who speak peace while plotting harm, David ends here. With a blessing over the people. Save your people and bless your inheritance; be their shepherd and carry them forever.

That is not a man writing from rest. That is a man asking God for what he himself cannot give. He is in the middle of the very thing he is praying about, and he still hands the shepherding over.

I have been sitting with why this is so hard.

Control is exhausting. It exhausts every part of us. Mentally, because we are constantly figuring, predicting, scanning for what’s next. Physically, because control almost always requires doing - and if you have ever been the delegator, you know that delegating well is its own kind of labor. Spiritually, because we are trying to do what we were not built to do, with a Helper we are not fully drawing on. By every measure, control should not be appealing; it costs so much.

And yet we choose it. Over and over.

I have come to understand that what feels comfortable about control is not the work of it. It is the knowing. The predictability of being the one with the map. The sense that if I am the one carrying it, at least I can see where it’s going. The exhaustion is real, but the unknowing of being led somewhere by someone else feels worse. So we choose the suffering we recognize over the rest we don’t.

This is what makes the shepherd image so disarming.

Tara-Leigh said something that morning that I keep returning to: the shepherd’s job is to protect the sheep from their greatest threat, and the sheep’s greatest threat is itself. Sheep wander into danger. They eat what will harm them. Sheep follow each other off cliffs. And I sat with that and realized, I can figure most things out. I do an excellent job of figuring, but most of what I have needed protection from over the years was not the world. It was the way I had decided to move through it. The threat I was managing was usually one I had constructed. The fight I was bracing for was often a fight I had started inside my own head.

This is some of what I’ve been writing about in the revised edition of The Strong One. The Strong One is not always obvious about her self-reliance. More often, it shows up quietly, dressed in language we have learned to praise.

The vigilance that becomes its own prison. The scanning, the anticipating, the staying three steps ahead. It was built to keep her safe in a moment when safety was not guaranteed. It is still running long after the threat has passed.

The exhaustion she calls faithfulness. Mistaking depletion for devotion. Wearing the tiredness like a badge. If she is tired enough, the thinking goes, surely she is doing it right.

The competence that prevents intimacy. Being the one who has it together means no one ever gets close enough to see her undone. Over time she has traded being known for being needed, and she is not entirely sure when the trade was made.

The protective story she tells herself about why she has to be the one. No one else will. No one else can. They need me. Sometimes these are true. Sometimes, they are the wall she has built so she does not have to find out what would happen if she let go.

The self-sufficiency that masquerades as faith. She prays. She believes. And she still does it herself, because somewhere underneath she does not trust that God will show up in time, or in the way she needs. The doing is not the problem. The quiet unbelief underneath it is.

Read them again, slowly. Which one have you been calling something else?

While at face value, it may seem like strategy and in many ways it is, but it is also pride, and it took me a long time to call it what it is. A few years ago, I had to come face-to-face with it and repent, not for failing, but for the quiet, competent, exhausting refusal to be led.

David ends this psalm with the only posture that holds. Not because he stopped fighting. Not because the betrayal resolved. But because somewhere inside the fight, he remembered that the people, including himself, were never meant to shepherd themselves.

We weren’t either.

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By every reasonable measure, Mandy is not alone. She is a VP at a company she worked hard to reach. She has the apartment, the career trajectory, the life she mapped out early and built on purpose. She made clear choices about what her life would look like, and her life looks like that. She has no regrets. She recognizes that she is blessed in this way and is grateful, even if a little prideful about it.

Despite the blessed life, having everything…something has been sitting with her lately that she cannot quite identify. It surfaced in a small group last month. She’s involved in church, loves her community, and has been a part of the women’s ministry. One evening, though, the conversation turned to the ways marriage and other deep relationships stretch you, and she sat quietly in the circle, feeling like she was watching through glass. It wasn’t because there was anything about their lives she wanted; she was content, but she struggled because she could not find herself anywhere in the room. The realities they spoke of just didn’t resonate. She didn’t belong.

She went home and called her sister, who listened, cared, and then circled back to her own news about the kids. She texted her college roommate, who responded warmly and fully, and still had nothing that could meet Mandy where she was standing. They didn’t fail her; she got that they don’t live in her lane. And Mandy, who had never needed to build new friendships because the ones she had were enough, understood something for the first time. Enough had a ceiling. You see, for so long, she had been closed to new people; she had her friends, two people who earned their place, and that was enough. Right?

I have thought about Mandy a lot since that devotional last week. Mostly because I have seen people like her too many times to count, even in my own life. Of course, there are differences; we don’t have the same titles, our life trajectories are different, but the architecture underneath, the two people who had been there long enough to become load-bearing, and the slow, unexamined assumption that those two were enough, does resonate.

In my friend circles, what I did not notice for a long time was the pattern inside my own relational world. I was not closed off to people. I talked to new people fairly easily, showed up present, and engaged warmly. What I was closed to was a specific kind of entry. The only people I actually added, past surface-level, past pleasant, were the ones who needed something from me first. They needed support, someone to pour into them, someone steady. I had no real category for adding someone because of what they might bring to me. That door I did not know how to open.

What I could not have predicted is what happened once I started opening it. Once I recognized how much of myself I had been withholding from people who had been there for years, people who genuinely wanted to know me, and I began letting them further in, something shifted. The circles deepened…and then slowly, something else happened. I became able to add new people in a way I never had before. It wasn’t even because they needed me, but if I’m honest, I needed what they carried.

I have a friend I have known for less than ten years. She is one of the most significant people in my life right now. She has walked with me into seasons I could not have imagined and spoken to parts of my calling that my lifelong people, as much as they love me, simply did not have access to. That friendship could not have happened if I had decided my oldest relationships were sufficient. While they are irreplaceable, they are also not the whole picture.

Jesus did not pour into a crowd and call it a relationship. He moved through his ministry with a clear intention about who was close and how close. There were three, Peter, James, and John, who were present at the Transfiguration and present again in the garden at Gethsemane. Not the full twelve. There were three. There were moments, weight-bearing moments, that he brought only those three into.

Beyond the three were the twelve, named and commissioned, who traveled with him through the bulk of his public ministry. And beyond them, a wider circle of disciples, men and women, who were an essential part of what he was building on earth, and whose names we mostly do not have.

What strikes me in all of this is not only that Jesus had layers. It is what he received within those layers. He returned to Bethany, to Mary and Martha and Lazarus, in a way that suggests the household was important to Him, not only a place where He offered service. When Mary anointed His feet, He did not redirect her or minimize what she offered. He received it. He defended it. He let her in.

His relational world was not static either. Lazarus’ family was not there from the beginning. Zacchaeus had a single afternoon that changed his life. The women who traveled with Him and supported His ministry with their own resources entered His story after it had already begun. He remained open to new placement, and He received from the people those new relationships brought.

The circles Jesus moved in were not accidental. They were intentional. And they were not only for what He could give.

So here is where I want to sit with you for a moment, particularly if you read through last week and felt settled because you already have people. Too often, it is easy to check the box because it is “safe.” I believe you, I’ve been you.

But Mandy has people too.

The question worth chewing on this week is not whether your circles are full. It is how they were built. If the only people who have made it past the surface are the ones who needed you first, or the ones who arrived before you knew how to close the door, before the pattern set in, then your circles may be populated without being resourced.

There is a difference between people who have been there a long time and people who have access to where you are right now.

