Not in a “I’ve been comparing myself online and I’m in my luteal phase this week” way.

In a I woke up this morning and realized I’ve been feeling the need to defend myself, by myself way.

I grew up a middle daughter of 3 girls, so yes, I do think I’m funny, I do believe I faced a level of neglect, and I am extremely independent.

That last part really gets to me some days, because I spend a lot of my time taking care of myself AND others. A middle daughter but still an older sister. Next week I start a new role in my church and it is all about taking care of others. Believe me, that is what I’m so excited about.

Yesterday I was in a planning meeting with two leaders and one of them said “you know, it sounds cliche, but you’re not alone.”

Duh! I have you two! And the rest of the team!! - she thinks to herself in word not in deed

It’s hard to admit how lonely this all feels. And it’s not that I don’t have people it’s that it doesn’t feel relatable.

I felt like I received a ‘calling’ into ministry my senior year of high school. I told no one for two months and the day I told my family I was laughed at and told “Well at least I know which of my kids won’t be making any money.” and “Do you want to be a pastor or something? Because women aren’t allowed to do that so what do you want to do instead?”

Right.

My first college professor read 1 Timothy 2:12 out loud to the entire class and said I was not allowed to ask any questions about it because that’s just what the Bible says.

I taught for the first time my sophomore year and a parent booked a work trip the day after I told them the date I was teaching and didn’t come.

I taught again about a year later and men asked another leader if they could step outside or do cabin time while I was teaching so that them and their small group of guys didn’t have to watch me teach.

I have been the tagline in almost every female in ministry joke for 5 years. Both when I am in the room and out.

People stopped coming to the ministry I help lead because I was on stage every week, and then told me to my face that my gender was the reason.

If a woman in leadership gets mentioned I feel eyes in every direction on me.

In 5 days I step into a new position of higher authority and I feel the tension of it all.

My prayer journal covered in tears with the words “God are you sure?” Marking the last 6 months of entries.

And truthfully, I’ve read the texts, I’ve seen the arguments, I have read the books, the commentaries, and sat through sermons on the complimentarian argument. And I get it, I understand why they believe it.

And then I don’t agree.

And the amount of backlash and pain I have experienced from the belief that on topics that are not first tier can have faithful readings of Scripture and still land on different sides of the argument is far more than I’m willing to admit.

I don’t really want to state my case in evidence in this Substack because I am actively pausing every couple minutes to let the tears fall.

I’m in ministry with men, I work with men, I do life with men, and I love men. They won’t ever understand it. They won’t ever know the truly personal reality that this position takes for women on both sides. What we believe about this affects our entire lives.

And to my own dismay, I found myself this week thinking that in 5 days from now, my success or failure will show all who did and didn’t believe in me were either right or wrong. And that if I failed it would be like a sign from heaven that I was never meant to be a leader in the first place, like I was told to believe. But if I succeeded it was only because God allowed it this time.

I am starting to think this is a lifelong journey and my convictions and thoughts may change over time but I know that today is today and I am only where my feet are. I also know that my greatest defense is in the cross. In the man who submitted Himself to humiliation and death without a word but that of mercy for those who murdered Him.

To be honest, I am a little scared. But being afraid isn’t the point, doing it even when I am means more.

Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do. Maranatha.

I want to quit writing for many reasons. The main reason is because my life is in shambles and I refuse to trauma dump online. My main source of writing fuel is put to use in my journal which should have a deadbolt lock and be burned after completed. The recreational writings have sounded angry or depressed and I’m not inherently either of those things so it feels naturally dishonest to publish something so far from my voice.

But I have to write. Whether it is a systemic pressure or my own personal integrity, I have to write.

I have ideas about writing about my healthcare opinions but part of me doubts my audience wants to read about the fake beef epidemic in America or my political opinions on whole milk. So those are at rest as well.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the process of learning, as I handle the situations in my life right now, I notice how I handle them differently, think differently, and talk differently than even I would have expected to be doing.

As I have grown with the Lord I’ve been developing a theory, that maybe life with Christ is that of unlearning.

From a young age I was taught to scream when angry, isolate when angrier, and handle my emotions with zero regard to the effect of those around me and myself.

From a young age I was taught that desire is automatically sin and that everything I want is bad no matter what it is, and if I want something a lot it’s an idol in my life.

From a young age I was taught that quick fixes and immediate satisfaction are how to rate success and ‘good’ rather than how the Lord would see it.

Now it wasn’t just my parents that taught me this, it was the media, my church, my friends, and my own thought life.

Every day, when I sit with the Lord I start to see those life lessons unravel in His presence.

What if, like many things of the Lord, God does this upside down too?

What if, God is in the business of helping us unlearn what the world has taught us so that He can be the one that helps us reach innocence once again?

What if it’s not just about learning new things as a sign of maturity, but unlearning the wrong ones?

What if we learn wrong, unlearn, and then learn rightly.

If you have ever experienced deliverance or sozo prayer you will know the three R’s: repent, renounce, reclaim.

Now I will say that my argument will seem void at this point if you do not believe in this active work of the Holy Spirit, however, I do. I have seen the power of this in my life and many others. Repentance is inherently spiritual in Scripture: from ceremonial offerings in the OT and to the welcoming of Christ as a call to repent, then Acts reveals that it is a gift to be received from God not just a matter of willpower.

The reason I bring up deliverance is because this model of repent, renounce, replace has some serious and healthy emotional repercussions.

If sin is the thing to turn from then what/who we are turning to (Jesus) is uncharted territory. Walking in the way is not a one size fits all calling because obedience will manifest itself differently in each person even if there are simpler things that all should follow.

After repenting of sin, we are having to unlearn all our habits that cause us to fall into it and replace them with new ones, new thoughts, sometimes even new people and environments.

Growing up, laziness was acceptable in many ways in my house, especially with things of health and mental growth. So this morning when I didn’t want to go to the gym OR write my substack, I had to decide if I was going to do what I was taught or continue to fight to unlearn old habits and replace them with new ones.

In my mind, seeing it as unlearning feels a little bit liberating from western evangelical pressure.

I’m going into my last year of seminary at 23rd year of being in the western evangelical church (19th year conscious of it) so I know how much we care about knowledge. Discussing things of the past over and over again until we unlock something new is my entire livelihood right now. And it’s not BAD, but what if we didn’t rank ourselves based on how much we can remember when not everything is worth remembering.

A reason you can’t teach an old dog new tricks is because dogs don’t have the mental capacity to unlearn old ones, you do.

So, I didn’t lash out and scream at a friend after weeks of bottling up emotions from the last month of my life (which is unfortunately how I was taught to handle hard things).

Instead I took a long walk, wrote a lot in my journal, prayed, asked my best friends to pray, debriefed, called my therapist and booked an extra appointment this month, ate really good meals that I enjoy, set boundaries, had long and hard conversations, and slept more than usual (none of which are habits I learned in my childhood).

I’ve spent the last year working tirelessly to unlearn old habits and replace them with new, healthy ones.

If I didn’t unlearn the old ones, then lashing out and going for a walk are both tools in my toolbox. That’s the emotional equivalent opening up my toolbox to a lighter and hairspray…

I would like to stay attached to the old ways of life because that’s how I related to people and God originally. Without the intensity and unregulated emotions, I had to relearn how to relate to people and to God. But is that such a bad thing? (Hint: no. It’s actually really good)

Not because I necessarily fall into societal standards. My nose is big and has an “Italian bump” because, well, I am Italian. I am below average in size in almost every way, stopping at a total of 5’0. My teeth are crooked because I couldn’t afford braces as a kid. My side profile doesn’t match the way that drawings of ‘perfect women’ looked, and so I was always thought there was something wrong with mine.

I spent years, like most women (and if we are being honest, men too), trying to fit into the box of society’s standards. The right clothes, haircut, makeup, etc., etc.

I was one of about 30 million Americans with an eating disorder in 2018. I started saving money when I was 14 to try and pay for a nose job and a facelift or chin botox for a more prominent jawline.

I wore pounds of makeup every day because if I had to show what I truly looked like, then… well, in my teenage mind, the world would probably have imploded.

I could mention the impacts of social media in this but we all know the story.

8 years later, I have grown up. But truthfully, I don’t look all that different than I did when I was a teenager.

The difference I find mostly is in how I talk.

Two years ago almost exactly, I went out for taco Tuesday with a friend.

Long story short: I found out what God thought about me in the middle of biting into a fish taco. Thanks, God, you love me.

I didn’t just find out what God thought about me in a casual way, but in a heart-moving, run through the streets, can’t shut up, stay up late, always thinking about it. I had been swooned by the King of the universe, and the Word became a love letter, and the Cross became a proposal.

All of a sudden, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it truly meant to be alive in Christ. How life in Him redefines the entire identity that I once knew.

Beloved. Holy. Blameless. Righteous. Precious. Spotless. Redeemed.

The list goes on, and on, and on.

The God of all things. The one who created everything is madly in love with me and thinks highly of me.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, so it was involved in everything I did.

I went into my phone while sitting at that taco place two years ago and renamed my friends name in my contacts to “gracious _______” because just like me, she was defined by the grace of God.

She did the same thing.

To this day, I can’t text her without having to look up “gracious” first.

It ended up as everyone’s names getting changed to what God thinks about them, followed by their birth name/ formally used nickname.

For months, I couldn’t address anyone without calling them the blameless or beloved, or any other truth God speaks over His people. I am sure you can guess where I fall in the ‘sinner vs. saint’ argument, and that’s okay.

That year at school I got teased, quite viscerally because it started a “trend” of sorts and everyone was posting about it and it became a common language at my college.

Saying it was just a trend, or calling people the opposite of the truth to antagonize me because I was bleeding with passion about this.

January of the following year, I gave a sermon to 800 young adults on a camping trip, and I talked about this truth.

It was a large platform for a simple truth: God loves you.

Slowly over time, I stopped believing all these negative and horrible things about myself and how I looked. I no longer struggle with insecurity, to the point that the automatic assumption (even in my luteal phase) is that I look beautiful.

I didn’t really think it’d ever be this way.

I was prepared to buy a new face before I bought my first house.

I went from staring at myself in every mirror and judging to catching a glimpse out of the side of my eye and being delighted.

The fear of humans is the self love is automatically pride. That by truly believing I am beautiful, I am somehow putting myself on the throne of my heart over God.

But to me, when I look at myself, I begin to think more about God, and how he shaped me and formed me. How he was intentional when he thought I should have cute little moles on my face and neck. A birthmark on my ankle. Maybe he likes the bump on my nose, and the color of my eyes. And that it being uncommon doesn’t mean it’s bad. Because beauty is what is pleasing to the eye, and when we look to Him, the veil is removed, and we can see clearly.

If you talked about yourself the way God talks about you, would it sound different than how you talked to yourself in the mirror today?

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For about 3.5 years now, I have suffered from chronic migraines. Sensitivity to light, noise, and, on some days, it seems the very act of breathing.

I thought I would have enough time to finish my chores and homework this afternoon before the attack hit. I started convulsing over my kitchen sink while washing dishes, and I knew my rush to get everything done so that I could rest and recover just got flipped on its head.

Throughout college, I walked into meetings and classrooms with sunglasses on while indoors and got perceived as rude, stuck up, or begging for attention. Those sunglasses were the only thing keeping me in the room and capable of making it for the next few hours.

