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.

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season of your life when that was actually true — when someone's disappointment in you did mean something important was withdrawn.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.

Being needed allows you to stay impressive. Being known requires you to be honest. If you are always the strong one, you rarely have to risk being seen as the one who is unsure, tired, or emotionally messy. Strength can become a hiding place just as easily as weakness can. Read that again.

People-pleasing is often mischaracterized as insecurity or vanity — as if the core issue is craving attention. For many high-capacity women of faith, that is not the root at all. The root is safety. Somewhere in your formative years, you learned that tension led to distance. That disagreement led to withdrawal. That someone else’s anger could destabilize the environment. Whether it was overt conflict or subtle emotional unpredictability, your body internalized a message:

Hyper-independence is one of the most socially rewarded survival strategies on earth. People clap for it. Employers promote it. Churches call it “maturity.” Families depend on it. And because everyone benefits from your ability to carry everything without falling apart in public, nobody asks the one question that actually matters: Who taught you that you had to be this strong to be safe? Because here is the uncomfortable truth: for many people, hyper-independence is not co

I'm going to say this plainly, because clarity is kindness: God never assigned your coping mechanisms a name tag and called them “you.” You did that — and understandably so. Survival has a way of convincing us that whatever kept us intact must also be who we are meant to be.

Many of us have been surviving for so long that we stopped questioning the weight. We adjusted. We adapted. We became “strong.” We learned how to function with chronic exhaustion, emotional self-neglect, inconsistent relationships, and unspoken resentment—and then we called that maturity. But healing does not begin where coping is constantly justified. Healing begins where truth interrupts what you’ve learned to endure.

So if “God as Father” makes you uncomfortable, guarded, or quietly skeptical… take a breath. That’s not rebellion. That’s history talking. And no, pretending you don’t feel that way hasn’t actually healed anything yet. (Ask me how I know... 😌)