Some of what you carry in this season, your current work, your current spiritual questions, the particular weight of where you are at this point in your life, may require someone who also lives in that lane. Do not think of this as a replacement for those who are already there, although a prayerful inventory of who remains and why doesn’t hurt, either. But there are things your lifelong people cannot give you, not because they are unwilling, but because they have not walked the road you are on. That gap is not a failure but a place to consider opening up.

What I want to ask you gently is whether you are still open. Open to being placed again, to recognizing a new relationship as provision rather than obligation, to letting someone in not because they need you, but because you need what they carry. The woman who has built a safe circle and closed the door behind her is not less strong for it. But she may be less resourced than she knows.

Mandy is not without love. She is without someone who can meet her where she is right now, and honestly, the distance between those two things matters.

The inventory this week is simple, even if sitting with it is not. Look at how your circles were built. Notice the terms of entry. Ask whether there is a season you are in, or a road you are on, that your current people do not have the map for. And then stay honest about whether you have been open to new relationships, and then look around. Because God sets the lonely in families, I know that it is ongoing… He is still setting. The question is whether you are still letting yourself be placed.

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A few weeks ago, I was invited to be part of a “generations” promotion for Purpose Awareness Month. My daughter, my mom, my grandmother, and I were dolled up for a photo shoot. We had ourselves a blast, and the beauty, literal and figurative, was not lost on me. Publicly and in my personal life, I tend to tread lightly around Mother’s Day. As I have navigated life, I’ve become more attuned to the nuances of this day. It’s way more complex than the over-commercialized, consumer-driven faux-holiday it has become. But without getting caught up in that, I still always pause and celebrate. Because I have a lot to be grateful for, and some of it is captured in this photo.

My daughter is in the picture, the first one to make me a mom. She gets to experience, at least in this season of her life, three generations of women in her line. I have two of those women captured here with me. My mom and my maternal grandmother -women whose shoulders I stand on, and shine on. And they are not the only ones. There have been many, many by blood, and others by adoption, who took me in at different stages of my life, who journeyed with and/or poured into me. For all of them, I am grateful.

What I feel when I look at the photo isn’t only that they are alive, though that is no small thing. It is that I have had the privilege of knowing them. Watching them. Being shaped by their voices, their hands, their decisions. The way each of them has, in her own way, mothered me, my children, and the people in her orbit.

That is its own gift. Not only are some of the women I love deeply still present with me, but I have come to know them well enough to recognize what they have carried, what they have built, what they have refused to pass on, and what, through their legacy, I inherit (1000 generation blessing)!

That is what this Mother’s Day is for me. And it has me thinking about you.

Last week, we sat with Psalm 68:6 — God sets the lonely in families. For some of you reading this, the woman who carried you may be gone. Whether she passed away, left, or for other reasons, or maybe was never truly there. For others, the relationship with mom may be complicated in ways that make today especially heavy. So I want to gently invite you to look again. God places the orphans in families. And His placement is wider than we sometimes give Him credit for. In addition to “mom”, there may have been (or is) the woman down the street who fed you. The teacher, colleague or boss who saw you. The auntie, the godmother, the friend’s mom who chose to mother you anyway. There may be a name that just came to mind. Today is a day to honor her, too.

And it makes me want to widen the circle even more. So this is me, naming it bigger.

For every woman who has ever mothered in any capacity - every woman who has prayed for a child, raised one she did not bear, sat with a friend through grief, taught classrooms full of other people’s babies, fed neighbors, mentored, tarried with, poured into.

Mothering is not only biology. We know this. So…

• For the Annas who waited long in the temple, we honor you.

• For the Hannahs who prayed before they ever held a child, we rejoice with you.

• For the Hagars who mothered alone, in exile, sustained by a God who saw them, we hold space for you.

• For the woman with the issue of blood - for every woman whose body, or whose womanhood, has felt like betrayal - we sit with you.

For every woman whose love has been a roof over someone else’s head. For every woman who has been someone’s safe place. For every woman who has loved a child she did not carry. We celebrate you.

And for those of you whose hearts are heavy today, for the absence of a mother, for the child you did not get to keep, for the relationship that was never what you needed it to be, we cry with you. The day does not have to feel one way. Grief and gratitude can sit at the same table.

For all of it. For all of them. For all of us.

Happy Mother’s Day.

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The scripture was Psalm 68:6: God sets the lonely in families.

I have read this verse more times than I can count. Of course, I’ve even quoted it a time or two (or 100). What I always knew (assumed) was that this didn’t necessarily describe the feeling of loneliness. Put another way, God isn’t promising relief from the interior experience of feeling unseen or disconnected. But I don’t think I had ever actually stopped to take it apart until this week. And when I did, I found something that required me to pause. Side note: Y’all be getting so much of my selah moments now that I’ve committed to this weekly writing.

As a good scholar that I am, I needed to understand the meaning of the word. Psalm 68 was written in Hebrew, and the word translated “lonely” in most English Bibles is yechidim - a word that describes an objective condition: the state of being singular, solitary, the only one. We see this same root word in Genesis 22:2, when God speaks to Abraham and calls Isaac his yachid - his only son. The word is not about how Abraham felt about Isaac. It describes a relational reality. There was only one. That was the condition.

What God promises in Psalm 68:6 is an answer to that condition. He places the solitary into bayit - household, family, a relational structure. He addresses the objective state of being without kin or companion. What the text does not promise is that the interior experience of loneliness will lift. The provision is real. It is also structural, not necessarily felt.

For many strong ones, women who have learned to carry, provide, and hold things together, this gap between provision and feeling is the suffering that doesn’t always have clean language. Because on paper, the provision is there…for many of us, the people are there. The community, the friendships, the relationships that persist over many seasons, they exist. And yet, she is still lonely.

In my book, I talked about the possible origins of this weight of being strong, and in the soon-to-be-released revised version, we dig a little deeper into these weights. You see, for some, strength was not a choice so much as a response to chaos, to the crumbling of early family structures, to the lesson learned young that needs go unmet unless she meets them herself. For others, the strength came first, and the isolation followed because, over time, providing and protecting required hiding. You cannot be held and be holding at the same time. The hiding becomes structural. It becomes the shape of how you relate, and eventually, you stop noticing you’re doing it.

What makes this harder is that aloneness does not always look like being without people. You can be surrounded and still be the least known person in the room. Being placed in family, community, friendship, or marriage does not automatically mean you are fully present in it. It doesn’t mean that you are open to receive in a way that bonds and connects.

Here is the honest challenge: if you are sitting in loneliness right now, I want to ask you gently whether some of what is sustaining it has become invisible to you. I’m not pointing fingers; I am not suggesting this is intentional or chosen in this moment. But patterns… of managing rather than sharing, of performing rather than showing up, of editing yourself before anyone else gets the chance to. It’s easy to see how these have helped keep the most real parts of you out of reach.

I can say this because I have lived it. I have been married for 18 years. I have had a best friend (not hubs) for more than 30 years. In addition to them both, I have had close friendships with people who genuinely cared for me. And there are clear periods in the last 2-3 decades when I still felt unseen for long stretches of time. Not because they weren’t looking, not because they were so consumed in their own lives, not because anything was wrong from their end, but because in order to feel the connection, I would have had to show the most vulnerable parts of me. And this is what I hid. The most lonely and most broken parts of me were not visible or were only exposed for short, inconsistent periods of time. That part of myself was not within reach of being perceived by the people who would have received it.

