I have an ugly confession to make.

I have, repeatedly and over many years, considered avoidance the path to salvation. Through the gospel of vigilance, the commandment of “Make sure nothing bad happens,” and the liturgy of constant surveillance, I have sacrificed freedom on the altar of control.

My prayer is worry in which I rehearse every possibility, and prepare for every eventuality, relying on daily communion with my feared futures for guidance.

Having convinced me to continually monitor whatever might threaten my joy, my peace, my future, avoidance has become my god, interpreting reality and directing my life as a sovereign and all-knowing authority.

How did it come to this, you ask?

Well, as it turns out, you cannot continually watch for danger without making danger the most prominent feature of your life. In other words, whatever you organize your life around avoiding eventually becomes the organizing center of your life, turning everything you love into something you have to guard with your life.

Somewhere along the way, my brain became convinced that its job was not just to respond to trouble but to prevent every possible version of it, and avoidance gave me a way to try. Every time I escaped something, double checked, controlled the situation, or rehearsed it like a dead horse, avoidance was rewarded. “See how well I protected you,” it whispered.

Having chosen immediate relief so often that it became the object of my love, I turned protection into discipleship.

My name is Hayley, and I am addicted to certainty.

I have preached myself the gospel of vigilance, and it has failed me. I have treated uncertainty as unacceptable and control as my refuge. And all of it has failed me.

It has failed me by feeding me its lies, telling me once everything works out, is settled, doesn’t hurt anymore, and is exactly how I want it, I can finally relax. Anxiety can take a break only after I’m safe and comfortable.

But the search for safety and comfort is never over. There’s always one more thing to watch, one more outcome to control, and one more future to rehearse, which keeps me waiting for a certainty I never get in order to live the life I really want.

The evidence against me is overwhelming: I worry about losing my home while still sleeping in my own bed. I panic over the possibility of having a panic attack. I refuse to ask people for things because rejecting myself is safer than letting them do it. I really want to avoid planes, trains, and automobiles because staying home is the only way to guarantee I won’t perish in a fiery crash.

Yes, this vow to protect myself from suffering is a terrible bargain in which I surrender my freedom in exchange for a protection that avoidance can’t actually guarantee. Because “Make sure nothing bad ever happens” is not an assignment any human being can complete.

I cannot guarantee that I will never hurt.
I can’t prevent every disappointment, control every outcome, or prepare for every future.
I cannot keep living by the false promise that I will make sure nothing bad happens.

So my new mantra is: Even if.

Even if I am disappointed, I’ll survive it.

Even if they reject me, I’m gonna risk it.

Even if something hurts, it’s not necessarily harming me.

For years, I’ve fed my anxiety by demanding proof that nothing bad would happen. Now I’m risking to live with the belief that pain won’t be the end of me.

I can prepare for what is likely, respond to what is real, and stop surrendering today to what is merely possible tomorrow.

I don’t need to know the future before I live the present. I can do what is mine to do and give up what was never mine to control, even if I’m pretty sure it is.

All this time, I have been asking avoidance to save me from a future only God can see, a job that is way above its pay grade. The future isn’t mine to know, but the present is mine to live.

The reality is, freedom is living before fear gives you permission.

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I have a love-hate relationship with uncertainty.

I love it when I CHOOSE it, but I hate it when I don’t.

What’s the difference, you say?

Plenty!

I love the kind of uncertainty where I’m exploring and not just waiting helplessly for an outcome. That’s the good stuff. Like the uncertainty of an amazing meal I’m about to eat, or a creative project I’m consumed with. As long as it’s an uncertainty of my choosing, I can’t get enough.

Having entered the experience willingly, my mind can expect something rewarding, and then flush with excitement instead of anxiety.

But imposed uncertainty is the worst. It’s like being dropped into the jungle blindfolded and told there’s probably nothing dangerous out there. And it still produces the same energy as excitement, but turns it to worry.

If excitement is anticipation for a good thing that’s coming, then worry is just anticipation trying to protect me from a bad thing.

The bone beneath the flesh of this idea is control. Control gives me the ability to enjoy the possibility, while uncertainty, being void of control, is impossible for me to enjoy. I mean, I can enjoy wondering what will happen as long as I choose to enter the experience of my own free will and know that I can leave at any time I want. But when uncertainty is thrust upon me, all I want to do is get it off of me.

I know I’m not alone in this because there is even a name for it: “intolerance of uncertainty,” that thing that happens when your brain sees not knowing as a problem that needs to be solved.