Chronic illnesses are not that common, which is a good thing. Chronic migraines affect only about 1% of the population as a whole and up to 5% in America. There is a large margin between the number of men and women who have migraines, and that is primarily related to hormones.

As I lay a waste on my couch today, with my eye mask, blankets, and AC unit turned off because of the noise (even though it was 116 outside), my thought was “this sucks”

I wish my thought life was more profound than this at times, but truthfully I just wanted, and have wanted, God to heal me of my migraines for years. And another week goes by, and I heave over my toilet or have to sit down in the grocery store or do anything but cry so that extra pressure isn’t added to my head internally.

When I was in 5th grade, I started getting really sick; everything was making my stomach hurt, and I was constantly in pain. After a few doctor visits, they told me it was dairy. Starting with Lactose intolerance, it progressed to an allergy, which then became tied to a chronic illness called idiopathic urticaria. This was a progression of about 8 years.

By the time I was in high school, pretty much every food was making me sick, more specifically animal products. I became so afraid of eating that I started to develop an eating disorder because the choice was pain on either end, but hunger felt more manageable.

Close to my senior year, I started to break out in hives quite frequently. If I got cold: hives. Hot: hives. Stressed: hives. I ate a new food: hives. I ate too fast: hives. Clean sheets: hives. Dirty sheets: hives. My body was rejecting everything, and I was so sick.

I went and got an allergy test to find out eggs and milk were the worst of all. Followed by a myriad of minor intolerances that were easily found to be triggers for hives.

My dairy allergy continued to progress, and if a product or food touched my skin: hives. I was on 5 pills and medications daily for 2 years. Pumping my body with H1 and H2 antihistamines, allergy meds, nasal sprays, and carrying an EpiPen around just in case.

Oh, I forgot to mention, my lactose intolerance became an anaphylactic allergy to dairy. I was so sick.

I would cry in the bathrooms of restaurants because I couldn’t eat anything safely, and if I could, it would cost $18 more than an average meal. Then I would walk out and sit back down at the table, bloodshot eyes, and a “what if she’s just faking it” whispered on the other end of the table echoing around me.

The week before my 20th birthday, I started to see, hear, and read the words “fresh” and “dew” everywhere, not exclusively together but on occasion. It was in every Scripture I read that week; I met a girl whose name meant “dew”, it was mentioned in class, in random conversations, and a friend texted me a verse too.

I felt like I was preparing for something new, and I had no clue what it was going to be.

On the eve of my birthday, I walked out of my friend’s apartment at 11:57, got downstairs at 12:00 AM, and it was raining. Nowhere on the forecast all week did it mention rain at all, and here I was, in a fresh falling of water.

I went to bed that night and woke up with this visceral memory of someone praying for me about 2 weeks prior. I was at a ministry called Kamp Love, and they were doing a prayer movement for healing. My hand shot right up, and two of my best friends came up to me and asked me if I was sick; they didn’t know.

With tears in my eyes, I walked up to the girl who led the moment, and I asked her to pray, then I went about my business. I did nothing about it and pretty much forgot that it happened for two weeks until my birthday.

I woke up and got ready for brunch at a vegan restaurant with my family because that was the only kind of place that was safe enough for me to eat. I could not shake the memory.

At brunch that morning, I told my whole family that I believed next year we’d have brunch anywhere I wanted because God was going to heal me. They laughed in my face and changed the conversation. I don’t blame them, to be honest; I had been sick for so long, why would God just heal me?

For the next week, I spent every day praying for my body without telling anyone else about it. I made a group chat with 5 of my closest friends and said we were going to our local pizza place that Monday night. I was driving, I wasn’t taking meds, and that everyone should come ready with a whole lot of faith because I wasn’t bringing my EpiPen either.

The closest emergency room was 10 minutes away, but I didn’t know that until tonight. I figured it’d be good to know for dramatic effect.

I went inside and ordered a Canadian Pizza (not in the mood to argue about it) and asked her to give me the biggest slice because it was my first piece in 8 years.

I sat down, and that was it. I ate the pizza; nothing happened. I didn’t have any stomach pain, no hives, no reactions. The next day I had a burrito with the works. The day after that, I had my first whole milk latte. My next birthday I ate cheese just to celebrate.

I went from chronically ill to perfectly healed in an instant. I tossed my meds that night and canceled my prescriptions the next morning.

Some days, when I have an awful migraine, I feel hesitant to take pain meds (mostly because of liver problems tied to excessive use of Tylenol; 2-4 migraines a week will add up fast), but also because, if I take pain meds, do I not have faith that God can heal my migraines?

Does the fact that I still have chronic migraines after 3 years of praying for them to be taken mean God doesn’t care about them? Do I just need to have more faith?

This is a real and honest question. One that I believe has been tampered with by culture and the concept of manifestation. Manifesting is a belief that you can ‘will’ or ‘think’ goodness into your life by good intentions and thoughts.

While there are links between neurology, positivity, and perceived life experiences, I do not subscribe to the belief that I can manifest things into my life with good thoughts. I don’t believe that having faith should be confused with thinking about God and what I want enough simultaneously to convince Him to give me what I want.

Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see”

When you think it through, it can feel like a similar process to manifestation. However, faith without works is dead. I do believe that my belief that God would heal me, and my willingness to eat that pizza, was the faith that God asked for to heal me.

This doesn’t mean do something life-threatening to your health later today because I did 2 years ago and it worked out great for me. And I also don’t believe that this model of actions linked to belief is a secret formula to getting whatever we want from God. He knows our hearts better than we do; He knows when we are trying to manipulate Him.

I know that God honors faith and works, and I want him to heal me of chronic migraines. Still, as I pray about it, I start to get a burning heart to research causes, preventative methods, studies, hormonal health, books, homeopathic and big pharma medicinal treatments, wives’ tales, and whatever the Amish recommend.

I know God could heal me tonight as I sleep, and I could never have another migraine for the rest of my life, and another awesome story to write about. Maybe he will. But I could allow the action, paired with my faith, to watch God turn my pain into passion.

If I started to think too deep about questions that effected what we did, most of my pastors didn’t have an answer for it so I got a “I’ll do some research and get back to you!” with no follow through.

One thing I learned was that if something good happened , God gets the credit. If something bad happens, Satan gets the blame.

Then as I started developing my theology I was naturally more reformed as I began which meant: if something good happens, God gets the credit. If something bad happens, I am always at fault.

Both of the generalizations are dangerous for our spiritual and emotional formation as Christians.

One tells us that we have no part in anything good or bad. Emphasizing humanity as made from dust and returning to dust.

If God didn’t care about what you did at all, why did He send His Son to die for such a useless part of creation? Why is His communication to humanity throughout Scripture? Why does He use humans to build the church that will be His bride?

Secondly, there is very little Scripture about the devil, so this doesn’t mean we don’t care or ask questions, but maybe we don’t let formational theology be settled with half of the conversation being what we know little about. In the Garden, who received a curse for sin? Just the devil? No. Both man, woman, AND the enemy.

Sometimes you’re not possessed, you watched porn out of your own selfish and sinful volition. You’d probably be able to handle the sin problem better if you didn’t blame the enemy for your own actions.

The second idea of humans getting all the blame isn’t right either.

Imagine spending thousands of years loving Creation and speaking consistently through a written document all the potential and greatness that it can be just for a 17 year old boy to win a track meet and say it has nothing to do with him. Or a wonderful 25 year old worship leader with a beautiful singing voice to say that her worship on a Sunday morning has nothing to do with the work she put in for 8 years doing musical theatre and voice lessons…?

“It’s not me, it’s God”

Well… the Bible says (the same book we claim to be developing this theology from in the first place) that Jesus is seated on His heavenly throne right now. Which means He didn’t run your track meet for you, leads your worship set from inside your body, be kind to that homeless man, or work outrageously hard for 2 years to start a nonprofit or ministry that impacts your community.

Yes, the Holy Spirit helped and empowered you and made you stronger than you can imagine, but you stayed obedient. You said yes and kept your yes. You remained. You did that.

Saying thank you for a compliment does not damn us to hell by the way. I don’t know if I am allowed to be that blunt but I am obviously very passionate about this topic.

“Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God’s coworkers. You are God’s field, God’s building.”

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭3‬:‭8‬-‭9‬ ‭CSB‬‬

Gen Z is so chronically afraid of being perceived as prideful to the point we obsess so much over it that we end up actually being prideful.

We feel the need to over explain every situation.

We ask everyone to pray that we don’t get prideful when pursuing a dream or doing something we feel called to.

And that’s fair because we have documentaries of church leaders falling because of hidden sin issues like pride. And one way to not do that isn’t to have other people pray away pride in you it’s to have the Holy Spirit uproot pride by regular confession and honesty in community.

We (Gen Z) have this way of validating actions done on fear rather than faith by putting a righteous intent behind their actions.

“I don’t want to be prideful”

“I don’t want to cause drama”

“I don’t want to ask for attention”

Okay, what do you want?

You know the cliche that people who don’t want to become their parents and try so hard to not be that thing end up being just like their parents?

Well it’s backed up by facts because as you read that you either thought of a friend that said and did that very thing or you got nervous because you say that and you immediately defend to yourself every way that you don’t fall in that category.

If your entire thought life is spent avoiding what your parents did wrong than living in the freedom that God gave you his righteousness, which do you end up more likely to become?

Avoiding pride isn’t the path to humility.

Have you ever been in the heat of the moment and then said something you didn’t mean to say, something you felt deep down but didn’t want to say out loud? And didn’t that reveal your true thoughts and feelings that after said aloud you had to actually deal with?

“I just don’t want to be prideful” while probably meant with a very good intention reveals that you don’t believe you’re good enough to fulfill the task you did or are going to do, so you shrink back, so in the likely case that God really does have your back and you do succeed, at least you didn’t assume it in the first place and people think your prideful.

The most humble person you know isn’t talking about all the ways they avoid pride, they probably talk a lot more about Jesus than pride.

God knew that it would be hard for you humanity to have faith in a God that believes they can be something great. He said that even us mustering up enough faith the size of a mustard seed could move a mountain.

That’s not that much faith… this isn’t a guilt trip it’s just… have you seen a mustard seed?

Humans fail. I get it. The entire covenant that we live in is completely dependent on the resurrection of Christ, because we can’t hold up our end.

And yet He still chooses to work with us every day.

Jesus isn’t delivering your sermon or leading your Bible study in His body, you are doing it in your body. He isn’t passing your drivers test. He isn’t making the first move on your crush. And he isn’t telling you to breakup with your girlfriend instead of learning how to regulate your emotions.

The enemy isn’t making you watch porn. He isn’t locking you in your bedroom to doomscroll all day. And he isn’t making you read a script of unkind words to your parents.

You are not helpless or useless. You have been given the mind of Christ and the life that is of victory. You are in the flesh and tempted but not forced. You are more than a victim but a victor by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.

Fear of pride can get you far, and it has gotten so many Christians onto stages and into relationships that God in all His love blesses anyway.

Perfect love casts out all fear. You don’t have to be afraid of pride to prove you are a Christian. God is the judge of that and the fruit of the Spirit says more than comfortable fear that we have been raised up in ever will.

Have you ever wondered why Hebrews says, “But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”

Sounds pretty serious and real. Let’s file it away in the suggestion box along with

James 5:16, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.”

James 3:8-10, “But no one can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil and full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God; from the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be this way.”

Matthew 6:14, “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

Shall I go on?