That has changed. Slowly, through intention and through grace, I have learned to answer more honestly. To show up more honestly. To let myself be present in a fuller way inside the relationships I already have. It has made a real difference, not because the people changed, but because I finally let them see me.

God has placed you. I have no doubt that, regardless of where you are in life, you can look back and see where someone (or more than one person) reached out and made themselves available. Where your circumstances changed and brought you into a “fellowship” that was undeniably familial-feeling (work, school, church). I know that, because that is a promise from God and He doesn’t lie. But placement is the beginning of the story, not the whole of it. Just because they reached out, doesn’t mean you accepted, or reciprocated or leaned in (consistently). It doesn’t mean you owned yourself to learn to trust so you could deepen vulnerability.

You may need to sit with what you have built, or what was built in you, that keeps you alone inside the family you have already been given. This is not a small thing to sit with, and I am not asking you to figure it out today. What I am asking is that you stay honest about it, that you resist the reflex to quickly cite the people around you as proof that the loneliness is irrational. The people being there and you being known by them are two separate realities, and both deserve your attention.

The question worth asking is not whether God placed you, but whether you have let yourself be found.

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She and I go over the list, and afterward she executes. I come in and check (double check) we move on.

The night before our travel day was interrupted by unexpected activities, which meant… my initial attempt to double-check the bag was thwarted. This also meant that when I thought I checked the bag, I actually didn’t. Well, I checked in with her, but never actually went through the bag. I know now that checking the bag and actually walking through its contents are two entirely different things. My daughter had taken out the needed items, set it aside, and somehow, in the beautiful chaos of life, certain pieces of clothing stayed exactly where she left them. At home. She zipped up the luggage and put it near the front door as instructed, but the bag was without the contents it should have.

We only discovered this after arrival in the new country, after check-in at the hotel, around 11pm the night before competition day.

She was frantic. I watched her pull out everything she had, convinced the missing items were buried somewhere in that bag. Mommy, I packed it. I promise I packed it. Who moved it? And I had to gently help her trace back through the sequence until we both landed on the same quiet conclusion. The three pairs of leggings she needed were never in the bag. She had the one pair she traveled in. That was it.

Here is what I want to tell you about that moment: I was fine.

Not performing fine. Not holding it together for her sake while quietly unraveling, fine. Actually fine. I knew what we had: one pair of leggings, the right color, a hotel bathroom, a blow dryer, and morning. So I did what I do. I spent about twenty minutes working on the problem. Checked the hotel website for a laundry room. Searched nearby stores for backup options in the morning. Ordered a pair for next-day delivery, worth the try even if the timing was tight. We made a plan, I handwashed and hung the leggings in the bathroom, and went to bed.

What I did not do, and this is the part that caught my attention later, was to ask any of the other parents on the trip. There were at least twelve gymnast families there. People who know us, who were rooting for my daughter, who probably had an extra pair between them without blinking. And it never crossed my mind. It wasn’t something I considered and set aside. It simply did not occur to me.

That is not a logistical gap. That is a groove.

There is a moment in Exodus 18 that always gives me pause when I’m reading. Moses is leading an entire nation and judging every single dispute, from morning until evening, alone. His father-in-law, Jethro, watches for a full day before saying, plainly: What you are doing is not good. Not wrong exactly. Not malicious. Just - not good. And what strikes me is that Moses was not refusing help. He simply had not considered that another way existed. Jethro had to call him out from outside because Moses could not see it from where he stood.

Sometimes the habit doesn’t announce itself. It just runs.

This is especially true under cognitive load. When the brain is managing too many things at once, this trip was the first of a multi-stop, two-week trip for me, on top of the night before a competition, logistics, a task list - all the adulting - it doesn’t reach for new patterns. It reaches for the familiar ones, the well-worn road. Hear me clearly: solo problem-solving wasn’t a choice I made that night; it was the only road my brain offered.

By morning, there was still a lot happening as the pants weren’t fully dry. So we improvised, and I adjusted; however, over breakfast, our situation became apparent, and as we chatted about it, the multiple offers came. In retrospect, it was a “duh” moment, no doubt. Thankfully, my default wasn’t shame or even embarrassment. I kindly acknowledged and accepted the many offers.

The reality is, my wallowing in shame won’t rewire a neural pathway, but grounded awareness might, so I’m happy that what hit me wasn’t the need to hide but instead, a thoughtful reflective pause.

My daughter left for the competition in a teammate’s leggings while hers finished drying. The backup order I placed the night before didn’t arrive in time, but it was worth a try. The laundry room that was NOT listed on the hotel website turned out to exist, as I learned when I asked at the front desk that morning.

It all came together…as it usually does.

Paul writes in Philippians 4 that he has learned to be content in whatever state he finds himself. I have read that verse many times and moved past the word learned without giving it its due. He does not say he arrived at contentment. He does not say it came naturally. He says he learned it. Which means there were moments before the lesson fully landed. Moments where the old response came first. Moments where the progress was real but incomplete.

I am in the learning.

I know this because five years ago, that hotel room would have looked different. The spiral would have accompanied the very loud (internal) self-criticism. And my daughter would have absorbed all of it while I tried to hold myself together in front of her. Instead, I got to show her that these things happen, that we problem-solve without punishing ourselves, and that morning usually brings what the night could not.

She competed and did extraordinarily well, a personal best for her this season. And since she had nothing to wear for the trip home anyway, she got to do a little shopping.

The leggings made it into that bag.

One more thing…

You don’t have to arrive to be making progress. You just have to keep going.

The unlearning is doing what learning does, slowly, imperfectly, and by grace, for real this time.

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What often follows is not just the disappointment itself, but the way we begin to navigate pain differently because of it. It is not always the presence of pain that unsettles us, but the persistence of it. There is something disorienting about a process that does not seem to resolve when we think it should, especially when we are trying to make sense of it through the lens of faith.

Some experiences in our lives come with a kind of clarity. The moment is obvious, the impact is sharp, and you can point to it, name it, and begin to work through it. It may produce a form of pain that, while difficult, moves in a way that feels contained. You can see what it is, and over time, you can begin to see what it is doing. But not all pain works that way. Some of it lingers in ways that are less defined and far more difficult to interpret. If I’m honest, it’s the latter that messes with me.

It didn’t go out. It just stopped being obvious.

Recently, one of our pastors, who is also an accomplished firefighter, explained something to me about how fire behaves. There are fires that burn cleanly and resolve, and then there are fires that continue to burn underneath the surface even when they no longer appear active. In those cases, what you see is not always flame, but smoke. The smoke fills the space, obscures your vision, and creates a kind of discomfort that makes it difficult to remain close. The fire itself has not gone out, but it no longer presents in a way that feels clear or contained. It is still doing something, but it is harder to recognize what that is.

This distinction matters because many of us may not actually run from pain. In general, the more I meet Strong Ones, the more I appreciate their high tolerance for intensity. We know how to remain steady in difficult moments, how to carry responsibility, and how to show up when things are hard. That’s what we do! What tends to destabilize us is not intensity, but ambiguity. It is the kind of experience that does not resolve quickly, that does not provide a clear sense of progress, and that reappears in ways that feel both familiar and unfinished. It is in these moments that something subtle begins to shift. We do not necessarily walk away from God in an obvious or dramatic way, but we begin to pull back from the process itself.