That’s because the human brain has a limited attention budget. It can’t keep everything equally important, so it downgrades the predictable because, well, it’s predictable. You don’t have to worry about the sun coming up because it will always come up.

But uncertainty makes unresolved stuff emotionally visible and therefore upgrades it to suspicious. That explains why I worry. I worry so much because I see so much to worry about. Why? Because life is filled with an almost unlimited supply of uncertainty, that’s why we have Google! My brain never runs out of material because there is always something I don’t know or can’t control, which gives me a huge search category for worry.

I mean, as long as I sort reality into what I can’t know or control, and what I do know and can control, the possible worry topics are endless. Because clearly, there’s danger everywhere.

The trouble is, I have allowed the predictable stuff to disappear from my view. I stop noticing the sun rising, the comfortable bed, the running water, because none of it needs me. In other words, the better something behaves, the less attention it gets from me. My heart beats correctly 100,000-ish times a day? Yawn. One weird palpitation? It’s a heart attack! My husband comes home safely thousands of times. Background noise. He’s twenty minutes late, and I don’t know why. Car crash.

Having gone nose blind to the everyday wonders of life, all that’s left for me to do is to manage uncertainty with worry.

But I don’t think the answer to uncertainty is necessarily having more certainty. At least, it hasn’t worked for me yet. I think the key is learning that not knowing isn’t as dangerous as I’ve made it out to be. And that the answer to uncertainty isn’t control, it’s exploration. Exploring the possibilities instead of controlling them gives you the ability to interpret your feelings as excitement instead of anxiety.

Researchers have studied what happens when we encounter something so big, physically or conceptually, that our existing understanding isn’t big enough to contain it. Which sounds suspiciously like anxiety. But being faced with something beyond your understanding can produce another powerful human experience: awe. And awe doesn’t require you to resolve your uncertainty before you can stop treating it like a threat. In fact, “I don’t understand” is part of what makes awe possible. Awe just changes your perspective.

According to researchers, awe produces what they call the “small self.” When you experience your small self, your problems don’t necessarily get smaller, but your brain remembers that your problems aren’t the whole world.

People experiencing awe report less daily stress, and researchers have even measured less fight-or-flight activation while people talked about their stress.

Fortunately, you don’t have to wait around for awe to find you. You can look for it. In one study, researchers had people take fifteen-minute awe walks, deliberately looking for things that exceeded their usual way of seeing the world.

So look up, look farther, notice what has become so familiar you stopped seeing it. Let something bigger than your immediate worries back into the picture.

And then do the same thing with your life.

Instead of staring so hard at the uncertainty in front of you, widen the view by looking at your history. Look backward at the things you were sure were disasters at the time, and follow them where they have led you.

Then look at where you are now and instead of asking, “How am I going to control what happens next?” ask, “Where could this be leading me now?”

In other words, don’t judge the end of the book by the middle page. That’s the problem with jumping to the ending. You can see the loose ends, but you can’t see the connections until you live them.

Awe doesn’t promise that those loose ends will connect the way you want them to, but it can be a constant reminder that reality is bigger than the tiny piece you’re currently seeing.

There are things that happened years ago that make sense to you now only because you know what happened next, like when I lost the career of a lifetime only to find the child of my dreams.

Look back, and you can follow the thread from the thing you never wanted, through the door you never planned to walk through, to the person you met, the place you landed, the life you have now, but you couldn’t see any of that from the middle page, and you can’t see it from this page either.

Worry wants the meaning now, the ending now. It wants the guarantee now! But there’s more happening than you can see from where you are standing now.

Awe gives us something that worry never will: the humility to admit that our view is not the whole view.

Worry looks at what it can’t understand and sees danger.

Awe looks at what it can’t understand and sees something bigger.

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As someone who specializes in control, I’ve often found myself consumed with the conduct of not only the people around me, but the parts inside me. I know that my body doesn’t need my help to breathe, or digest food, or keep my heart beating, but sometimes I think it does. It’s not like I can make my heart pump, I understand, but I am often very diligent about how well it’s doing.

If I feel the slightest twinge or cramp on the left side of my body, I’m sure my heart is in need of my assistance. And my assistant is worry, worry that my heart has forgotten its job, keeping me alive!

And though my heart has been beating without my supervision my entire life, I still feel like it needs my close supervision. Ironically, the part of my body actually responsible for keeping the operation going isn’t worried at all; my brainstem. I say ‘my,’ and suddenly I feel kinda special. God gave me something amazing when he gave me a brain stem. The name itself betrays its power. A stem doesn’t get all the glory the petals get, but the stem is incredible. My brainstem, of which at this moment I am very proud, regulates all the stuff inside my body that, though I’d love to be more in control of, doesn’t need my guidance on a moment-by-moment basis at all.