I cannot even count the number of times 1 encouraging word, text, or conversation has saved someone I know from quitting, suicide, sin patterns, heartbreak, cycles, and much, much more.

I love the kind that comes on the exact day you need it at the exact right time.

“Hey! I was just thinking about you and…” could change everything

And when you get encouraged, you don’t have to pull the whole, “it’s not me, it’s God” thing. 1. Not true. 2. ‘Thank you’ will suffice.

Someone saw you; let them.

Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called today

My friend told me at a coffee shop today that one of their assignments was about spiritual gifts, and she responded that they have been wrestling and don’t really know what or if they have any.

A classmate and friend replied to them and went above and beyond and decided to take the moment, as part of the class assignment, to publicly encourage my friend and call out her giftings.

She teared up telling me the story.

A girl I know got healed of a crazy knee injury, and immediately wanted to call her mom, who wasn’t a believer. She had only prayed for one person in her life, and once she told my friend about the faith she had, he asked her if she could pray for the room and encourage them to share the gospel with their parents. She did. And she did amazing.

Every time I see her, she brings up how pivotal that moment was for her life and faith, and she was the one encouraging people.

A few weeks ago I got on the wrong side of Instagram Reels. It was right after the SBC made their vote against female pastors, and I saw some really crazy media with some very harsh language around the topic.

It wasn’t a “we can faithfully read Scripture and arrive at different conclusions” type of talk; it was that “women in any form of leadership in the church is an injury to the church” talk.

Harmful enough to make a young girl start to think her dreams grieve God and that she may have to give them up. The young girl was me.

I wept for days. I had no clue what was going on. I was reading every Scripture and journaling for hours and being very honest in my car conversations with God about how I felt.

I cried myself to sleep on a Monday afternoon and didn’t wake up for 4 hours.

7 PM rolls around, and I check my phone to see a text message for every hour I was asleep. Each from a male that had served under my leadership the year prior. Not any lengthy messages, but 4 real and honest encouraging texts from 4 men.

I went and deleted the drafted text to my friend that I was debating about quitting, and went for a walk to watch the sunset. Who would’ve thought it was that easy?

That one day of encouragement saved me from sin’s deceitfulness and making a life-changing decision based solely on insecurity.

I don’t think God designed encouragement to be a regular ego boost for everyone; instead, I think he designed it so that we could use our eyes to actually see.

When I look at myself, I think I see things clearly, but it is actually all foggy and wrong. I wasn’t designed to have to look at myself; this is what the first sin did.

However, when I see my friend, I see the redemption, growth, and shortcomings all at once. What is important to me is that they know exactly what I see and why I am fighting to stay in their life.

Imagine the love you feel when someone knows your darkest secrets and horrible sins and stays anyway. And when you win or accomplish something, they aren’t there to remind you how that one time you failed but just to cheer you on. And when you fail, they are there to be honest with you and acknowledge that you messed up, and call out every great thing about you that is way more important to them than a mistake.

Today is today; you know what to do.

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We see highlight reels of people’s lives online, and it is a downward spiral from there.

I’m not engaged yet! Geez, I am not even dating right now. I don’t have my dream job. My friends aren’t as funny as-

You know, that kind of spiral.

Recently, I found myself putting boundaries on what I can and can’t do to have fun. Not out of morality but by way of comparison. Which put me in a box that was essentially no fun at all.

Mostly for the last year or so, I have been so focused on healing that I forgot that I can also laugh too.

I was sitting at brunch in San Diego a few weeks ago with some girlfriends and walked away with tears in my eyes because I couldn’t remember the last time I had belly laughed for that long. I had tears well up in my eyes multiple times during that meal because I just kept laughing so hard.

I missed the moment milliseconds after it was over.

A few weeks later in the room with my therapist, I begin to explain that everyone seems to be having fun and laughing a lot, and the common denominator when that doesn’t happen seems to be me. Maybe I have something functionally wrong with me that makes me not fun. I mean, all these other people don’t even go to therapy, and here I am on the couch, again.

Like any good therapist (and mine is great) they tell me gently (and not in these exact words by any means) that it was a stupid idea and I can have fun.

First of all, God made me a human, not a robot; system malfunctions don’t just happen because that’s how we are made. Newton’s third Law of Motion is honestly true for emotions as well. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Meaning that my ‘seriousness’ was a reaction to something that happened, and it if it’s not good, it can be unlearned over time,

Secondly, there is no normal; there is only what is common. Or at least that’s the new language I am adopting because I tend to think in generalized terms and well… it’s not as helpful as I previously thought.

So a reason I am so mellow is that I spent 8 years in chronic fight or flight and in the last 2 years finally got my nervous system to feel safe again. Mellow isn’t not fun; it’s safe.

I spent all of high school with night terrors and chronic illness related to the manifestation of anxiety in my body. Today, that is not even a recognizable experience from my day-to-day. I do pretty much anything that doesn’t add stress to my body or I catch it really early on so I can regulate before it’s too late.

So ‘fun’ for me doesn’t look like a common form of this for a 22-year-old. Long conversations, walks, cooking, reading, writing, creativity, eating, naps, window shopping, real shopping, and hikes that don’t disrupt my ability to keep talking.

When I listed out these things, my therapist giggled and said that sounds introverted and common for old people; you’re only one of those two options.

I think being introverted during college felt like the antithesis of being a good friend or a fun person. Both of which I wanted to be, but I couldn’t get myself to mutter words in large social settings after 10 minutes of small talk. Not because I am shy or nervous, but because talking about someone’s year and where they are from is the most agitating conversation ever, and I can only do so much of it before I am wiped,

I couldn’t go on every weekend trip or late night excursion because if I went, I’d be dreaming about it ending so I could be alone. I didn’t really have FOMO because I probably wouldn’t have fully enjoyed it when I am in an enclosed room with 35 people, and I can’t hear the person in front of me.

To some people, this is a typical week in college and something they love and enjoy. Good! Please do. Someone has to. It’s just not me.

Not many people relate to what I’ve written about today. Or maybe not many want to admit it. However, there is a Christian out there convinced that they are a bad Christian because they like alone time and actually need it to function. One that leaves ministry nights “early” because they are exhausted from meeting 8 new people already that day. The list goes on.

Jesus spent a majority of his ministry getting away from the crowds. John Mark Comer makes a very large point of this in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry if you’d like to see more of it. And if you don’t like John Mark Comer’s writing, he isn’t doing exegetical theology; more pastoral care, and when you read it from that perspective it’s a lot more fun. Jesus was leaving all the time for the soul to commune with God, which does not have to be what all-alone time looks like, but some of it absolutely.

We are about to enter the next year of college, and I worry for the introverts. They get guilt-tripped and ridiculed and put on survival mode from day one because they just can’t emotionally handle people all the time.

That doesn’t mean you can’t love people well; it’s actually a reminder that the command goes “love others as you would love yourself”.

He isn’t out here picking favorites based on who can get less sleep and still be the life of the party. You are allowed to have a night in or call it in early. You’re allowed to stay out late and not take any of the flak for it being “past your bedtime”. God loves introverts too.

The point is to become like Jesus, not like everyone else. Obviously, don’t get all hyper individualistic,

but maybe don’t try to just be like everyone else first and fall apart.

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I looked up, and an hour had gone by, and it felt like 10 minutes.

I had to go to class. I had a full day of seminary and the study of God ahead of me.

I got into school 4 years ago without a single clue as to what I would learn.

Now I find it difficult to read Mark 1 and not think about the literary implications that Mark had when quoting Isaiah as the opening discourse for his narrative. The first prophecy shown to be fulfilled in his book is recorded as the one who prepares a way for the Lord.

Also, I think about how each of the writings about John the Baptist continues to shape the conversation of baptism itself.

Credobaptism. Paedobaptism. Which to choose, which to choose.

Baptism of the Holy Spirit - is that upon salvation or a second filling for the believer afterwards? Acts feels explicit, but there isn’t much evidence or language surrounding it, and whether it still happens today.

(I used hyphens before AI ruined them for writers everywhere, and I am growing increasingly upset about it. If you see them in this essay, please do not discount it; I am attempting to make a comeback as a human using human literary tools.

Immediately into a text about the baptism of Jesus. Not baptized as a baby… noted. Is that a church thing now? Jesus didn’t make a believer’s confession, but technically he shouldn’t have to, right?

And what is the Greek word for-

I have been trained to know Scripture inside and out, to ask questions, be curious, search, dig deep.

I have been taught that before I start anything, I must know this: the Word.

I must know the inerrancy. I must know the continuity. I must know the implications. I must know the covenants and be convinced of what it means today, and-

I’ve never really been understood as a theology bro. Partially because I am a woman (not to get political, it’s just an honest observation), and partially because I like to worship barefoot.

I am starting to realize that I am actually smart, or at least in quantifiable terms- the other day I noticed I am keeping up with the theology bros in my class. I knew I was never really “dumb” coming from GATE classes and accelerated honors my whole life; it was easy to get attached to this whole knowledge thing. Learning was something I was good at.

It’s been a little difficult for me to admit this because, truthfully, I wish some days that I were blissfully unaware. That I knew nothing about the Bible theologically and hermeneutically, because then I could read it with a blank slate. I could read through Romans peacefully while getting convicted about complacency and how I treat my neighbor rather than spiraling over patristic thoughts on soteriology.

I am learning about myself that I am extremely motivated by productivity, quantifiable, cold hard facts, spreadsheets, and checklist levels of productivity.

Sometimes, sitting with God just doesn’t scratch that itch.

The very thing I am made to do- dwell in His presence- isn’t stimulating enough. I get distracted. I wish it came in 30-second clips. I wish it came in some blue light format. I wish it sounded more like a vibe than rushing waters.

And that is the very thing I am fighting against.

Truthfully, the reason I was able to keep up with the theology bros in my class was that I had been up to nothing with God. Not a tracked plan, just reading as much as I can take for the day/ Not a time limit, just as long as I can sit down for the day. Not a fixed routine, but a flexed rhythm.

Doing this makes me a better student. I sit in class with more alertness, more attention, and less of a desire to go on my phone all the time.

It makes me a better friend, so when my classmates are talking about stuff I don’t know, I ask questions rather than pretending I understand. This gives them practice in explaining things to people (literally one of the core skills we are in seminary to learn about), and I get to learn something new.

It’s a quiet transformation. We don’t even see it happen until it happens.’

People keep asking me about my summer, and it has been the same answer every time: “I just work, work out, eat well, take care of my body, and that’s it”

Now, I am extremely introverted, and so it is not a surprise that this is how I spend my offseason. However, I found myself trying to make a routine and a to-do list to do all the mundane things of life before 11 AM. If I had stuck to that plan, I would have had nothing to do for the next three days. I needed to slow down, move at the pace of my life right now, slow. It’s the last time for a while that my life will be this slow, this simple; I just need to take it in for what it is.

I grew butterflies in my house one time. We had the cylindrical mesh cage and caterpillars from outside, and we just waited. We didn’t do anything, but every morning for a week I’d wake up and check on my caterpillar first thing in the morning. That first morning that the cocoon had cracked open and the monarch butterfly was drying its wings with a gentle flap, I was amazed. I had never seen anything like this before.

Last week, it was the caterpillar I saved from my dog trying to eat it while being scared of it at the same time.

Obviously, this is a really easy parallel for transformation. It doesn’t take much thought to see the connection I am trying to make here. But even though it is an easy parallel, just stay for a few seconds.