That movement is often quiet and incremental. We create just enough distance to feel like we can breathe again. We regain a sense of control by leaning on what we already know how to do, and we re-engage patterns that have helped us stabilize in the past. From the outside, it can look like maturity or resilience, because we are still functioning and still moving forward. But internally, something has been interrupted. We have stepped away from the very place where the deeper work was still unfolding.

Over time, we find ourselves encountering similar moments again. Another situation arises, another interaction touches the same place, and the familiar tension resurfaces. This is where frustration begins to build, because it feels as though we are repeating something that should have already been resolved. We start to question the process itself, wondering why we are still here and whether anything has actually changed. In many cases, this is where disappointment quietly takes root again, not only in the situation, but in our expectations of how healing was supposed to work.

But what if nothing has actually gone wrong? What if the issue is not that the process failed, but that it was not finished?

The kind of healing that forms us rarely happens all at once.

It does not move in straight lines or resolve in a single moment, even when that moment was meaningful and real. Instead, it unfolds in layers. It revisits the same places, not because the initial work was ineffective, but because there is more present than one moment could fully address. When that process slows down or becomes less visible, it can feel as though something is off, when in reality, it has simply moved beneath the surface.

For many of us, especially those who have learned to be strong, the challenge is not simply whether we stay in difficult situations. We often stay. The deeper question is how we stay.

It is entirely possible to remain in something externally while internally disconnecting from what is happening.

We can endure without being present, push through while overriding our own internal experience, and even frame this as faithfulness. In reality, this pattern can mirror the same self-abandonment that we have relied on in other areas of our lives, just expressed in a more spiritualized form.

This is why discernment matters. Not every difficult experience is something we are meant to remain in, and not every form of discomfort is refining. There is a difference between what harms and what heals, even when both feel uncomfortable. The kind of process that leads to healing does not require you to lose awareness of yourself or disconnect from your internal world. It invites you to remain present in a way that is honest, grounded, and connected.

The question, then, is not simply whether you should stay. It is whether you can remain present without leaving yourself. This means noticing the moments when you begin to pull away internally, naming what still feels unresolved instead of rushing to resolve it, and allowing the tension of something unfinished without forcing it into closure. It involves returning to what you know is true, even when your emotions have not yet aligned with that truth, and choosing to stay engaged in the process without overriding your own experience.

This kind of staying is not passive, and it is not about enduring discomfort for its own sake. It is an active, ongoing posture of connection. It requires patience because the work is often slower than we would prefer, and it requires trust because progress is not always visible in the ways we expect. There is a willingness involved in remaining in something that is still unfolding, without prematurely stepping away simply because it has become uncomfortable or unclear.

Not every fire is meant to go out quickly. Some are meant to be held long enough for what lies beneath the surface to be fully reached. When that happens, the work is not rushed or forced into resolution, but allowed to complete in a way that is deeper and more lasting than a quick fix could provide.

The invitation is not to endure the process perfectly or to stay longer simply to prove something. It is to stay honest. To remain present without abandoning yourself in the middle of what is still unfolding. To tell the truth about what this feels like, even as you continue to trust God within it. To resist the urge to force resolution simply because the process is uncomfortable or unclear.

Because, as I can personally attest, it is not endurance that completes the work. It is your willingness to remain present - honestly, patiently, and without self-abandonment - while it is being done. 💖💖

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If you asked her directly, she would have said she was fine. Maybe a little tired, maybe navigating a hard season, but nothing she couldn’t handle. She had language for everything else. Gratitude. Perspective. Faith. She knew how to make sense of life in a way that kept it moving forward.

But there was a moment, if she actually slowed down enough to find it, when something had shifted. It wasn’t anything dramatic, no obvious breaking point or a day/moment where she could point to and say, “That’s when everything changed.” Nah. This was the most innocuous. It was a prayer she had prayed for a very long time. And this prayer was full of conviction and promise; she was fully committed with the kind of faith that settles deep in you and begins to shape what you expect from the future.

She believed it would turn out a certain way. Unquestionably convinced and trusting God that it would.

But it never did.

Life moved on, as it always does. There were other responsibilities, other demands, other areas that required her attention. So she did what she had learned to do well: she adjusted. Supported by the platitudes and cand genuine care of others, she learned to pivot and reframe, telling herself that maybe the timing wasn’t right, or that something better would come, or that this was just part of a bigger story she couldn’t yet see.

And in many ways, she was right; those weren’t wrong thoughts. But something else was happening underneath them. This one is also a bit of a reframe, albeit way more subtle. This one wasn’t about her beliefs in that way; it was more about how she trusted.

Before, trust had felt natural with an ease and openness that allowed her to lean without overthinking where her weight was falling. But after that disappointment, something in her became more careful and measured.

She still prayed, but her expectation was different. Similarly, her hopes were less certain, and what she did decide to believe carried an additional layer of self-protection. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she began to rely more on what she could manage, and if you asked her about it, she’d respond that this shift was “maturity”.

She became more thoughtful about her plans. More prepared for outcomes that didn’t go the way she wanted. More capable of holding things together when life felt uncertain. She learned how to carry what needed to be carried without waiting for things to change.

People admired it…admired her, describing her as steady, grounded, resilient. She was the one others came to when things felt overwhelming, the one who could hold space, think clearly, and move forward without falling apart.

And all of that was true. What wasn’t as visible was what had shifted beneath it. Somewhere along the way, trust had been rerouted. For Evie, it wasn’t the kind of shift that represented abandonment, but it was more of a redirection. So, instead of resting fully in something outside of her, she had begun to lean more heavily on what she could control, anticipate, and sustain on her own. If she was honest, and let’s be real - she rarely stopped long enough to be - there was a part of her that no longer leaned on God the way it once had. She couldn’t shake that nagging in her that never quite went away, what it felt like when it didn’t turn out how she had hoped.

There is a moment in Scripture that felt surprisingly honest when I paused and reflected on it. John the Baptist, the one who had been so certain, the one who recognized Jesus clearly, finds himself in prison and sends a question back through his disciples: Are you the one… or should we expect someone else?

Nothing in Scripture suggests that he had walked away from faith, so I don’t think it’s that. But if we put ourselves in his shoes, the humanity of it…well, honestly, what he was living did not match what he had expected. The Christ he spent his entire life preaching about was there, and yet, he was in prison. I can’t imagine he’d ever thought that would be the outcome of his ministry once Jesus had been revealed.

Back to Evie, in her humanity, she adjusted her expectations. Not in a dramatic way, but in small, practical ways that felt wise and responsible. She stopped letting herself fully depend on outcomes she couldn’t guarantee. She built systems, rhythms, and ways of being that ensured she would be okay, regardless of what happened.

And it worked. Until she began to notice that while she was functioning well, something in her felt less open than it used to. Less at rest and, honestly, less free in the way she engaged both her life and her faith.

It wasn’t a crisis. It was more of an awareness…it’s like seeing something and not being able to unsee it.It was the realization that the strength she had built had come at a cost she had never fully named. Because Evie was always only trying to protect herself from disappointment. She never wanted to feel the disorientation of trusting deeply and not seeing it unfold the way she believed it would. You know, that vulnerability of leaning without having a guarantee? What made it hardest for her (and many of us) to recognize was this:

She would never have called it disappointment with God because that felt too direct, certainly too irreverent. How could we even utter or admit to thinking this…so like Evie, we carry it silently, buried in our subconscious, but life is unintentionally built around it.