From my breathing to keeping my blood flowing, to swallowing, digesting, and sleeping, my brainstem is the master of them all. Making sure I stay alive, without so much as a walkthrough by me.

But I wonder at what age I started to micromanage the process, because somewhere along the way, I did. I went from carefree and completely oblivious to panicked and sure my appendix was about to burst, my liver was toxic, and my gut needed a full cleanse in just a matter of decades. And somewhere along the way, managing my vital organs became my full-time job, and a demanding job it is.

There’s always something to check, something to Google, something to notice, and some perfectly ordinary bodily sensation that needs my undivided attention and worry.

And the worst part is the older you get, the more the job description expands. And with that job comes the responsibility of not only monitoring your body, but also making sure nothing bad happens to it.

In this process, I personally have shrunk the definition of a good day down to this:

Nothing bad happened.
I didn’t hurt.
I didn’t get scared.
Nobody I love died.
Nothing went wrong.
Nothing happened that I couldn’t control.

Success!

Ugh, that’s a pretty high bar for a life, isn’t it?

I must have pure perfection, or else something must be wrong.

Unfortunately, when your highest goal is to make sure nothing bad happens to you, eventually you end up eliminating anything that might possibly “ruin” your day, and that’s most of the good stuff.

Work too hard, and your heart could give out.
Ignore sharp pain, and you could die tomorrow.
Love somebody, and they could break your heart.
Try something new, and you could fail.
Let your kid go, and they could get hurt.
Hope for something, and you could be crushed.

There is always a reason not to risk any of that when your highest priority is not getting hurt.

But in the process of not getting hurt, we end up so overwhelmed that living becomes an exercise in anxiety.

Which brings me back to my brainstem. For decades, I didn’t know the job of keeping my body functioning was already taken. I mean, the fact that God wrote protection into our bodies before we even knew enough to worry about them is magical. My brainstem was already managing my blood pressure before I even knew what that was. Before I knew enough to be afraid of dying, my body was already working very hard to keep me alive, but then I came along and tried to help my brainstem out with the wonderful power of worry, as if God had forgotten something essential to my survival: anxiety. And as if anxiety has the power to keep my blood flowing at the proper pressure, and my heart beating peacefully.

Isn’t it ironic that you can lose your life by trying too hard to save it? Not lose it, in the literal sense, but lose it in the living sense. And I know because I’ve done it. I’ve spent perfectly good days trying to prevent potentially bad ones. Giving hours of my life to illnesses I never had, disasters that never happened, and problems that never came. All in the name of staying safe.

Turns out standing guard over your life and living your life are two very different occupations. And I’m ready to quit one.

Maybe I’m a freak. Maybe I’m the only one who worries about every odd sensation in my body. Maybe you don’t worry about your heart. You’ve never Googled a symptom and diagnosed yourself with something that requires an immediate trip to the ER. If so, congratulations.

But maybe you stand guard over something else. I’m just spitballing here, maybe it’s your kids. Your money. Your marriage. Your reputation. Your future. Your plans. Maybe you’re not trying to keep your heart from failing, but you’re working super hard trying to keep your life from failing.

And maybe we could all ask the same question: What am I trying to control that was never mine to control?

Because I’m starting to think there are jobs God gave me and jobs I gave myself.

Keeping my heart beating was never on my to-do list. Neither was making sure nothing bad ever happens.

No, my job is to take care of the life I’ve been given, not work around the clock making sure nothing goes wrong. And I think I’m ready to cut my hours.

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Some prisons don’t have locks. They’re built from things that once made us feel safer.

I want to tell you a story about one of them.

There was once a princess who lived in a great fortress at the center of her father’s kingdom. Its archways stood open to the roads and fields beyond, and people came and went freely beneath them.

In the courtyard stood the King’s table.

When the princess was young, she sat beside her father every evening. The Shepherd was often there too, returning from the hills with his sheep. The princess followed him through the fields and wandered through the orchards, running home when she heard her father call, “Daughter, come to the table.”

There were enemies in the kingdom. The princess sometimes saw a wolf beyond the archway or a dangerous stranger on the road. But she gave them little thought. She knew whose kingdom this was, and she knew the Shepherd.