For years, I have ranked my transformation in Jesus based on how set apart I could calculably live from the world. How much I could deny my flesh. How many times I fled from temptation. How often I repented for sin.

God cares about numbers. He cared to preserve the fact that Jesus took 39 lashes on his back.

And that he spent 40 days in the desert with no food and the devil tempting him over his shoulder.

And somehow, when he says that he will transform us into the image of his son (who is the visible and perfect image of the invisible God), there is no timeline, blueprint, or numbers involved. Just the promise.

I think there is a raw and honest work of God happening when we do what feels like nothing to us with him. When we break past the boredom and dwell.

It’s not about how many times we can sit at the altar and repent; it’s that we keep going.

It’s not about how long we can spend in our ‘quiet time’ in the morning; it’s that we keep going there.

It’s not about how many journal pages we use every day writing down prayers; it’s that we don’t stop writing down our dreams and thoughts and desires and going back to see how God blew us away again.

I don’t really know how to convince people in the modern Western evangelical church that maybe it’s a good thing not to be quantifiably productive with God, so maybe it’s a plea to try and let God do the rest.

When was the last time you came without an agenda? Or felt no moral issue if you didn’t finish x amount of chapters that day? Or didn’t you guilt yourself for only getting away for 30 minutes and not an hour? Or even worse, had an hour and scrolled through half of it on social media, so you only spent 30 minutes with Him?

Chill out.

God wants to spend time with, he doesn’t have an ulterior motive. He has made his intentions very clear. He wants you- and all that comes with that reality.

Go and get into nothing productive with him today and see where it leads.

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If I am being transparent, as a female writer, I feel so tethered to my cycle sometimes, something many of you won’t understand. However, I am shocked that so much of the research that has blazed the internet over the last few years is actually accurate about this topic. Since, surprisingly enough, most of my readers are male, I won’t be talking about the spiritual and mental weight of being a woman with hormones this week. Maybe in a different essay. Because, unfortunately, with most church leaders being men and most women’s conferences exclusively talking about Ruth and Esther, we don’t hear much about how to handle being alive and loving God with high progesterone levels.

I am feeling an insane amount of pressure to write this week. Not merely in general but specifically for this Substack, as discipline will often lead to delight, and sometimes it will absolutely strip it away. I have a desire to write things that are profound and thought-provoking. Truthfully, I don’t really believe that I do write anything profound or new; my writing is so incredibly human that it shows the wrestling and pain of just showing up and my regular thought life, and the authenticity in itself is what I believe people find intriguing. I don’t intend to stray away from this; it just gets hard to manage when I am put face to face with myself week by week. Seeing all of the areas of required improvement and honest insecurities that fall so easily from my lips is humbling.

If authenticity and humility is a standard, then talking about it seems to be a way to monetize life itself. That if you talk about humility, it automatically makes you prideful. And discussing authenticity is what makes us plastic or regenerative AI.

What if the secret to life was living?

I have spent the last three weeks dissecting the inner workings of the body, mind, and soul. Nuances and realities, objectives and subjectives. A painstaking journey all to arrive at the fact that all too much pressure is placed on a conceptual idea of what it should be rather than what it truly is. Last week I heard, “Dissecting is for dead things, not for living”

The biggest and most important connection between the body, mind, and soul is that they are alive.

You are real. You exist.

I read in Let Me Be a Woman by Elizabeth Elliot about 4 years ago this story about her daughter questioning the purpose of a Tiger and a Jellyfish. Why do they exist? What is their value and importance? She explains that the value of a Jellyfish is that it is most fulfilling and beautiful when it is simply just that: a Jellyfish. The same goes for the Tiger.

Her argument was geared towards femininity, and the truest expression to be fully a woman is not to be a man or to be God, but to just be a woman.

True, and that concept stretches far beyond just women but to mankind. Let me be human. Let me experience the outrageous effects of my hormones and not realize it until I am regulated and need to apologize. Let me feel better by eating food that actually nourishes my body. Let me pray and experience Christ as I am truly meant to. Let me be.

All these productivity and growth charts are good, believe me, I know firsthand that it is necessary to continue growing. The problem comes when all growth is quantified, when the chief end of man is to glorify God (which is not a quantifiable reality).

My existence is not present to achieve and do unto a specific goal. For existence, when lived in true authenticity and humility, is what glorifies God. Not all the extensive glamour and results that I produce as a way to overcompensate for the fact that I failed ten years ago at a specific topic of life, of which I knew no better at the time.

Life gets complicated, and schedules get full, and relationships get hard… really hard. All of the things we believe are bodies are designed for rather than designed to endure.

You can get through a really difficult workday, and you will do it best when you start from the position that you have already arrived: loved.

You can have a painfully hard conversation with a friend, and you will do it best when you begin the conversation already convinced of who you are: loved.

I try not to overspiritualize my life, but is it really that bad that the simplicity of the Gospel continues to seep into daily life? Is it really overspiritualizing to see Christ in everything?

The truth is, I feel an insane amount of pressure to maintain the value of breath in my lungs. That somehow what I do and how I do it convinces the God who holds every atom in existence together by His breath that He should continue to keep breathing in me.

That was never the point.

John 15:5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing”

Abiding feels like a buzzword. Left with little explanation and as simple as it should be, just remain. Remain. Remain. Remain.

Stay. Stay in the vine when it hurts to be sanctified. Stay in the vine when you are faced with yourself. Stay in the vine when you feel naked and exposed. Stay. Set up camp. Build a house. Whatever you do, do not leave the vine.

So, with all that I am, I look to my right and to my left, forward and behind. I hear all the noise and pains, the trauma and blessings, the news and results. I see all the memories and dreams. I feel all the desires and realities. Each closing in like walls around my person, systemically put up as distractions by a person who wants me to do anything but exist. With the last breath of effort I have today as a weak and feeble being, fighting to remain and being squeezed into one place as a pressure point and pulled away by incessant yanking all at once. In I breathe and with my exhale comes sharply, “Shut up and let me be.”

The connection between the body, mind, and soul, when the body is neglected, the mind is demonized, and the soul is too ethereal to acknowledge substantially, sounds like the modern day.

The mind was always portrayed to me as the equivalent of being a 5-year-old, looking into a forest of dark, swaying trees. With a slight fog hovering at eye level, and the sound of an owl in the distance, and a few crickets to fill the deafening silence. Unbearably terrifying and only meant to be searched alone.

Dangerous, and also controlling my thought life, will, and desires? So, you’re telling me that the central system from which my consciousness is derived is dangerous? Awesome. Yes, let’s create an unhealthy and broad perspective with blanket terminology and then teach it to little kids, crushing hope and instilling unnecessary fear. That’s worked out well in the past!

What if we stopped buying the propaganda that we had to be mentally unhealthy to live this life right? Or that our mind was always meant to be misunderstood and unstable?

I remember in junior high, venting to a friend about how I was feeling and talking about how sad I was, and she said, “Well, at least you’re not on meds like me.” I don’t know when it became a competition of whoever is more unstable wins, but I don’t want to play.

I was originally going to write this essay from the perspective of how social media and the information age make us obsessed with knowledge and emotional numbing simultaneously.

But you know that already. You’ve started noticing that you can’t pay attention or make a grocery list without asking for AI. You find numbing out through doomscrolling to start to get boring, but you can’t move. Your thumb is prewired in a circular motion with a quick pause to double-tap every three rotations. You know you were made for more than a phone, but you may not care.

You have boomers demonizing your phone and the enticing reality of ‘staying connected’ the only way you’ve ever known, coming from both sides. There are plenty of other essays that will ask you and encourage you to throw your smartphone into the ocean.

We all know our hearts are sick, because our mouths tell us all.

Sometimes you can tell if someone is insecure with body language, but listen to them speak and you’ll know for sure. Sometimes you can sense spiritually if someone is bitter, but listen to them talk and you’ll know for sure.

Scripture says that our mouths reveal the overflow of our hearts. Our desires ultimately get expressed in words, which for some of us would send a chill down our spine and an immediate pause to rethink all that you said today. Can people really tell that I… Yes. Yes, we can.

When I was deeply insecure and begging for a glance in my direction, everyone knew. Not because I’d say it directly but because the way I spoke of myself exposed that I believed my deepest fears were already true. My mom started doing that thing where, after a self-deprecating comment, I would have to say three positive ones about myself. I quickly memorized a few basic ones and would just shoot them out to get out of an awkward moment.

I like my hair.

I like my hands.

I like my eyes.

All the while, my blood would boil because I am already in a vulnerable state, and then this? I wasn’t actually upset about saying something positive; I was upset because I accidentally revealed that I hated myself with my words, and everyone knew

For the last two years, I have deeply committed myself to being refined in what I say. I used to have to wash the dishes for a week every time my mouth got me in trouble as a kid. I once washed dishes for 6 months straight. The Lord had a lot of work to do in this department, and I was so desperate to be free that I let Him.

It started simple; I decided I would not make a single “I am” statement that was negative. “I am dumb, ugly, gross, etc.” left my vocabulary. Then I started to replace it with “I did something dumb” or “I feel like my outfit is ugly”

This separated my negative words from my identity. Then, I started believing the opposite. I was having to replace and change my verbiage so often that I started training to just say what was actually true at the moment, objectively, or what I believed to be true of myself.

Usually, we try and will ourselves into believing something and then walk in obedience after, but for many things, discipline comes first, and desire follows.

If you think this is dramatic, you’re right. That’s the point. I needed some drastic changes to help with my insecurity.

My brain was running at 100 mph, and I physically walked at a cool 2 mph on a good day, and my soul wanted to run at the speed of light. My body, mind, and soul were not running at the same pace. Changing my verbal life and how I was understanding myself through words changed my thought life, and my thought life being renewed changed and is changing my spiritual awareness of Jesus every single day.

Words are central to human existence.

Creation was spoken into existence by the very Word of God.

Jesus is expressed as the Word through which all is created.

God spoke to the Israelites in words.

The holy scriptures are recorded in words.

What may seem to be a simple jumbling of letters and shapes carries the way in which humans calculate understanding, which is to know what the jumble of letters means, subjectively and objectively.

Caring about our words is deeper than saying sorry after dropping an F bomb in the church parking lot.

It’s being aware that our environments are being exposed to the aches and groans of our hearts by the words we speak. The ones that either bring life or bring death. Which is so interesting that God doesn’t leave a grey area in our language. He only explains that there is life and death coming from our mouths, not a mixture or kind of version leaning one way or the other.

Just life or just death.

There was a study called the IKEA Experiment where two plants were in controlled environments, and one was given daily compliments, and one was given insults. After one month, I’ll give you one guess as to which plant was thriving and which had died. Interesting, isn’t it? And it doesn’t even have a soul. How much more could words affect you?

We all know how it feels to receive an insult from someone else, and yet the same words fly flippantly from our mouths about ourselves.

We teach people how to treat us by what we allow, and that goes for what we say about ourselves. What are you teaching people about how to speak to you by how you talk about yourself?

But of course, freedom of speech. Why would the God of the universe, who asks His people to be set apart, ever want to refine the core way in which humans communicate and understand their own existence? Sounds outlandish and far too much of a sacrifice without even considering how liberating obedience to His ways truly is for human existence.