Reminder, not every form of strength begins in confidence. Like Evie, some of it is formed in the quiet places where trust was disrupted, and something in us decided, with or without fully realizing it, that we would not stand there unprotected again. And if we are not careful, we will call that wisdom and growth. We may even go as far as to call it learning how to live, without ever noticing the place where trust shifted underneath it all.

If this resonates with you and is an area you currently need to address, here’s what I want you to consider..give yourself grace. Do not rush back into trust as if nothing happened, and certainly do not force yourself into a version of faith that feels disconnected from your lived experience. That is, do not gaslight yourself.

But as you are already doing, just notice. Take inventory of where the shift happened. Equally important, determine the costs. Notice where strength may have stepped in and taken over. As I have said before, what remains unseen (unknown or in your subconscious) will continue to lead your behaviors.

And perhaps, for some of us, the first step back is not striving or proving anything at all… but gently, graciously but honestly acknowledging what we have been carrying all along.

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So my story - it’s Good Friday and the first morning of the two-day Encounter, and somehow the day didn’t quite begin the way I imagined it would. In my head, I expected quiet, grounded, and prayerful as I prepared for what I knew to be a beautiful but heavy day.

Instead, all I felt was disruption.

Let me just say, it was nothing dramatic nor spiritually profound. It was just the kind of inconvenience that comes in the most ordinary way. The dog, Dallas, who is very much still in his late childhood years and not quite disciplined era, managed to pee in a way that felt almost intentional. While locked in his cage overnight, he clearly lifted his leg toward the outside and emptied his bladder. The first evidence of this was not even the smell, but the wet foot when I approached the cage. YUCK.

So now, instead of finishing my prayer time and settling into the posture I thought the day required, I was cleaning… the dog, the cage (a little got in), and the house, as the pee drained quite a bit before settling.

A little annoyed, I opted for the walk; it’s always refreshing, a great way to get some steps, have him burn some energy, and, my favorite part… quiet, talking to God. So this was a win-win for both of us. Walking clears my head and helps me reset in ways I don’t even fully recognize. And this morning, I walked extra long and took a bit of a detour in a different direction around the neighborhood. And in that detour, somewhere along the way, I loosened my grip, well, more accurately, I gave him more room on his leash, and he wandered off into a bramble bush. I didn’t even notice it. I just turned around and found him clearly disturbed, rubbing, spinning, and looking frustrated.

There were prickles everywhere.

In his fur. On his paws. Around his face. Tiny, stubborn things woven into places that you wouldn’t imagine, I mean, some were even under his chin area…and worse, around his ears, like how? He was visibly uncomfortable, and I knew immediately what needed to happen.

We had to go back home because I needed more tools than I could carry on a walk, and I needed some concentrated time to tackle this process. I knew when I got home, I had to do what I’m now calling… the “deep de-prickling”.

At first, I approached it the way many of us approach interruption - quickly, forcefully, with just enough attention to “fix the problem” so I could get back to what I actually wanted to be doing. I grabbed his brush, and with a quick and forceful stroke, I attempted to move quickly through his curly fur. My hands were firm, maybe a little too firm, but I was trying to solve the problem.

But it wasn’t working.

He was spooked. Pulling away. Flinching. And the more I rushed, the more it hurt him. The more I pushed, the less progress we made. So I stopped. We went to another spot on the back porch, where I sat down and pulled him close. And with a resigned sigh, I changed my approach.

First of all, I used a different brush. This one required slowness. Eventually, I set the brush aside altogether and used my hands. One prickle at a time. Carefully. Gently. Attentively.

It was a process.

At first, he resisted, squirming out of my hands and trying to run away. Every instinct in him said, " Get away from the thing that’s touching the pain.” But slowly, almost imperceptibly, he began to settle. While I don’t speak “dog”, I think Dallas realized that if the prickles were going to come off, which by this point they were, he would have to trust me/the process. He actually stopped pulling away and let me get closer to the most sensitive places. The areas that would have been impossible to reach if he had stayed in the resistance.

And as I sat there, pulling prickle after prickle from his fur, I couldn’t shake the parallel. Because if we’re honest, this is what our healing often looks like. We wander, whether rebellious and loud or just a slight diversion. A small loosening of our grip. This latter wandering could look like a moment of distraction and a subtle drift from the place we know we’re meant to stay.

And before we know it, we’re carrying things we didn’t intend to carry.

Pain. Patterns. Reactions. Defenses. Prickles.

Some are obvious, and others are buried so deep in the fabric of who we’ve become that we don’t even realize they’re there until something brushes against them and we flinch. When we finally do notice, when we finally feel the discomfort of it all, many of us respond the only way we know how.

We try to fix it. Quickly. Efficiently. On our own.

We reach for whatever tools we’ve developed over time: strength, control, performance, and self-reliance, and we start brushing over the surface. Applying pressure where we think it’s needed. Hoping that if we just try hard enough, we can remove what’s hurting us without having to slow down, without having to be vulnerable, without having to let anyone get too close.

But the deeper the prickle, the less that approach works. This is because healing, well, real healing, requires something that the Strong One in us often resists.

Slowness. Tenderness. Proximity. [ouch] It requires us to stay present to places that hurt.

It requires us to allow ourselves to be handled with care, even when part of us is bracing for impact, and all of this requires trust.

I honestly feel this is where the challenge emerges, because somewhere along the way, many of us learned that closeness is dangerous. Safety is built upon emotional (and sometimes physical) distance. There is no safety in being seen in our discomfort, as it can lead to rejection, misunderstanding, or exposure. So we adapt, and our adaptation looks like covering, managing, or hiding.

Not unlike the first instinct in the Garden of Eden, when awareness entered the story, and suddenly being seen felt like too much to bear. Or like Hagar, who ran, not because she didn’t need help, but because the place she was in had become too painful to stay. Or even Cain, who chose protection over vulnerability, control over confession. Then there was Saul, who clung to his image rather than taking the cost of obedience.

And while these are stories you’ve heard over and over, these are not just stories. If you allow them, they can become mirrors for our own lives because if we’re paying attention, we’ll see that our instinct is often the same:

• To move away from what hurts.

• To manage it ourselves.

• To stay in control.

But what I experienced on my back porch that morning was a quiet, gentle reminder of something I already knew, but needed to see again.

Healing does not happen at a distance. Instead, we heal in proximity…in the safety of relationships and communities.

And while it may involve discomfort, because yes, removing what is deep in us will require touching the place where it sits, the pain is an indicator of our healing process, not one meant to harm us.

It is meant to free us. The most notable difference is in the hands we trust. Because where I was rushed to clear the prickles off Dallas, God is patient, no matter how many times or how many thistles have to be cleaned. Where I was forceful in my annoyance, He is gentle, tender, and grounded in His grace. Where I was focused on solving the problem, He is attentive to the person.

And what I love most is this:

God is not intimidated by our resistance.

He is not thrown off by our flinching, our running, our attempts to manage it ourselves. He simply stays. And His presence is steady, gracious, and available as He extends the invitation into a different kind of process.

• One where we don’t have to fix ourselves.

• One where we don’t have to perform healing.

• One where we can, slowly, learn to come closer instead of pulling away.

One more thing, consider reframing your goal in life from someone who never gets prickles, to someone who knows what to do, more importantly, who to trust when it’s time to have them removed. 💖

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Last week, we sat with this idea:

Rest is not the absence of responsibility. It is the refusal to abandon yourself while carrying it.