Then one evening, as she returned alone from the orchard, a wolf came out of the trees, and she ran. She could hear it gaining on her as she raced toward the fortress. When she reached the archway, the Shepherd was there. The princess ran to him and stood trembling at his side, watching the wolf beyond the archway. When darkness fell, she walked back through the courtyard with the Shepherd and joined the evening feast.

But the next morning, something had changed. The princess looked toward the archway. No wolf. A few minutes later, she looked again. Still no wolf. She moved a little farther from the archway. When her friends went to the orchard, she stayed behind.

She felt safer.

As the years passed, other enemies came. A man she trusted stole something precious from her. Someone she loved disappeared for a night. A woman who called herself a friend wounded her with words she could not forget. And the princess became very good at protecting herself. She kept precious things farther inside the fortress. She watched the roads from the tower. She checked who was in the courtyard before entering.

Each time the princess moved away from what frightened her, she felt better, but the feeling never lasted. Soon she was watching again, checking again, listening again. So she moved a little farther inside, and once again she felt relief, at least for a while. She did not know it then, but relief and peace are not the same thing.

The King still held his feasts. One evening, as music filled the courtyard, a servant found the princess watching the road from the tower. “Your father is asking for you,” he said. “I’ll be there in a moment,” she replied. Another evening she was checking the storeroom when she heard her father call, “Daughter, come to the table.” Again she answered, “In a moment.” There were many such moments, and little by little, fear led her farther inside.

No wolves came there. No thieves came there. No cruel women came there. Eventually, neither did the music. The princess had finally found a place where almost nothing she feared could reach her, and yet she was still afraid. She listened for a wolf she could no longer hear, worried about treasures no thief could see, and wondered about travelers on roads hidden behind walls of stone. Her protections had removed the things she feared from sight without removing the fear. The prison could give her relief, but it could not give her peace.

Then, in the silence, the princess remembered herself as a little girl sitting at her father’s table. She remembered the enemies that had been there even then, and she remembered a wolf standing beneath the archway. Most of all, she remembered what she had done when she saw it. She had looked at the Shepherd.

The little girl she had been had not known peace because there were no wolves. There had been wolves then too. She had known peace because she knew where to look.

Then, from somewhere beyond the walls, came a familiar voice. “Daughter.” She stopped and listened. “Do not be afraid.” She knew those words. The King had said them. Then came the words she had heard since childhood: “Come to the table.”

The old warnings answered immediately. Check first. Wait. Watch. Something might happen. But suddenly the princess saw what she had not seen before. Every voice she had obeyed had led her farther from the King. His voice had been calling her toward him all along.

So she stood. The warnings followed her, but she did not follow them. She followed the voice of the King. As she walked, she began to hear music, and then she smelled bread. At last she reached the great hall and saw the courtyard beyond it. The feast was still there, and so was an enemy.

The princess stopped. Then she saw the Shepherd standing between the enemy and the table. Beyond him sat her father, and beside him was the chair that had belonged to her since she was small. “Daughter,” the King called, “come to the table.”

She looked back toward the darkness of the fortress. No enemy had put her there. The wolf had not chased her down those corridors. The thief had not hidden her there. The cruel woman had not shut her away. She had walked there herself.

The wolf had chased her for minutes. She had been running from him for years. The enemies had come and gone, but her protections had remained. The fortress had been built to protect her life. Fear had taught her to hide inside it.

The feast had never moved. She had.

The princess turned toward the Shepherd and came to the table.

The Difference Between Relief and Peace

An ancient song pictures God setting a table for us in the presence of our enemies. That may be one of the strangest pictures of peace ever written. The table isn’t set after the danger has passed. It’s set in its presence.

The song is Psalm 23, written thousands of years ago, and its picture of peace turns ours upside down. We tend to think peace is something we will finally experience when enough of the threatening things are gone. When the diagnosis changes, the relationship is fixed, the money is finally there, the person we love loves us back, or we finally know what happens next. We keep moving peace to the other side of whatever scares us.

That was the princess’s mistake. She thought if she could put enough distance between herself and everything that frightened her, eventually she would find peace. And every retreat seemed to prove her right because it brought her some relief. But that relief kept wearing off, so she had to retreat again. Her protections removed the things she feared from sight without removing the fear.

The prison could give her relief. It just couldn’t give her peace.

We build our own versions of that fortress. We check, plan, avoid, prepare, rehearse, control, and wait. None of those things is necessarily wrong. In fact, they can be wise. The trouble starts when we ask them to give us something they can’t. And then we spend years getting better and better at making ourselves feel safe while becoming less and less free.