Colossians 3 talks about setting our minds and hearts on things above. Truthfully, in a charismatic community that comes off a little whimsical and a little unrealistic. Whatever is holy, pure, and right in God’s eyes, think about such things; your life will show the fruit of it.

Boy crazy girls only talk about boys, and money-obsessed finance bros only talk about money; people with their fixation set on Jesus talk about things of heaven. This doesn’t mean they exclusively talk about angels; it means they talk about life from a renewed perspective of heaven.

More than just how words will build up the self physically and mentally, the One who hung every star by the power of His breath is waiting for you to say a word to Him. Listening intently at the door, hearing you whimper, and for the sake of loving you well, waiting until you are ready to invite Him in. He is listening to every one of your heartbeats. He knows the rhythm of your heart and the sound of your blood rushing through your veins. He loves your voice. Not just the one that can sing on key. He loves the way you sound, the way you experience, the way you love.

With eyes of fire, waiting for the overflow of your heart to say “I love you too.”

The resurrected Jesus, who kept His wounds, exists as the Word of God awaiting the millisecond with great anticipation for you to say a word to Him.

The part of your heart that still feels that insecure longing is filled by His unquantifiable desire for you to just look back at Him and speak, no matter what the words are.

The overflow of your heart moves the heart of the King of the world. How precious are you to the One who exists outside anything a word could ever begin to describe.

An interesting concept to ponder is that every human who has ever lived has been inside a human body, and yet we don’t really know what to do with it. Our entire lives are spent occupying an incomprehensible and unfamiliar home: our own bodies.

Obviously, there are ways to become familiar and learn more, especially with the rates of modern science progression and access to the internet. But why is it that the phrase, “I know it like I know the back of my hand,” exists, but if asked to describe the back of your hand, you might not know if you had a freckle on the knuckle of your left ring finger as information that lives in the forefront of your mind?

Most of what we learn and do with our bodies is done by imitation of another person; our brains, even in the simplest form, work through imitation. Monkey see, monkey do, and peek-a-boo are stimulations for what seem to be the simplest of minds.

I remember writing my first class essay. My teacher asked us to write the word “essay” at the top of our paper. Obviously, in 2nd grade, I thought phonetically and sounded it out, so I assumed it was an acronym, “S.A.” was written at the top of my paper. I look over at the girl next to me, who wrote, “essay,” and without even asking, I erase the top of my paper and switch it out before anyone sees. Good thing I did because a boy behind me got made fun of for writing the same acronym moments later.

This simple act of imitation saved me a small amount of embarrassment, but there are countless times in my life when I have just done what others have done and hoped it would work, or quickly realized it was an awful idea.

I learned how to cook by watching my mom, how to work out by watching my sophomore year roommate, and how to write by reading a lot of books.

When it came to stewarding my own body, examples came few and far between, so instead it became an act of trial and error. So for years I lived sick, bloated, with brain fog, fatigue, and just about every vitamin deficiency you could and still live.

This isn’t just an essay on why you should fast and eat whole foods; it’s about how healing the mind and spirit also heals the body. God loves to restore His creation, and for many its happens in a different order, but for me, my mind and soul got some care, and then my body did.

For most people who have been through a traumatic experience, if you’re anything like me, when I first started healing, the phrase “you’re holding stress in your back/shoulders or head” felt like a guru trap into a secular and monetized version of healing.

Then I lived in a rough environment for 4 months and gnawed away my entire back molars from stress and grinding my teeth at night. I had a headache every day because I had made my body so physically tense as a subconscious reaction to my environment that by the end of the four months, fight or flight was my new homeostasis.

Our body experiences everything; it was there before your mind can remember and keeps track of those moments that shaped you today. Thankfully, it comes after the soul, which is formed in the spiritual places of heaven and gifted to your body at birth. This does create a hierarchy, but it helps us begin to see it rightly once again.

Our nervous system begins to develop in our earliest years. For example, if you’re a girl, when you’re about 2-3, you start going up to male figures, typically your father or uncles, and asking them for attention of sorts. Women have a natural beauty and desire to be seen, not in a twisted and sinful way, but out of purity. Nonetheless, depending on how those male figures react and offer attention to us as a result of asking, our body begins to believe we are lovable or not. Yes, that’s right, our body begins to believe whether we are lovable or not.

Neurons in our brain, hormones, and the nervous system exist and react to the situations around us and become wired in a specific way. That’s why some things are harder to believe than others, because your body is physically wired to believe the opposite.

Another interesting fact I have learned recently has to do with working out. During traumatic, stressful, or negatively formative situations, it causes you to lose brain matter. Working out, or physical activity for about 30 minutes a day, stimulates an action called neuroplasticity, which is the recreation of brain matter and neurons inside the brain.

This doesn’t offer an immediate fix, but over time, it restores parts of our brain and rewires us to begin to believe the things we want, like, you are loved. Or you are valuable. You belong. You are safe.

The most difficult of truths to believe when everything about our being feels it is wired in the opposite direction of truth.

Now, the Spirit and the body connection is different. As someone who leans charismatic (I say gently, knowing that I am a token charismatic in my own community) it would be simple enough for me to talk about the physical reactions to the powerful presence of God that I have had in my own life.

Unexplainable and wonderful moments that have shaped me, my convictions, and beliefs.

However, the spirit/soul is tied to someone’s deep sense of being, their morality, and their belief systems. I deeply believe that the best way to tell the condition of someone’s soul is to see their health and habits.

Love is devotion. Devotion is deeply tied to our sense of being and belief, and you can tell by how you take care of its house.

There are physical acts that connect us to the spiritual reality of Love Himself.

If I claim to believe that I love pickles but always ask for them removed from my burger and give up the side dish at restaurants, the people around me will begin to question if I really do love pickles.

If I claim to love Jesus and never obey Him (as 1 John 4 states is the expression of love and James 2 claims is the test of true faith), the people around me will begin to question if I really love Jesus.

You can probably will yourself into loving God more through action to prove a point, but that’s not what love is for.

The Bible actually shows that God cares deeply for physical reality.

He made the law with specific physical tasks for communion and worship.

God led the nation of Israel through the wilderness with pillars of fire and clouds.

When Job lost everything, his reaction was to tear his robes as an act of worship.

David was mocked for dancing around in worship with no clothes, and blessed.

Jesus, the Son of God, came down from the throne of heaven and took on flesh, to live a life never succumbing to its desires and suffer the death deserved of those who did.

The Gospel is physical. The Gospel has a body in the man, Jesus Christ, alive and enthroned at the right hand of God.

Romans 12 says to offer our ‘bodies as a living sacrifice’ because it is our worship. There has to be a reason that the God of the universe, omnipresent and omnipotent, desires finite beings that can only exist in one place at one time to worship Him. Wouldn’t it be more glorious to have beings that are less physically frail?

The angels dwell in the presence of God in heaven above, and yet Moses could barely look at the back of God’s glory as it passed Him by. I have seen people barely able to stand in worship settings because His presence becomes so palpable.

Weak.

This will be explained in depth in a later essay in this series, but I will say this for now. I think Christians may have “killing your flesh” and “neglecting care for your body” confused. We don’t need to demonize or neglect your body to get close to God; He will meet you in your body of flesh. He is actually quite well acquainted with it.

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Say something. I am begging.

Drawing a blank. Yet again. Because it’s not just something, it’s something profound, honest, real, relatable, and thought-provoking. Or at least that’s what I told myself it had to be.

I started writing weekly Substacks 6 months ago, and it is one of the most stretching experiences I have been in thus far. I love writing, until I don’t know what to write about, or get halfway through and don’t know how to end an essay, so I just exist and start a new document.

23 Substacks written and published, and 55 sitting in my drafts.

I sit down to write, and I have to beg my brain to formulate a thought. That feeling lives deep inside my gut.

One thing about myself I have been learning is that I hate to fail. I don’t just hate to fail in a normal way. I hate to fail so much that it is actually such a painful experience to try something new.

I did sports, but never pushed myself to a point of greatness because I couldn’t let myself believe that I couldn’t be great at anything I had control of.

I did really well in school because failing is optional, and I wasn’t picking that option.

I’ve stayed in relationships for far too long because I simply cannot stand the idea of it coming to an end, as I failed to make it work.

Even now, I don’t try new things or put myself out there that much. In public settings, I get quiet and a little shy because you can’t miss if no one notices you’re there. I like it this way. Balancing right in between a feeling of success and comfort.

A week ago, I was offered an opportunity, and when it was presented to me, I was told I’d have the ability to fail and figure things out. They said this as an exciting and captivating thought, I personally went into a frenzy.

I spent the next five days trying to figure out why my nervous system was rejecting the opportunity, and it is because I have trained myself to avoid failing. To make everything possible to a point of measurable success, no matter the cost. Bending over backwards just far enough to do a full 360, to appear like I am upright.

It’d be easy to sit here now, reflective and transcendent, and say that failure is good for us, that it’s all a part of the learning process, but I won’t.

Mostly because I am not there yet.

I am not ready to become my biggest fear: an unquantifiable emotion that comes as a result of not meeting unrealistic expectations in a made-up scenario in my head.

I imagine it looks like a jumbled-up ball of yarn, not the neatly wrapped kind, but a previously unraveled and put into a ball again randomly.

I am terrified. I can therapize it to you and explain why this feeling of failure looms over my head like a dreaded disease, but that won’t fix it.

I am mortified. I can confess it to a few friends and get some encouraging words and a reminder not to believe lies over my life, but that will only help partially.

I am petrified, and I have to fail.

I won’t fail at writing 52 Substacks this year, but I might fail you, or a class, or a new sport or game I try. I might not pay my credit card bill on time, make my bed every morning, or work out every day.

I will have to admit it, as failure, and watch myself continue to breathe, shaky and unpatterned breaths, as my sight blurs through salt water. When my throat closes at the catch in the middle where my voice stops, that is when I will know I have failed, and will live to do it again.

But born into sin as my inheritance, I was already touched by the world; I just didn’t know it. Then, there is the moment I met the man Jesus, truly. The day He poured His Spirit into my heart and called me His. The day I was born again and washed as white as snow. Pure in a way I had never been before, even at birth.

There is something so beautiful about the radical difference between my birth and rebirth. One was doomed for darkness, and another was destined for something so much greater.

Another aspect of that beauty is what was similar between these two moments. In both, I was single, I didn’t have my dream job, and had anywhere from $0 to $100 to my name.

Interesting.

It’s a shame that at two pivotal moments in my own very existence, they count for nothing if I have not achieved marriage by 21.

About as disgusting as a lie can be: this is the pressure of being a young adult in America. This is also the truth we believe.

The struggle between desire and reality is only worsened by being in a country that convinces us to believe that by not having, something is inherently wrong with ourselves. That I am single solely because I need fixing. I don’t have my dream job because I am too young and naive to know the cost of doing what I want.

But it’s not just in our country as a whole, it’s in our churches, it’s in our universities, it’s in our friend groups, it’s in our hearts. This belief has found its way into the small, open cracks of our hearts. The ones made by loss, rejection, and fear. Those unhealed and sneaky moments that have come back up to accidentally become a core factor in the ‘why’ of ‘who’ we are.

It feels painfully cliche for a young adult girl to write about ‘singleness’ because, well, what’s new? It feels as though it is always a young adult girl wrestling through this more than men. Maybe men see this part of life differently; I don’t really know yet.

I do know that women long to be wanted as a core part of our existence, but being single seems to catapult us in the opposite direction of that.