And if we’re honest, that sounds beautiful… but also a little abstract. I’m a very practical girl, and this is actually one of the gifts I offer to the “body”. I love a good opportunity to teach on the how. Because what does that actually look like? From my early memories, I attended a church with good, solid teaching, but I can remember myself often struggling with the how.

So, back to the point: not abandoning yourself while still carrying your responsibilities.

What does that look like when life is full? And the demands are real? You know, when the weight doesn’t lift?

As I thought about this Holy Week, and this post being scheduled for Good Friday, I thought there was no better example than Jesus Himself.

Because if there was ever a moment where someone carried the full weight of responsibility, it was here. :whew: Even writing this, I had to pause. Because what we see in Jesus was not escape, nor withdrawal. We see Him fully, with the full weight of HIS burden.

When I began drafting the first part of this series a couple of weeks ago, I landed on four ways we practically carry our responsibilities without abandoning ourselves:

• Being seen in relationships → rest disrupts hiding

• Boundaries → rest requires truth, not performance

• Caring for the body → rest is physiological, not just spiritual

• Receiving from God, not just working for Him → rest requires relationship, not just transactions

Now, let’s look to Jesus, who is the author and perfector of our faith.

1. He received from God before He gave Himself to others

In Gethsemane, Jesus does something many of us politely skip. I say “politely” because for some of us (me), it’s kinda like a “no thanks” and for others of us (me), it’s…”oh, I’m too busy”.

But right here, in the midst of His heaviest week, He stops and brings His full, unfiltered self before the Father.

“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death…”

There is nothing that is polished or composed about that admission. It is painfully and brutally honest.

And then…in words that continue to pierce me: “Not my will, but Yours be done.”

That point is pivotal; without that submission, I wouldn’t be a “daughter”, forgiven, accepted, and justified. But even more than what that line and the actions that followed mean to me, I realize this statement was all about connection.

Jesus received from God before He surrendered to what was ahead.

And this is where we fall guilty of inverting the divine order. Because we will be quick to give, show up and carry…and then at some unknown and usually unplanned point, then…well, if there is time. We make an attempt to receive.

2. He allowed Himself to be seen in His most vulnerable moment

In the garden, Jesus brought Peter, James, and John with Him. He let them witness His sorrow, and He was vulnerable enough to name what He was feeling out loud. He did this even knowing they wouldn’t fully understand or be able to hold it with Him. He exposed His heart, even knowing they would fall asleep.

There is a depth of vulnerability here. He still chose to be seen by those closest to Him, when He easily could have withdrawn and fully isolated.

And for many of us, especially those of us who have learned to be strong… it is these same hard moments where our M.O. - and sometimes even our intentions - are to disappear. To remove ourselves from being seen. We much prefer to be seen when we are composed. But in weakness? Nah. Even when we stay useful and needed, we still find ways to hide.

3. He held boundaries even as He surrendered

When I thought about the practical nature of this one, I realized it is subtle but powerful. As I see it, Jesus was not passive on the way to the cross. He surrendered without losing His agency, voice, or identity. He answered when it aligned with His purpose, but there are recorded moments when He was silent, when there was no need for Him to speak.

For example, when He was before Pilate, or before Herod, where it was more of a “show”, there are moments where He simply does not engage.

This is less a reflection of His power than of His confirmed identity. He was anchored in deep and meaningful ways. He is not performing for their approval; there is no need to over-explain, nor to manage others' perceptions.

What we see from the Biblical account is this: Jesus is clear on WHO He is and His purpose at this time.

And that clarity is a form of rest.

How? Well, I’ve personally learned (the hard way) that striving is exhausting, but alignment in your true identity… yep. That is steady and peaceful.

4. He did not abandon Himself, even as His body suffered

When we think of Good Friday, the last thing we consider is physical rest. Jesus’ body was beaten and bruised and pushed beyond human limits. And because of that, I approach this part with caution.

Hear me and hear me clearly. This is not an invitation or endorsement to neglect your body. It is not a model for running yourself into the ground. Jesus was carrying a unique assignment, one that required Him to endure what we are not called to replicate in our everyday lives. We can however, look at His life before this moment. Remember that the same Jesus who went to the cross also withdrew to rest, slept in the boat, and stepped away from the crowds.

But what we do see is this:

Even in suffering, He remained present. He did not disconnect. He did not numb out. He did not detach from the moment He was in. He stayed, fully surrendered, fully aware, fully Himself.

And for many of us, when things get overwhelming, the instinct is to leave ourselves. To numb. To push through. To disconnect just enough to survive.

Bringing it back to us

So if we take these together, rest begins to look less like escape…

And more like this:

• Receiving before giving

• Being seen instead of hiding

• Holding boundaries instead of performing

• Staying present instead of abandoning yourself

And that kind of rest?

It doesn’t require your life to slow down first. Yes, some of us do need to do inventory and get rid of all the stuff that may be distracting. Busyness after all is a beautiful way to hide. But if you are walking in the fullness of what God has assigned to you in this season, rest can meet you right in the middle of what you’re carrying.

So today, on Good Friday, as we remember the weight that was carried…I want to offer you a different question than the one we often ask.

Not just:

What am I carrying?

But:

How am I carrying it?

And more importantly:

Am I still with myself in the process?

Because the invitation of rest is to stop leaving yourself behind while you hold firm to your God-given assignment.

Selah.

As we move toward Easter, I’m praying that even in the discomfort of what today represents, we will sit with all that Jesus carried for us (for ME)… and even in that recognition, remember ALL that was conquered for our freedom.

May His resurrection meet you in real and personal ways.

Happy Easter

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This was my second year doing it, and when I say honor, I really mean that. The visionary behind the retreat is a woman who is deeply intentional about guarding our hearts and our minds, about making space for rest for weary souls. She also happens to be one of the biggest champions of The Strong One message, and I remember when I first realized that… I was honestly overwhelmed. Like, wow. I couldn’t quite believe that something I had carried and wrestled through had landed in someone else like that.

But over time, what started as a lovely surprise has become something bigger. There’s a shared language now and maybe…I’ll call it a shared burden. Better put, we both share a desire to see women return to themselves and to God in ways that is honest and whole.

And it’s been a gift to stand alongside her in that because when I walk into Woody’s Retreat spaces, it’s never only about pouring; I’m poured into as well. I’m invited to bring my entire self, in my own humanity, not just “Dr Gia”, so that I too can pause and receive.

our mirror moment reflection at the Pause Wellness Station

And that’s exactly what happened.

My session was titled Pause, Rest, and Refill, and I structured it in three movements.

We began with pause, which, in many ways, is the hardest part. Because pausing isn’t just stopping. It’s becoming aware. It’s letting yourself actually see what you’re carrying. And for many of us, busyness has become the very thing that keeps us from noticing both the small details and the bigger picture of what’s happening inside of us.

But it was when we got to rest that something deeper opened up.

As I was preparing, I came across a line in my notes, something I had written while sitting with God over time, especially as I’ve been simultaneously holding space for what will eventually become my second book: Return to Rest.

And the line was this:

“Rest is not the absence of responsibility. It is the refusal to abandon yourself while carrying it.”

I had to sit with that.