That’s because you can manufacture relief, but you can’t manufacture peace. And that changes everything. If peace depends on getting your life under control, then peace will always be one solved problem away. We all know there’ll always be another person to worry about, another uncertainty to eliminate, or another possibility to prepare for. Life will keep giving us reasons to say, “In a minute. I’ll live when I’ve taken care of this. Just give me a sec.”

But God doesn’t set the table in a world emptied of enemies. He sets it in the presence of our enemies. And that means that peace can’t be the absence of everything that frightens us. It has to come from somewhere bigger than the circumstances we’re trying to control.

The princess had known that once. Her younger world hadn’t been safer. The wolves had been there then, too. What changed wasn’t the presence of danger, but where she looked for peace. As a child, she looked to the Shepherd. As she grew afraid, she looked to the walls.

Where are you looking for peace? Because whatever you’re waiting to get under control before you can really live has the power to keep you waiting. There’ll always be one more thing to fix, check, settle, or know.

But the table is waiting. Freedom starts when you notice where fear has been leading you. Look at what you’ve stopped doing, where your world has grown smaller, what you keep checking, controlling, or avoiding just to buy yourself a few more minutes of relief. Those are the walls of the prison. And once you can see where fear has been leading you, you can start walking in the other direction.

Peace isn’t waiting at the end of a perfectly controlled life. God offers it in the middle of the life you have, before every problem is solved, before every uncertainty is settled, before every enemy is gone.

The enemies are present, but so is God. And at his table there is a chair with your name on it. Come to the table.

A Littel More About The Fortress

This story grew out of an idea at the heart of The Overprotective Brain. In the book, Dr. Sam Tyriver and I use the image of a fortress to explain something fascinating about the brain: the very systems designed to protect us can become overprotective, eventually keeping us from the life they were trying to protect.

The book explores the neuroscience behind that process, especially in chronic pain and anxiety, and how we can begin teaching an overprotective brain that it doesn’t have to sound every alarm.

If the princess’s fortress felt a little familiar, you might find yours in these pages.

You can also find more articles, stories, and diagnostics at The Overprotective Brain Journal.

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I wrote about when “their life matters to me” turns into “their life is happening to me” on my new site, The Overprotective Brain Journal.

If you’ve ever loved someone whose choices you couldn’t control and found their life taking up far too much space in your own head, I wrote this one for you.

When you get there, you will be asked if you want to subscribe.

You have two choices:

Click the X in the upper-right corner and keep reading for free.

OR

Click Subscribe to join The Overprotective Brain Journal for free, which would mean a lot to me as I build this new project.

See the image below, so you know what you’re getting into. LOL

CLICK HERE to read When Love Becomes a Surveillance State.

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Your brain protects you all day long without even asking your permission. You touch something hot, it pulls your hand away. You lose your balance, it corrects you. Something moves toward your face, and you blink.

So obviously, protection is one of your brain’s most important jobs, but it doesn’t have to be right in order to protect you. Sometimes it decides to respond to something that might be dangerous as though it is dangerous. And it even keeps protecting you after a threat has passed. If that happens often enough, protection can start changing the way you live. But it rarely feels like overprotection in the moment. It feels more like being careful.

So here’s a little experiment.

Read the statements below and keep count of every one that is usually true for you. FOR EACH ONE THAT SOUNDS LIKE YOU, GIVE YOURSELF ONE POINT.

I have a hard time relaxing when there’s something I could be doing to make sure everything’s okay.

I brace my body before doing something I know is going to hurt.

I can spend a lot of time doing nothing, even when I don’t actually want to be doing nothing.

I keep checking my symptoms to see if they’re getting worse.

I feel like my body is always a little bit on alert.

I avoid certain movements or activities because I know I’ll pay for them afterwards.

Sometimes I cancel my plans because I’m not feeling good.

I pay close attention to other people’s moods, so I know if something is wrong.

I sometimes feel exhausted just thinking about everything I need to do.

I made a list of 19 ways an overprotective brain can start shrinking your life. If you’re already keeping score, you can finish the quiz here and see what your score means. You might just be surprised.

Want to learn how to turn down the overprotection?
Get The Overprotective Brain at Amazon.com.

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I always like the original most. I like original Coke. I like the original VW Beetle. I like The Original Pancake House. I like the first iteration of things because that’s how it seems they should be.

Which is probably fine when we’re talking about cars, but it gets a little more complicated when the original thing is me. Because apparently I’m just as attached to my original words, thoughts, and ways of doing things as I am to soft drinks. I chose them, after all. Why would I want someone coming along and suggesting revisions?

