Let's Heal Together!

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.

That belief did not appear out of nowhere. It was not dramatic or irrational when it formed. It was the conclusion your nervous system drew in a season of your life when that was actually true — when someone's disappointment in you did mean something important was withdrawn. When the emotional temperature of a room could change everything. When keeping someone comfortable was less about love and more about what you needed to feel safe.

There is a specific kind of tired that a good night's sleep cannot touch. You know the kind I mean. You wake up after eight hours and you still feel heavy. The weekend comes, you finally rest, and by Monday morning you're already depleted again before the week has even started. You've tried the vitamins. You've cut back on caffeine. You've told yourself you just need a vacation, a slower season, one less commitment. But the tired follows you there too.