For both parties, it is easier said than believed that “singleness is a blessing” when you have either been waiting around for years or been rejected and tossed to the side far too many times to count.

I have been pretty apathetic towards marriage for many years. I didn’t really believe a guy could step up and lead me, and from all I have seen in my life, I want a marriage of fruit and love,, or I don’t want one at all.

I didn’t want marriage because I didn’t really believe there was a benefit for me. I have a wonderful relationship with Jesus, I have great friends, a good life, and dreams and desires. What if dating got in the way of that? Or worse… I am in covenant and I can’t back out and lose all my dreams to a toxic tyranny.

Until I heard this: “Marriage is a divine act of sanctification that God uses to prepare you for the eternal marriage with Him. We are His Bride, and He is coming back. This is one way that He encourages so many to get ready.”

That’ll do it. That is the exact motivation I needed. AND it means that my life is more about becoming like Christ than fantasizing about a wedding I am not actively having.

So that’s it? My life just goes on?

Yes! The hope I have is in Jesus, not a partner whose name is unknown to me. The hope I have is that my inheritance is eternal life, not a drained bank account and student loan debt.

Don’t tell your single friends that your day will come soon. Or well, it’s probably good because dating and marriage are hard.

Truthfully, 1. You don’t know that. Plus, it’s a relative and scapegoat statement. If they start dating, probably ever you can just say you were right. 2. Oh no, another person is exposed to you intimately and frequently, and now you’re getting exposed to all of your sin problems.

This isn’t to say it is not difficult, but conviction doesn’t just happen when you start dating (or shouldn’t, but that’s a different essay); it happens in friendship and in time with the Lord quite frequently as well. The verse about iron sharpening iron in Proverbs 27 is about brotherly love and care; it says “as one man sharpens another”(ESV). A chord of three strands in Ecclesiastes 4 is also about the benefit of friendships…

So what if singleness wasn’t the opposition but darkness was? What if the way you came into this world, and were born again (as an individual) didn’t need to be demonized?

Right now, in this very moment, the Holy Spirit is stirring in your heart, chipping away at sin and darkness, leading you into the light. Right now, your Father in heaven is looking at you through the lens of the resurrected Jesus and His atoning blood with delight, joy, and passion. He sees you as pure. He also lives inside of you and is purifying you all the more.

There is trinitarian work happening in, through, and for your existence at all times: for your soul, for your gaze, for your love.

For the version of you that exists singularly, individually, and holistically. The only time in your life when you were missing something, when you truly lacked what you were designed for, was when your heart was an empty and vacant home, longing for the Holy Ghost to come and fill.

Again, easier said than believed.

Frankly, I am just exhausted of people thinking marriage is a requirement for my life to propel forward. I can therapize and process my life for hours on end. Doing a deep dive into why I am still single and arriving nowhere but on the doorstep to insecurity with my hand on the knob. Or I can spend 20 minutes in prayer and watch in real time my heart start to shift back to His gaze, fixated on the real reason I exist once again.

Marriage is good! I am sure because the Bible says so. It is good because it’s fun and refining for the soul.

Hint: so is life walking in the Spirit.

You can wrestle in the waiting. It’s natural when we exist between prayers and fulfillment. But I promise, the meaning of life is not when your name has a red heart emoji in his/her contact or when you sign it on the marriage license. Your meaning is derived from the one who wrote your name in the book of life.

It wasn’t within a moment that it changed; I didn’t start randomly caring about men. It was a long-winded process. One that starts and ends with men being themselves:

Helpful, protective, and feeling a whole lot more than they are ever willing to mention.

Desiring deeply to be understood, to be looked at and appreciated. The constant stepping up, lending a helping hand, carrying bags, and holding doors. There has to be something deeper going on. Wanting no more than a simple thank you, and being patient even when you don’t receive one.

Sitting by yourself in your room is fun, menial, a way to pass the time until: Why did I do that? Why did I say that? What is wrong with me?

Replaying the situation in your head over and over again. Except you’re not geared to sit and sulk about it. You’re determined to fix it. Fix the problem you didn’t know existed until you accidentally revealed it. What you feared all along came true: maybe you are as weak as you thought as a boy. Maybe you aren’t really a man.

Identity is so thoroughly linked to a concept without a consistent definition. We always thought that the feminine beauty industry didn’t play by the rules, what if it was everything?

Changes from hunting, to making the most amount of money, to being the coldest in the room, depending on the establishment you walk into. You never know which one to expect, but all you do know is that you’re not allowed to cry. As long as you don’t shed a tear and show an ounce of vulnerability, you’ll be okay.

Vulnerability is what led you to the dark thoughts that made you doubt yourself in the first place. Why on earth would you ever visit that again?

Vulnerability only brings rejection and loss. If you reveal weakness, you lose. It’s an impossible standard, expected of all males that are breathing.

Vulnerability isn’t just a sign of weakness; it’s an attack on the already shaky identity of manhood. A direct reflection of whether or not you “carry the man card”. The card you earn from doing something either outrageously careless, unwise, or harmful in front of a group of men. Harmless and fun at first, but institutionally run by the peer pressure of the loudest and most thoughtless one in the group.

But remember, don’t cry.

Women cry all the time, and it works out alright for them. But there has to be a distinction. A larger one than what feels obvious to some.

Men aren’t the antagonists of female existence but rather a requirement. Male came first in the creation story. Without a helper well-suited for him, this was the most vulnerable a man has ever been. Not because he was not in the safety of God’s presence, but because the partnership he was so intricately designed for was lacking. Without a need for a helper, women wouldn’t exist.

“The bone of my bone, the flesh of my flesh!” cries Adam with one look at Eve. The Creator organized all of creation by its own kind. Seeds, plants, animals, and creeping things along the earth were distinct by their own kind. Then there was a human, only one without a kind to pair with. Even if there had been an entire existence of men, there would have been something missing: women. The compliment, the helper, the gift.

Any time this conversation gets brought up, there are all of the sociopolitical and theological repercussions that are brought about with it. I understand, and I don’t care.

Men are hurting. 1 in 10 struggle with anxiety and depression. The suicide rate is 4x higher than that of women, monthly. For the same reason mentioned earlier, they want to fix the problem, and it often leads to this conclusion: I am the problem, and to fix it I must leave.

Overnight, somehow, in the minds of countless people, men went from being heroes to being demonized. The reality that many men have failed in living honorably and worthy of respect, and even more haven’t failed. If you’ve made it this far, it’s probably you that’s done well. No horror of a man reading through a young girl’s Substack about men with a title like this. It was clickbait for the immediately defensive but restrained and curious. The ones who know they can be aggressive and harsh and decided to stay and listen anyway. The ones who know that dark bedroom experience all too well. That exists and desires so deeply to protect the very thing that inflicts poison into their soul, out of our own means of self-preservation. Probably from a long history of terrifying encounters with men who choose to be overly aggressive and pious. Again, things get separated by kind; it’s difficult not to associate one with all.

Truly, I will never understand the depths of it all, as you will not understand the experience of being a woman. However, it is not all dim and bleak. There is hope.

Not just for the restoration of the nuclear family and overtly submissive yes women who do as men say, but things are truly turning to the original design. A helper, a defender, a nurturer in return.

I feel a shift happening, maybe it’s just in my heart or my community, but if it starts here and spreads, then so be it. A shift where women let men cry, and even more than that, men let men cry. You let yourself cry. The phrase, “don’t cry, you’re making me sad,” dies and painful and emotionally unavailable death and tears are met with a warm and accepting silence.

Weakness is the sign you need a Savior. Weakness is the reality that you can’t do it yourself. Weakness reveals a problem the King wants to heal, not a thing for you to kill by yourself.

I have noticed that men tend to cling to the verse, “When I am weak, then I am strong,” But more in a verbal practice than an applicable reality. Fair. Delighting in weakness doesn’t exactly come with a manual to follow and a clean slate from all the pangs that you were weak originally. Now, I am willing to be wrong, but I think that might be the point.

The strength it takes to admit weakness is far more than suppressing emotional, spiritual, and mental damages for years for the sake of appearing unafflicted in a world that promises the opposite and under a King and that covenantally ensures healing.

What about the first time you rode your bike without training wheels, thinking your parents were holding onto the seat in the back until it was too late and you realized you were on your own? Then, after a small shake in the front wheel, you got it. “Dad! Look at me!”

All the way up until the very moment you fall for the first time, your parents are looking. You could hide, shrink away, get back on the bike, and ride off into the dim sunset to protect yourself from the humiliation of weakness.

Or

You could let yourself be seen and helped. The very things you wanted originally.

You can cry, I promise. You can let someone see you, too. Your kids, friends, and families will be better for it.

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I wanted someone to talk to about all of this that I could trust truthfully. (They don’t come until later in my story.) So in my naive and human mind I decided, “Maybe I’ll just ask God instead.”

Casually settling for a conversation with the Creator of the universe, I sit down and say nothing. It was like a first date or meeting with that friend you haven’t spoken to since elementary school. I breathe in deep, the kind I can feel fills my throat gently. The first thing to release tension is my clenched jaw, then my neck, down to my hands, legs, and finally my feet. My body slips away into a state where sitting on my bed feels like blissfully floating in a still lake.

My mind starts to wander off. I was expecting an ethereal experience, maybe something that felt like magic. Instead, I start to remember this moment I didn’t want to see. A moment of such deep grievance and pain that I wanted nothing more than to forget. I didn’t want to go into that memory at all. I actually wanted God to erase that one from my mind and all its effects.

What I would’ve given to avoid the part of me that was inevitable. The part of me that feels dark and hidden, covered in mold, dirt, and quite a bit of dirty laundry.

Until I saw Him sitting there: Jesus, in the middle of my mess, storm, and memory. I wanted to yell to Him, “Get out! Save yourself!” Before my darkness scared Him off anyway. Before the tornado wrecked home in my heart was too much for Him to bear. There is no way that He, in all His perfection, could see the darkest parts of my heart and stay to love me?

But what if He was exactly where he wanted to be?

For so long, the Secret Place was described to me as my bedroom with my Bible and notebook, and my favorite pen.

But that’s not it, really. The place where I go to commune with the Lord of all and be transformed is within me. It is the gross and dark crevices of my heart. The parts of myself I want to forget, and He wants to heal. The parts I want to let go of and the ones He wants to transform.

I’ve been tricked into thinking that the dark parts of me deter the King. That they make Him run away. The opposite of that is true.

On the cross, Jesus Himself considered me, knew me fully, and said that I was worth it. Worth His death, sacrifice, and suffering. Even more than that, with burning fire in His eyes, He looked upon me, lost as His enemy, and said, “That is what I will become so that you can become my righteousness.”

So, every day, when I go to meet with Him, in the dark crevices of my heart. I watch Him sit with me, help clean up, hold me, protect me from myself, and all other evil. He welcomes me into the worst parts of me, and I didn’t have a chance to clean up before He came.

He doesn’t want to save Himself from me, He wants to save me from myself. So He waits for me to be ready to see Him see me.

In a naive way, I didn’t want to believe that we would do it to each other, that we would gossip and rip whoever wasn’t in the room to pieces, too. I thought it was just about everyone else. Then one day, about a week after I heard what was being said about me for the first time, I was doing it too. I left that day feeling disgusted. Something was deeply unsettling about gossiping about my friends, even if they did about me. So I stopped. I didn’t just stop gossiping about my friends, but about everyone. I refused to partake in it at all.