Unfortunately, as an author, I’ve had to repeatedly live through the editorial vandalism of a person whose job it is to make sure I haven’t mistaken my first version for my best one. Editors just love to mess with what’s “working” and “improve” it when I don’t see the need.

To me, writing is like decorating. I chose the words I liked to create the environment I wanted to share, so when an editor comes along and tells me “This part over here isn’t working,” I’m insulted.

I mean, I said it because I wanted to say it. It makes sense. And it’s the exact environment I wanted to create.

Clearly, you don’t understand what I’m doing.

At least that’s what I tell myself while I’m having my editorial hissy fit. Unfortunately, once I’m done defending my brilliance, there’s an irritating truth I have to admit: I may be too close to the project to see the difference between what I meant to say and what I actually said.

But still, the fact that I know why every sentence is there, and they’re all there because I chose them, means I’m compelled to defend their existence.

That’s life, isn’t it?

I know why I said what I said.
I know what I meant.
I know why I’m impatient.
I know why I’m suspicious.
I know why I’m controlling.

That’s exactly why an editor has an advantage: they have no such attachment. They can see what’s confusing, unnecessary, inconsistent, or just not doing what I think it’s doing, and that’s why, despite all my complaining, I guess I need one.

When Life Gives You Editors

Unfortunately, the editorial process doesn’t end when I close my laptop because everyone around me is an editor, an editor of my character. My husband is deft at editing my reactions. My child can spot an inconsistency between what I preach and what I practice before I’ve made it to the period. And my friends can cut my word count with a single uncomfortable look.

But let’s be honest, good writers don’t accept every edit they’re given. They first ask themselves whether the edit makes the work better, clearer, stronger, and more faithful to what the book is actually trying to accomplish.

That’s especially true when the thing being edited is me.

After all, I’m not going to change myself every time someone doesn’t like something about me. Another person’s approval can’t become my editorial standard.

But since I’m too close to the project to see everything clearly, I should at least be willing to consider the edit, right?

Their approval aside, the question is, is what they’re seeing consistent with what I say I believe. Maybe they’ve spotted something in me that doesn’t look much like Jesus. And maybe that’s a passage worth revising.

Eventually, though, I feel like maybe I could start catching some of these things myself. Self-editing, if you will.

I hear the way I just spoke to him.

Edit.

I recognize that I am rehearsing an offense again.

Cut.

I notice myself exaggerating because the truth doesn’t make me look quite innocent enough.

Rewrite.

I realize I am doing something I have told other people not to do.

That definitely needs to be deleted.

Self-Editing

The trouble is, I’m much better at spotting the edits everyone else needs. So I usually bring God the manuscript that is my life and point out everything He needs to change in the other characters. “Revise the difficult person,” I say. “Remove that troublesome chapter, improve the ending, correct everyone else’s dialogue.” Meanwhile, the red pencil just hangs over my own paragraph.

Maybe I’d be less defensive about accepting it if I remembered that an edit isn’t a wholesale rejection of the manuscript. Sometimes you cut a perfectly good sentence just because it doesn’t belong in the book you’re trying to write.

Of course, knowing what to cut is one thing. Actually cutting it is another.

Blaise Pascal once said something Mark Twain gets most of the credit for. Writing to a friend, he apologized for the length of his letter because he hadn’t had time to make it shorter.

And that’s the irritating thing about editing: cutting can take a lot more work than adding. There’s even a name for the tendency to overlook the cut: subtraction neglect. When trying to improve something, the tendency is to look for something to add, even when taking something away would work better.

And I do the same thing with myself. I tend to assume that in order to grow, I need more faith, more discipline, more knowledge, more effort. But growth isn’t always about adding something that’s missing. Sometimes you just gotta remove something that doesn’t belong. Not because everything I cut is terrible or every edit is better than my original, but because maturity means being willing to look at your life and say, “I know why that’s there. I may even love it. But it doesn’t belong in the final manuscript.”

Which leaves me with the uncomfortable task of looking again at the pages I’ve been so busy defending and asking whether they belong there, or whether I’m defending them simply because I wrote them.

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The pain started out as a visitor and ended up a full-time resident.

It came in as a headache but became my identity: “I have migraines. I can’t lift my arms over my head. I can’t run. I can’t make plans. I can’t go on walks.”

The visitor didn’t just move in; it started rearranging my life. I stopped making plans, working, running, and even going on walks. And started calculating whether something would hurt before deciding whether to do it, and avoiding more activities than I attempted.