Because if I’m honest, there are still parts of me that default to believing that rest means everything has to stop. That is, the only way I can truly rest is if I somehow step away from all of it. So much so that a few years ago, I remember being in a season where the refrain in my mind sounded like that old song - “Stop the world and let me off.”

Not because I was in despair. It wasn’t anything that serious. I was simply tired of carrying. And in that fatigue, I found myself imagining this almost utopian version of rest, where I could disappear for a little (or long) while, somewhere quiet, somewhere removed, somewhere with no expectations and no responsibilities. Think Castaway, just… shorter. The daydream never got further than that…it was just emptiness and me. But I really believed that if I could just get there, I’d be fine.

But when I finally sat with God about it, like really sat, not just brushed past the feeling, I felt a deep conviction. The reality hit me that this was NOT the rest He was inviting me into. And I’ve been on a journey ever since, letting Him reshape what rest actually means.

Because what I’ve come to realize is this:

The rest God is forming in me doesn’t always remove me from what I’m carrying. More often, it meets me in it.

Even now, in this season, I’m carrying a lot.

• I’m writing (weekly).

• I’m leading (in every single facet of my life: home, work, church…everywhere).

• I’m here and I’m showing up in all the places God has called me.

This weekly writing itself is a part of that calling. And if I’m honest, I could easily turn it into striving, all the “shoulds”: planning ahead, forcing ideas, trying to manufacture something meaningful on a schedule.

But that’s not how this has been unfolding. Instead, rest has looked like more like me paying attention to the every day. It’s looked like the daily devotional I share with my spiritual daughter and the conversations that open up insight I wasn’t striving to find. It’s looked like mentoring conversations that stir something in me because what God is saying to my mentee is somehow the same thing He’s been saying to me. It’s looked like pausing long enough to notice what is already happening instead of chasing what I think should be.

And slowly, I’m learning:

Rest is not found in escape.
It’s found in how I hold myself while I remain.

So when I say -

Rest is not the absence of responsibility. It is the refusal to abandon yourself while carrying it.

What I mean is this:

It is asking…

• How do I stay present to myself here?

• How do I love myself here?

• How do I make space for my own soul… while still showing up for what has been entrusted to me?

My rock from “The Rock Experience”… this represents my foundation word(s) for this year

Because for many of us, especially those of us who have learned to be strong, abandoning ourselves while carrying everything else has become normal. And most times, even expected. But it was never what God intended.

So this week, I want to invite you to sit with this question:

Where have I learned to carry everything… except myself?

And what might it look like to return, not by putting everything down, but by finally refusing to leave yourself behind in the process?

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Resilience.

Not just being resilient at work, but in the personal lives of my colleagues and even others around me. I don’t know about you, but this first quarter of the year has been one for the books. And I’m not even talking about the headlines or the unrest unfolding across the world. I’m talking about personal experiences. The battles many are navigating behind the scenes…the loved ones we have buried, the diagnoses we are processing, the disappointments and losses…life.

It made me think about our human instincts in moments like these: fight, flight, or freeze.

When life becomes overwhelming, our bodies are wired to respond in ways that promote survival. That instinct is not wrong, and realistically, in many ways, it is protective and can sometimes be productive. But when we live there too long, when our nervous systems stay on high alert, it becomes exhausting.

We find ourselves reacting rather than responding. Pushing forward rather than being restored. And it struck me that unless we find ways to settle ourselves internally, we will continue to operate from this very basic biological survival response.

So for the reflection that day, I chose to focus on something we often overlook when life is demanding our attention outward.

Our inner life.

One of the quotes I reflected on was:

“Can the beauty we cultivate within be the engine which empowers our minds and personalities to radiate love and joy and peace?”

And this reminded me of something that happens in Psalm 77. The psalm begins with distress. Asaph writes honestly about sleeplessness, questions, and a soul that refuses to be comforted. Anyone who has ever carried too much for too long knows that feeling. But somewhere in the middle of the psalm, something shifts.

He writes,

“Then I thought, to this I will appeal: the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand.”

In this act of remembering, the circumstances had not yet changed, but his attention did.

The “right hand” of God in Scripture is a symbol of His power at work, moments when His presence was not only felt, but when He acted decisively in the story of His people. When Asaph says he will appeal to the years when the Most High stretched out His right hand, he chooses to remember the times when God moved powerfully before, allowing those memories to steady him in the present moment. For many people, especially those who have learned to be the steady one in their families, workplaces, and communities, this shift is not always easy.

Strong Ones are often incredibly capable at managing what is happening around them. We organize, problem-solve, show up, and carry responsibility when others feel overwhelmed. But the strength that helps us navigate the world can sometimes make it harder to pause long enough to care for what is happening within us. We stay focused on the next task, the next decision, the next person who needs something. And before long, our inner life becomes the place we visit last rather than the place we begin. The invitation in moments like these is not to stop being responsible or engaged with the world. It certainly isnt to sugarcoat or “thik positive”... it is to remember that the quality of what we carry internally eventually shapes how we show up externally.

Strength that is sustained over time is not only about endurance. It is also about tending the well within.

In the Christian tradition, the apostle Paul offers a similar invitation when he writes:

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.”
— Philippians 4:8

At first glance, this verse can sound like simple encouragement to stay positive. But it is actually something deeper than that. It is an instruction about attention.

What we consistently give our attention to slowly shapes the emotional atmosphere of our inner lives. And that atmosphere eventually spills outward into our relationships, our work, and the way we respond to the pressures around us.

Modern psychology would say something similar. Our minds naturally scan for threats, problems, and unresolved concerns. Left unchecked, our attention can become anchored to anxiety and vigilance.

For many Strong Ones, that vigilance becomes a way of life.

• We watch for what might go wrong.

• We anticipate what others might need.

• We carry responsibilities that require us to stay alert and responsive.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that posture. In many ways, it reflects care, responsibility, and leadership. But if our attention never returns inward, if we never cultivate what is good, peaceful, and life-giving within, eventually we find ourselves running on effort alone.

Scripture offers a gentle corrective to that imbalance.

“Above all else, guard your heart,” the writer of Proverbs says, “for everything you do flows from it.” - Proverbs 4:23

Notice the direction of the flow. Life does not only move from the outside in. It also moves from the inside out. The quality of what we nurture internally, our thoughts, our attention, our spiritual posture, becomes the well from which our actions and relationships are drawn.

Which means that tending the inner life is not a luxury. It is a form of stewardship.

In seasons when the world feels loud and demanding, this may look like something very simple.

A moment of stillness before the day gathers speed.
A prayer whispered quietly between tasks.
A deliberate decision to let your mind linger on something that is good, or beautiful, or hopeful.
Literally, stopping to smell the flowers

Not because the difficulties around us are going to disappear. But because what we cultivate within eventually becomes what we carry into the world.

And the world, perhaps more than ever in its current pace and deep divisions, needs people whose inner lives have become deep wells of peace, peace that can flow outward into the lives of others.

In seasons when life refuses to slow down, the most powerful thing we can sometimes do is return to the well within and draw again from the peace that God has already placed there.

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This week I found myself thinking about shame. As you know, I’ve been pecking along on the revisions to The Strong One (my first book). One of the biggest shifts in this new edition is the way I’m conceptualizing the Strong One profiles. I’m moving away from profiles that can feel a little personality-ish and reframing them much more clearly as masks - adaptations that develop in response to particular emotional environments rather than fixed personality traits.