If you have ever been in a friend group that bonds purely on combined hatred, you can probably assume that I got cut off really quickly. It took about 3 days for a new group chat without me to be made. I stuck to my word and made my departure, with only bad blood and gossip to follow my exit.

Second semester of my junior year of high school, and I was starting over completely. I sat in the hallways by myself during lunch and told my parents I didn’t feel like going out anymore, as if I had a choice.

2 months later, the friend group fell apart, and 3 of the girls came to me to apologize for not seeing the toxicity sooner.

I had no idea at the time the weight of what it meant to go first. To realize something and take action before you are taught or coached on a 10-step routine on how to do it right. To have knowledge that wells up from the deepest parts of your soul and trust it before trusting the path of less conflict.

The day I decided to leave, I took it upon myself by accident to choose the hard way.

The easy path is whatever my first instinct is. The one that avoids conflict and falls into fear. If it were up to me, I’d probably still be close friends with those girls rather than having a hard conversation(s) about what should change.

The hard way is the path of the righteous. The path that is marked with the refiner’s fire on all sides. The path that is rough to walk barefoot, to make our feet tough enough to handle what comes ahead. A path that is committed to purity and honesty.

Obviously, I was 16 at the time all this happened, and there is simply no way that I did it correctly. I could’ve been more kind and considerate to all parties. I understand that. This isn’t to make myself appear to be better than those girls. This was the first time I realized that choosing purity was harder than choosing complacency.

6 years later, I found myself in a similar position once again. Given a choice between keeping a life that I worked so hard to build or choosing to lose it all to commit myself to the life the Lord had for me.

It would’ve been easier for me to deny myself the refining process of the Lord. Easier for my flesh at the moment, at least.

My life is a continuous wrestling with the Lord of the active prosperity of the wicked versus the longevity of the righteous. Choosing to indulge my flesh and pick my own way will give me immediate satisfaction. It will show me a pleasure that is reactive and instant. Choosing the act of purity will refine me and test me in a way that makes me so weak I have no choice but to depend on the Lord. All while I get to watch those who have chosen the easy path with immediate satisfaction.

I am far too young to know the full weight of what it means to seek the Kingdom and all else will be added, but I do have a deep conviction to find out.

The narrow road is the death of my flesh.

In a world that has taught me how to get what I want and get it fast, I must learn to desire longevity. It is hard to believe that being able to look back and reflect on how you were faithful and the character and fruit it bore in you is better than the fast track of getting what you think you need today.

I would ask you to believe this even though I am young, but Scripture speaks the exact opposite of that. I truly believe that this generation can be an inspired one. One that deeply desires to remain faithful and zealous until the end, even if it means we die to ourselves (especially if it means that for some).

I do not find it to be a coincidence that God continually promises to refine and test those who commit themselves to Him.

Zechariah 13:8-9

In the whole land,” declares the Lord,

“two-thirds will be struck down and perish;

yet one-third will be left in it.

This third I will put into the fire;

I will refine them like silver

and test them like gold.

They will call on my name

and I will answer them;

I will say, ‘They are my people,’

and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’”

Jesus was tested for 40 days in the wilderness as he committed himself to fasting and had nothing but water for that time.

The apostles were thrown into prisons and martyred after they committed themselves to lives of proclaiming the gospel.

The early church was persecuted and met in houses in secret so that the Roman government would not come and kill them for worshipping the LORD our God.

God’s kindness to us is to refine us. The painstaking reality of being made more like Christ is realizing that I was once nothing like Him, and it is a lifelong process to do so.

It is more painful to commit to being clay awaiting the work of the Potter than to be clay in a far-off place with no one to mold me into anything. Clay that belongs to the Potter is formed, squished, bent, ripped, molded, shaped, fired, and then patiently waits to be used.

About two years ago was when this concept started to burn in my heart. I distinctly remember that I was reading Psalm 12 at night before I went to bed, and verse 6 flew off the pages to me.

The words of the LORD are pure words,

like silver refined in a furnace on the ground,

purified seven times.

A Silversmith will put the silver into the fire, pull it out, and hold it up to their face each time until they can see their reflection. Each time it must go into the fire so that all infirmities and imperfections can be burned away.

As I read it, I had the wonderful picture enter my mind that marked me forever. I pray this visual helps you too.

A door that is about 3 stories high and lined with gold and jewels opens into the grand room. The room is pitch black except for a far-off glowing hue in the distance. Each wall has no hint or where it starts and ends as it flows into the next. A young girl steps into the room, determined to move towards the hue out of curiosity and a welling up desire that grows with each step.

As she takes a few steps in, her right arm begins to have a burning sensation, with a quick glance, she realizes a gash has appeared. She continues. Another gash appears on her left leg. Right along the outside of her knee down through her shin. Limping, she continues.

The wounds do not stop coming, each one coming with every step. Along her chest, handprints are branded into her, deep wounds beyond the flesh. Gasping for air, she is reminded of all the hands in her life that came to her in places they never belonged.

Closer she comes to the glowing light, enough to see that the floor is a mirror holding her reflection. She sees quickly that she is naked, her clothes have been torn apart and left to waste behind her. She is completely exposed to the environment around her. Deformed and almost beyond a recognizable state, she begins to weep, each salty tear falling into a wound and causing each more damage.

Her bones begin to crack and fall apart as she weakly crawls before the glowing light that blinds her as she takes her last look before collapsing to her knees.

The light is so extravagant that its mere existence utters a hum that numbs out the sound of her whimpering. She feels the ground begin to shake as a door from the floor opens and a great cistern of silver rises from the floor. Pure silver, deeply refined and perfect, molting in fire and melted into a state of a glowing, velvety stone.

As she lies on her stomach, gasping for breath, and her throat begins to burn from each fighting breath, she feels the worst pain of all. The Light directed the cistern of silver over her and began to pour the silver into her wounds. Perfect filling and sealing the crevices of her cracked and broken skin with the purified metal that cools only by the temperature of her skin. Slowly, each wound is filled, and her health begins to be restored, weakened only for a moment under the pain of what is refined, replacing what is lost.

She regains the strength to stand and begins to glow, as she has now lost most of her worldly flesh, and it has been replaced by the refined silver of the Lord.

She cannot see as the light blinded her when she started this process, but she lifts her head anyway. The silver is poured gently over her eyes, burning and overwhelming her body in a way she has never felt before. Chills are sent down her through the parts of her flesh that still exist. She begins to see once again, with a new glow. She looks into the light and is not made blind. She turns around to see that the room is no longer dark but a grand hall lined with the same silver that lives within her. Precious stones line each archway with care and elegance.

I don’t know how yet, but I know seeking the Kingdom is worth it. ‘All else’ is not immediate satisfaction and riches for the world, but faithfulness, purity, righteousness, and the grace of God to be tested and refined as He promises to all who love Him.

Commit yourself to the ways of the Lord and walk the narrow road; it will prove to be far more valuable.

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My obsession with truth came far before that. My mom had an app on her iPhone 4 called “fun facts.”. I would sit in the car and read through them all, gaining new random bits of information.

It was odd how quickly I would’ve believed any sentence that I had heard at the time. Truthfully, in many ways I find myself doing more unlearning in this current season than finding new information that I don’t currently know.

One of those fun facts that I blindly believed as a young girl and held onto a little too much for years to come is: time heals all wounds.

I believed this up until the moment I sat down in therapy and therapist said to me, “I am so sorry. That is awful,” that I realized, time had done nothing for me. “Thank you” I said loosely with a warm, salty tear running down my cheek. I didn’t really mean it, but I knew the right response was not, “It’s okay” because she was right, what happened was awful. With a blank stare at the painting of a beautiful forest landscape as it goes in and out of focus; my tears fill up the waterline of my eye and slip away softly.

It is a sneaky lie to believe that as time goes all wounds will just magically disappear. Hopefully without a scar, and if there is one I’d hope it’s small and hidden from the public eye.

Time does not do any of the healing work, it merely clicks by and marks how long healing takes. True healing happens with true work within time.

I have been thinking about the aging of wine as these thoughts have bounced around in my head. It gets better over time, right? But what is actually happening that makes wine get better, is it just time? The process of chemical reactions between the sugars, acids, and tannins in an old oak barrel is truly what makes wine taste better. Time marks how long it takes. It is the realm in which this process exists, but it does none of the heavy lifting.

Time is not a villain, but it’s not the hero. It may be more similarly related to a mediocre employee; iffy work ethic and a little too much praise from the higher ups because of proximity.

A wound doesn’t heal if it isn’t exposed to the current reality. The pains of broken skin and itchy scars are markers of healing. Body working over time to send blood in that direction as a fix to what is happening. Time doesn’t do that, you do. And you can choose to suppress and try and let time heal.

I’m not really talking about a wound from falling off a bike you know…

Why would you let time heal wounds it knows nothing about? Time has never been betrayed or broken. It has never been lied to or manipulated. Time has never lost friends or loved ones. Time has never loved. Time has never dry heaved from the intensity of tears racing down your face, jolted by each gasp. Time merely clicks by and marks the moments in which it happens. Remaining consistent in the world so at least in the chaos my fingertips laced with my own tears have something to try and grab as I fall into my own sorrows to wallow in.

Time doesn’t heal wounds, and we should stop saying it does.

We have a great high priest who is able to sympathize with our weakness. The man Jesus, seated on a throne and kept his wounds on His hands and side. Yet still whole and perfect, and marked with sympathy. The wounded healer makes wounded healers.

God himself is not afraid of wounds like we think He is. He does not shy away from pain and darkness in the healing process. Maybe that’s scarier than assuming time fixes everything and living for years in a suppressive and weakened emotional state.

When I sit and make assumptions of how God deals with me I become far off and distant. Shame carries me to a far away land and fear keeps me there. It is easier to think this way, or its emotionally safer for an unhealed person, presumptiously. What would happen if I sat down just long enough for God to take my assumptions of Him and flip them on their head?

Time wouldn’t sit with me in the cold dark tunnels of my heart. The ones filled up to my ankles with tears, echoing with the deafening silence of my own mourning. But, He would.

Time wouldn’t tend to my wounds, disgusting and left unkept for far too long. But He would.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds, and that’s the good news.

Earlier that evening, both of those friends led worship for the youth group.

This was the first time I realized that Christians weren’t perfect. All my hopes and dreams of being perfect fell out the window.

I thought to myself, This is the life! I get to do what I want and get nice friends! For the next year of learning to follow Jesus, I basically stopped cursing in every other line around my Christian friends and thought I was good for the rest of my life.

5 years later, I am sitting across the table from a girl with tears welling up in her eyes. She had been deconstructing because the Christians she looked up to were in moral failure. She had no idea what to do with her faith as she saw those whom she looked up to not walk in the Lord anymore. I didn’t know that there was any other way to do it (being a Christian) than what I saw.

She had been taught that living a half-laid-down life was the fullness of life with Jesus.

There is a deep tension in being in Christ and knowing that there is no condemnation, and truly dedicating ourselves to the lifelong process of becoming like Christ. If it says that my sins are removed from me as far as the east is from the west, am I living like that’s true? Do I really buy it?

It was freshman year of college, and I walked in 5 minutes early to my Christian worldview class, and there was only one seat left open: front and center. Being a teacher’s pet, I was elated. I sat down between a boy who didn’t once look me in the eyes and a girl who could’ve easily been my teacher’s pet competition. She already had out a pen and paper for notes. Instead, we decided to just be the teacher’s pet together.