And the sad part is that every restriction made perfect sense because I thought I was protecting myself from more pain. But eventually, the pain didn’t have to stop me because I just stopped myself.

“There comes a time in your life when everything hurts,” I decided. “You can’t always be active. You are not like normal people. You live in the prison of chronic pain. And parole is not an option.” After all, how could it be, when I was given a life sentence?

By the time I noticed pain’s power over my life, it was too late. Or at least that’s what I thought.

But then I met Dr. Sam, who gave me an entirely different way of seeing what was happening. My body wasn’t a prison. It was a fortress that had become so overprotective that it kept me locked inside.

The key that unlocked my cell door was a simple vocabulary lesson: helpful vs. overprotective.

“Which type of pain do you have?” he asked. “Helpful pain is protecting something that needs protection, like an injury or a tissue issue. Overprotective pain is real pain too, but the alarm has become louder or longer-lasting than the protection your body actually needs.”

For me, the pain that had taken over my world like a slumlord, lowering my quality of life and dictating what I could and couldn’t do, was no longer protecting me. It was overprotecting me. And I definitely didn’t need more protection; I needed an education.

The education itself was elementary, but accepting it made me question almost everything I believed about pain because I had spent years treating pain as a measure of what was wrong with my body, when pain was actually my brain attempting to protect me. That realization changed what I needed to do. Instead of treating every instance of pain as a reason to retreat, I had to practice safety and teach my brain that I didn’t need the protection it thought I did.

And within a matter of weeks, the prison doors swung open. I could do things that would have made migraines inevitable. Like going back to the gym and going for long walks. Things I thought were off the table for me were suddenly back on.

And this freedom didn’t stop with my physical life, but permeated my emotional and spiritual life too.

Dr. Sam had taught me about pain, but my mind was finding freedom from far more than chronic pain. I started seeing the fingerprints of an overprotective brain in my anxiety, my fears, and even in my relationship with God.

The same brain that was trying to protect my body from pain was also trying to protect my life from uncertainty, disappointment, loss, and anything else it couldn’t control. And I started to see how much of what I called worry was really just me trying to protect myself from a future God had never put me in charge of.

This discovery was so life-changing that I finally told Dr. Sam I wanted to write a book with him about the overprotective brain. I then spent the next year immersed in neuroscience, studying the research and learning how the brain protects us so I could translate that science into something the rest of us could actually understand and use.

Now, a year later, that book is a reality. The Overprotective Brain comes out Tuesday, August 4th, and I’m so excited to finally put it into your hands. I got the information I desperately needed, and now I get to pass it on to you.

If you are tired of no one giving you answers, or if you have just given up trying, let me be a cautionary tale with a surprisingly hopeful ending. There may be more freedom available to you than you think, and it may be easier than you ever imagined.

If you’ve reluctantly concluded that this is just the life your body has sentenced you to, I want you to know why I no longer believe every sentence pain hands down is final.

Check out our website to find out more. You can also watch our podcast on YouTube and buy the book on Amazon.

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I’m a shopper. I like looking for the next best thing. I can’t just go to the store for a shirt and buy the first shirt I like and take it home. I have to look for four or five other shirts I like, try them on, then pick my favorite or favorites. I like options. They make me feel responsible. Like I didn't miss something obvious. Like if the decision turns out badly, at least I can say I really looked.

The trouble is, I’ve taken that sensibility and applied it to prayer.

It goes like this: I ask God for something. He provides, and then I say, “Well, that might be it, but I’ll keep looking in case You want to give me something better than your first answer.” It’s a nasty little habit created by my shopping addiction.

So when we moved to Wisconsin, and I was looking for a PT, I determined to take the most obvious one I could find and not search reviews or gather recommendations. Crazy right? Only if you think my future depends more on my research than on God's providence.

So I walked out of my house one morning, determined to discover my next PT, and within one minute of leaving my house, I saw a sign for a PT office and immediately knew I didn’t need to look any further.

I realize this is kind of like “eenie meenie miney moe,” but what better way to trust God with the outcomes than asking Him for something and then taking it without question when He shows it to you?

I wasn’t pretending the clinic across the street had magically become the best physical therapy office in Wisconsin. I just decided that if I’d asked God to provide and the answer was sitting a one-minute walk from my front door, I wasn’t going to spend the next three days acting like it all depended on my research skills.