As I was working on the chapter for the Performer mask, which in the earlier version of the book would have been closest to what I called the Socialite. As I sat with that pattern a little longer, digging a bit deeper into the psychology behind it, I realized something I hadn’t fully named before.

One of the core threats this mask is protecting against is shame. And that realization caught my attention, because it made me realize how little I’ve actually talked about shame here, even though it is unmistakably underneath many of the patterns we’re exploring together.

And the more I sat with it, the more I realized something else…the same way it was “hidden” from me as I fleshed out the original book, it’s also hidden for most of us in our day to day.

Most of us think of shame as something obvious, something that shows up when a person is exposed, embarrassed, or openly criticized. And yes, that’s true, but not the full story. Shame also hides beneath competence, achievement, and the subtle pressure to always be “on.”

In fact, it is hidden because culturally, we wouldn’t recognize this kind of shame because it often looks like success. The person carrying it is often admired. Capable. Responsible. Reliable. Strong. But beneath that strength, there can sometimes be a quieter question running just below the surface:

If they saw the real me… would I still be enough?

That question doesn’t always come in words. Sometimes it shows up as pressure. Sometimes, there is a need to keep producing, keep achieving, keep proving. Not necessarily because someone is chasing applause, but because somewhere along the way they learned that being impressive was safer than being exposed.

The Performer mask is one way people adapt to that threat (more on that when I share the book).

Essentially, instead of allowing the possibility that something might be wrong with them, they build a life that makes it harder for anyone, including themselves, to ask that question. Excellence is the strategy, and success becomes the shield.

And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with achievement or excellence. If you are a person of excellence with a track record of achievements, that’s something to be incredibly proud of. But (and it’s a big but) when achievement becomes the way we silence the fear that something about us might not be enough, the pressure can become relentless.

Simply because if worth is tied to performance, the performance can never really stop.

This is part of why shame is so powerful. Unlike guilt, which tells us I did something wrong, shame screams something much deeper and much more personal:

There is something wrong with me.

And when that message settles in early enough, many Strong Ones respond in the only way that makes sense at the time.

• They become strong.

• They become capable.

• They become the person no one questions.

But the strength that is built to outrun shame will become exhausting to carry.

As I’ve been sitting with this over the past few days, I’ve found myself wondering how often shame hides in places we rarely think to look.

When performance becomes the way we quiet the fear that something about us might not be enough, the striving can slowly drain the very well we are trying to draw from.

There is a story in scripture that came to mind… in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus meets a woman drawing water at a well in the middle of the day. Most people would have come early in the morning or later in the evening, when the air was cooler and the work was shared in the community. But she comes alone, at noon, under the heat of the sun.

Many scholars believe she came at that hour to avoid the others.

Shame has a way of rearranging our lives like that. It moves us to the edges and convinces us to hide in plain sight. And it is there, right there in the middle of the heat and the quiet, at the well, where Jesus meets her.

The beauty of this meeting is that it’s not by chance. In my heart, I deeply believe He knew she would be there, even though the Bible does not explicitly say so. And in His knowing and the meeting, there is no accusation or humiliation, just an invitation. Side note: I really do love the beauty of our walk with God… He’s always inviting us to something rich, deeper… more.

Skipping some of the details of the conversation, let’s go to this invitation. Jesus tells this Samaritan woman, who, for all intents and purposes, He should not be associated with, that anyone who drinks the water He offers will never thirst again, because the water He gives becomes “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Living water.

Which confirms for me that the wells we return to again and again…ugh. You know, the striving, the performance, the subtle pressures to prove ourselves, were never meant to satisfy our deepest thirst in the first place.

I’d challenge that there was always something different, and this reality is yet another point upon which to build our healing process.

It’s not about another achievement or another attempt to prove our worth, but with the slow rediscovery of what was already placed within us.

Our well was never empty; it may have simply been covered over by the long work of trying to be enough.

Sometimes the first step back toward ourselves is not to strive harder, but to remove the stones we placed there in the first place.

And remembering that living water was there, inside of us, all along. 💖

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Then she asked how I was.

I found myself saying that I felt a little out of sorts, too. Not emotional. Not overwhelmed. Just… tired. The previous weekend had been full. Friday night on a platform. Saturday morning co-leading life group. A podcast recording. Three clients. An evening out that wasn’t heavy but still required peopling. Sunday teaching. Sunday afternoon, lunch and separately hosting family (yes, two different things). Monday and Tuesday full in their own ways.

Nothing was wrong. Everything, I mean every single thing I participated in was intentional and meaningful, but it turned out that it was just a lot of pouring. So I took lunch at home that day. I needed space, so I prioritized it. It was simple and thankfully, easy enough for me to decide to do it.

And when I walked back out the door to return to work, I felt it clearly…you are getting low.

It wasn’t a dramatic moment at all. Actually, quite the opposite, more like a quiet whisper but my internal meter was doing its job. When I shared all of this with her, she nodded and said something that stayed with me.

“Yes. It sounds like you need to be poured into. And we need that…not only so we can go back out and pour again.”

I agreed immediately, I mean, of course I need to receive and to regroup.

But also…Not only so we can pour again.

And that’s where it caught me. Because if I’m honest, even my rest often has an assignment attached to it. My personal instructions sound something like…

• Pause so you can function well.

• Breathe so you can show up strong.

• Receive so you can give again.

It’s not every time, sometimes it’s just “let’s pause”. But also, I’m a leader in a number of domains in my life, and quite frankly, this is being mature, responsible…an adult. It’s what leaders do. You pour, show up and do. And if you do it long enough, you know you need to regroup to do that well.

But what I realized, the more I chewed on it, was the reality that this framing still positions pouring as the baseline state. Essentially, rest isn’t necessarily for its own sake.

What I’ve appreciated is that Strong Ones don’t necessarily refuse rest, I mean, some of us do, and sometimes we will find an excuse to skip it. But many of us will have it scheduled, even if it is superficial. We will definitely attempt to build it in when we start to notice the warning lights. But really, many of us live just close enough to empty and instead of recognizing it for what it is, we will simply call our “endurance”, wisdom and then we wait until the meter beeps.

We pride ourselves on functioning well under full calendars and meaningful demands. We love what we do. We love who we serve. We love our families, our callings, our communities. Nothing is actually wrong. And yet, sometimes we are living in cycles of depletion and repair.

Pour.

Pour.

Pour.

Pause.

Receive.

Pour.

Pour.

and…it works, until it doesn’t.

If you’re a Strong One, you probably recognize this rhythm as the backdrop of your life. You say yes where it matters and yes, you [always] show up when it counts. But unfortunately, somewhere along the way, living near empty starts to feel normal.

What unsettled me wasn’t that I was tired. It was realizing how easily even my receiving can be instrumental. As if being poured into only counts if it prepares me to pour better.

But what if receiving is not maintenance? What if receiving is belonging?

What if quiet isn’t something I earn at the edge of emptiness, but something woven into the fabric of being human?

What I do know is that..

• I don’t want to live only in cycles of depletion and repair and call it faithful.

• I don’t want to build a life where quiet is reactive.

• I want to build a life where quiet is assumed.

• I want to live such that receiving isn’t an emergency response.

• And where being poured into doesn’t carry a return policy.

Strong One, when was the last time you received, not because you were low, not because the warning light was flashing…but simply because you are human?

This is not about performance, or better service, or trying to prove anything.

It is…just to be filled. This is your reminder to take the moments, just because.

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