Let's Heal Together!

Maybe you learned that slowing down invited criticism, or worse, invited being overlooked entirely, so you built a self that stayed one step ahead of ever needing rest in the first place. Your nervous system adapted to that environment exactly the way it was supposed to. The problem is not that your body is broken. The problem is that it is still running a survival program that was built for a season you are no longer in, and nobody sent it the memo that the war is over.

True humility is not the elimination of your needs. It is the honest acknowledgment that your needs, like everyone else's, are real, are valid, and ultimately belong before God. What you have been practicing is not humility. It is preemptive self-erasure, and at its root it is a protection strategy, not a spiritual virtue.

Here is what I want to say to her, and to every version of her reading this at whatever stage of the journey she is currently in: the hollowness is not evidence that your faith is broken. It is evidence that your obedience has a motive you have not examined yet. And that motive, once you are willing to look at it with honest eyes, is going to explain a significant amount of the exhaustion you have been carrying, possibly for years, possibly for decades...

Because here is what nobody wants to say at Bible study: sometimes the hardest seasons are not the ones where God feels absent. Sometimes the hardest seasons are the ones where you can see exactly what He is doing and you just cannot see the end of it yet. And the waiting starts exposing every coping mechanism you were convinced you had already dismantled.

There's a particular kind of grief that comes with this kind of seeing, and I want to name it carefully because it tends to arrive without warning and without a clear object, which makes it confusing and easy to dismiss before it has done what it came to do. It's not the grief of losing something outside of you. It's the grief of recognizing something about yourself, about your history, about the shape of your relational life, that cannot be unseen once it has been seen.

What I have observed, in my own life and in the lives of women I have walked alongside for years, is that the patterns we have been examining in this series do not simply exist in our relationships. They migrate. They find their way into our theology, learn the language of our faith, dress themselves in Scripture and spiritual vocabulary, and begin presenting themselves as fruit, when what they actually are is fear with a Bible verse attached.