Slowly, after class, we started to talk, and eventually, I would pretend I was going the same direction as her so that we could talk for longer. Questions started coming up, and I realized she didn’t know Jesus. All the questions she asked stemmed from a place of guilt and shame, as if God was pointing a finger and laughing at her sin-filled life. By the time we had gotten back from Thanksgiving break, she had decided to give her life to Jesus and become my best friend.

Easy enough, right? Nope.

This meant that she was doing everything I did because she had no other example of living for Christ than what I was doing. She didn’t know how to read her Bible, talk to boys, fast, pray, or repent without shame. I was very quickly learning how to do all of this myself, as I had neglected it for the last year because I didn’t have the best examples, but I wanted more for her life.

If she were to imitate me and I saw all of my actions, thoughts, and beliefs on display in someone else, would I like what I saw? Would God like it?

I began to pray a lot about how I should live, not just for the sake of my friend but for everyone I encounter.

The verse, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” has been used to make lazy Christians who don’t want to take accountability for what they are doing. The reality of being redeemed is that on earth, we are in the process of redemption being in full. Which means Christ lives in me, so I should probably act like it.

I remember the first time I got convicted about a crop top in church, I was so confused. I had never felt this feeling before. No one cared, and my stomach was only showing when I raised my hands in worship, so I just didn’t raise my hands all the way. That night, I felt like the Lord whispered to me, I can’t have all of you if you continue to compromise my image for the one you want perceived.

It became less restrictive about what I could and couldn’t do. It wasn’t about walking the line and seeing how far I could go. It was about love. Obedience became fulfilling and joyful. The death of my flesh, no matter how uncomfortable, started to become an everyday occurrence, and I began to realize This is the good life! The King of the universe wants to tend to my heart!

God is jealous for me. He has a burning desire for my gaze. My eyes towards Him fill Him with great joy.

The Holy Spirit takes His job of sanctifying me very seriously. But do I take on the job of being sanctified seriously? Or more of a side gig, when it’s convenient and doesn’t affect too much, like friendships, work, social status, and family dinners that are already tense?

I heard a pastor preach through 1 Timothy and the qualifications of elders and pastors a while back. As he read through them, I remember him saying these are all truly qualifications of a Christian; those who do ministry just have more eyes on them to see if they do it right.

I, in my own little heart, immediately thought of those worship leaders from my senior year of High School that were vaping, the pastor I saw get drunk, and the leader who yelled at my friend when they got angry.

There I was, judging harshly, almost like Scripture says to? Wearing my immodest outfit, unforgiveness in my heart, riddled with worry and anxiety, and refusing to repent for being unkind to my sister that morning.

The ultimate plank was sitting in my own eye. That wasn’t all that God was teaching me. He didn’t want me to just become aware of sin and repent, but be aware of holiness and seek the Kingdom and its righteousness.

I double-dog dare you right now to not think about a pink elephant.

I made that a little difficult, but the premise is the same. If I only think about what not to do, then that’s what I end up setting my mind and heart on.

Don’t sin.

Don’t cuss.

Don’t masturbate.

Don’t get drunk.

Don’t ________.

That doesn’t sound like things above.

In the Old Testament, the first few books are just the letters of the law, the dos and don’ts of being an Israelite at that time. God designed it this way to prove to humanity that no works could reach His standard, so that His love could come and meet humanity.

The New Testament and the new covenant are a little different. Jesus in the gospels not only flips all the rules on their head and adds depth to the reality of them (ie, murder and hatred being tied together), but he spends more time explaining what to do; how to live life and life to the full.

The epistles do similarly. Upon reading them, you will see there are fewer lists of sins not to do and more encouragement on how to keep going forward. Even in Paul’s letter to the crazy Corinthian church, he doesn’t just give them a list of “don’t do xyz” but instead reframes their minds to believe that there is more in this life with Christ than the sin they are currently enjoying.

Somewhere along the way, I think we accidentally limited salvation to a list of rules and a one-way ticket to the pearly gates. That the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us is convenient to help me cry when the gospel is preached and see a cool miracle once in a while.

When we think this way about life with God, it shows… usually. And that’s the dangerous part.

My church has been talking about depth in some way, shape, or form since… well, since it started. My pastor is dedicated to encouraging us to rid our lives of the surface-level life with Christ. The boring things and copycat language, and the different voices while praying, instead of really being transformed.

It is a little too easy to fake depth and still live in compromise. At least to the public eye, it’s too easy. When charisma outweighs anointing, and pride covers hidden sin, we are probably in a gathering of a bunch of Christians. What if that wasn’t the case?

It could be more important to us that we are shaped than platformed. It could be better for the world if we take being transformed seriously before we take coaching on how to do public speaking more frequently. And if the platform comes before a lot of the sanctification, we should be instilled with the fear of God that we will be held accountable, rather than a free pass to be unkind to our friends and families once we aren’t in the public eye.

This is not me arguing for Christians to be perfect; this is me pleading that we would be repentant.

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It’s harder to embrace than I’ll ever be able to encapsulate in words.

Another school year has come and gone, and everything’s different.

New friendships have blossomed, old ones have died, or been picked up and taken elsewhere. Some opportunities have landed in my lap, and other ones have hurt the tip of my nose as the door was slammed in my face.

Another year has come and gone, and everything’s different, and I don’t even know how it happened.

I didn’t watch every change that I’ve experienced.

For some reason, as I am reflecting on the changes, the only changes that I can think of are the abrupt and hard ones, but what if I was shaped by the little ones?

As I was saying goodbye to a friend earlier this week, I thought to myself: It’s been a really long time since I’ve had to experience the world turning on its axis without them by my side.

An innocently profound thought that I can’t seem to escape. Change is happening all the time, and I’m the one missing it.

A funny thing about change is once it’s happened, you can’t imagine any other way. In the moment, it’s hard and painful, but now you can’t picture your life without the changes that occurred.

Think about the first time you lost a friend by being betrayed. Or the first time you ever realized that maybe Santa Claus isn’t real (I’ll leave that up to you.) Sometimes changes are not real; it’s just finding out something that I didn’t know before. Either that or it’s my entire world flipped on its head, and it keeps spinning on its axis. And change doesn’t care about my feelings.

This week was a mixture of both. I spent my time finding out that some friends are dropping out, and others are graduating and moving on to a new city in a new state. All in all, realizing that sometimes finding out that it’s really hard when they are not in the same place I’m in.

I’ve been in college for four years, and so it’s true. It’s been a really long time since the world has spun on its axis without them by my side.

The world is spinning 1,040 miles an hour, and we’ve done it together for years, the constant change happening right under our feet, and it was always us side-by-side. Not noticing the change that would slowly track the time that we spent together.

Time doesn’t really exist when you’re in college. Four-hour lunches and spontaneous road trips in the middle of the night are actually the point. We all spent $20,000 to make best friends and sit in a couple of lectures along the way.

I never noticed the way that the Earth tilted or spun when we were together. I only noticed when you bought a new shirt or ordered something new at Chick-Fil-A

Change is always happening, and I was the one missing it. How sweet it is to be in a place at a time with people who make me oblivious to the sharp pains of change.

It’s been a really long time since I had to think about the world spinning on its axis without you. Let’s not make it a habit, okay?.

With love,

MJ <3

I also wanted to be a pop star despite my inability to carry a tune.

When I was in high school, I believed I was going to be a nurse and that every ounce of my squeamishness would leave me over time.

I had grown up going to church and was really good at knowing the right answer in my head, but not in my heart. I could say “Jesus” out loud in Sunday school, but it really didn’t require anything from me. Learning Bible verses for Awana was a fun hobby that blesses me now, but back then, it was another homework assignment to do.

Right before my senior year of high school, everything changed. I confessed love to Jesus and pledged my life, and it cost me everything.

It cost me all my friendships, potential boyfriends, political views that I had placed my identity in, and my dream to be a nurse.

The day after I gave my life to Jesus, I was found weeping over the local church. I was given a deep and passionate desire to be in a community of believers and teach them about Jesus. Something that had never crossed my mind before August 5, 2021, was now all I could think about.

For a while, I didn’t tell anyone that I wanted to work in the church because it was so new, and it could’ve been an emotional decision. I was thinking about working in the church every day, I was dreaming up ways I could just get in the doors and show people that I had something to offer.

The first people that I told laughed and said, “Well, you won’t be making any money.” Yeah, but if I had a dime for every time I heard that.

Ever since I gave my life to Jesus, and even before I believed it in my heart, I was in the church. Serving and leading in the babies and toddlers and Junior High. I was the kiss up that made friends with the youth pastors, hoping to be used as a sermon illustration one day. I have always been a worker bee of the institution: the church.

I was asked what my plans were post-grad, and like many, I currently have none. Just a big dream in a little girl’s heart to go and faithfully serve my local church.

As I walked away from that conversation, I wondered, “What would I do if I didn’t do ministry?”

I have been serving in church since I was 11 years old, (Yes, my timeline says I was saved at 17, I get it.) There are very few settings that I walk into to just be.

To exist in a church setting and have nothing expected of me except to receive God’s love. To know and be known by Him. My first initial thought was, “Oh no I am striving.” Operating in a way that I believe I have to work for God’s love and prove myself to be worthy of His approval. Since I couldn’t pick a different profession, I was automatically self-righteously assuming that I deserve to be in ministry.

I have been learning recently that there is real beauty in desire. I think in Christian circles, this idea of desire has an immediate sexual connotation and is condemned. It has been pinned as an evil reality that whatever you want is in direct opposition to God. At one point, yes. But in sanctification, our minds become purified. I have been given the mind of Christ, which means that now, by the work of His blood and Spirit, I can (and do) have good desires. So do you!

God is a giver of good and perfect gifts, and He often gives to those who… ask.

If I assume that everything I have ever wanted is negative and sin, then I would just never ask God for anything. This doesn’t truly benefit the world.

I felt a few months ago that I was wrestling with the Lord about how “I never get what I want.” I had these expectations of what my life would look like by now, and the only accurate thing is that I am in college.

I was mourning all of my disappointment and pains while still not knowing why I felt like what I wanted for my life went in one of God’s ears and out the other. He heard me but didn’t care about what I wanted.

He taught me that He is the God of desire, not just good and perfect gifts in the physical reality of meeting my expectations. He created desire. He has desire. He longs for people to know Him and that He loves them.

We see throughout all of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, that God is one who wants deeply for Israel to love Him. He forgives and redeems and even gives her over to who she loves and watches it happen. He knows that all will be restored to Him one day, and yet chooses to be present in the reality of rejection with us.

Desire is actually beautiful. It shows that there are dreams worth wanting and asking for. Things worth the risk and the fight. The grit it will take between the desire and reality may feel a little dramatic, but it will make the receiving of it all the sweeter.

Have we lost our desires simply out of fear of not getting them?

This cannot be the prosperity Gospel, because remember, I was not getting what I wanted when I started learning all of this. I was actively having a desire and felt rejected by God in the middle of it.

Instead, we could desire and watch Him purify them along the way and realize that the true gift is not in the success, money, fame, or relationship, but it is in the recreation of our being from one degree of glory to another.

We must not let the simple satisfaction and quick fixes lead us away from deep longing, as it is a trait we have inherited from our Father. A beautiful King of rich and pure desire.

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