Within weeks, I realized this wasn't just an answer to prayer. It was one of those gifts from God that turns out to be much bigger than the thing you originally asked for. I'd gone looking for a physical therapist. Instead, I found someone who would change the way I thought about pain, fear, and eventually even my faith. And within months, I was so excited about the connection between the brain and the body, neuroscience and psychology, that I asked Dr. Sam if he ever thought of writing a book because I wanted to write it with him. And he said, “Yes!”

So, I dove headfirst into pain management and the brain/body connection. I spent months buried in neuroscience research.

And somewhere between highlighting journal articles and arguing with Sam over chapter ten, I kept running into the same idea from different angles.

At first, I thought, “This explains pain.” Then I started thinking, “Wait...this explains anxiety too, and insomnia, and the way we make decisions, and the way we trust, and even the way we pray!”

I realized I was living life like I was a prey animal, not a child of God. My brain was obsessed with safety while God was far more interested in trust.

That’s the rabbit hole I’ve been traveling through for the last eight months: one conversation after another with Sam that usually ended with one of us saying, “Wait...that explains so much.”

I used to think pain and anxiety were the problem, but they weren’t; they were the clues.

If you’ve ever wondered why your body or mind won’t stop acting like you’re under threat, that’s the conversation we’ve been having for the last two years and the conversation we've spent the last eight months turning into a book.

So that’s why I’ve been less than present lately. Research and writing.

This little studio is where the book has found its voice. It’s where Sam and I argued over chapters, recorded podcasts, laughed through retakes, and somehow managed to turn all our conversations into one book.

Those microphones have heard more discussions about overprotective pain than I can count. And next week you’ll finally get to hear some of those conversations yourself.

The book and podcast both go live on August 4! All because I prayed for a physical therapist. I wasn’t even looking for a co-author. I just wanted a PT. Good thing I stopped shopping when I did.

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When researchers gave people problems to solve, they overwhelmingly tried to improve things by adding. More blocks. More features. More steps. More kids. More dogs. Even when removing something would have worked better.

The researchers called this subtraction neglect or additive bias, the reflexive habit of assuming every problem is a deficit problem.

And addition is good when the problem is a lack. Like if you’re starving, add food. If you’re ignorant, add knowledge. If you’re lonely, add more dogs.

The trouble is that we tend to think that every problem is caused by a deficit, making more seem like the obvious answer to, well, everything. That’s because our brains reward acquisition by giving us a little hit of dopamine from finding, collecting, learning, and adding more. Subtraction rarely gives us that same hit.

But it is in the realm of faith where this idea becomes especially fascinating to me. The way I see it, Spiritual subtraction neglect leads us to approach faith with a scarcity mindset in which we assume every spiritual struggle is caused by a deficit.

Not enough faith.
Not enough discipline.
Not enough Bible knowledge.
Not enough prayer.
Not enough effort.

But what if the problem isn’t what we need to add, but what we need to subtract?

Fear.
Self-reliance.
Pride.
Control.
Unforgiveness.
Attachment to outcomes.
The belief that God is withholding something good from you.

Jesus solved a lot of problems through subtraction. Not because growth never requires addition, of course, it does, but because some problems are caused more by spiritual clutter than spiritual hunger.

The rich young ruler didn’t lack morality. He was just hoarding wealth.

Martha didn't lack understanding. She was simply distracted by many things.

The Pharisees weren't short on devotion. They were drowning in religious accumulation.

In each case, Jesus wasn't filling a deficit. He was removing an obstacle. Again and again, He removes what people cling to rather than adding what they think they need.

Working from abundance, not scarcity, Jesus isn't afraid to subtract because He isn't trying to fill a void. He knows the Father is enough. Letting go of lesser things can never impoverish someone who already possesses the greatest thing.

One of the greatest forms of spiritual maturity is learning that not every problem is solved by adding something. Children grow by acquiring. Saints grow by surrendering. Which means that sometimes the breakthrough comes when you finally remove what never belonged there in the first place.

We spend a lot of time asking, ‘What do I need to add?’ But God repeatedly asks a different question: “What is getting in the way?”

Field Testing Spiritual Subtraction Neglect: Hebrews 12:1

The Power of Spiritual Subtraction (a short Bible study on the topic)

Why we’re testing this passage:

Subtraction feels counterintuitive. We tend to assume every struggle is caused by a deficit and every solution requires addition. But Hebrews begins the race of faith with an act of subtraction. Before the runner takes a step forward, he is told to put something down.

1. Notice the sequence

“Let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance…”

The author doesn’t start out with running. He starts with removing.

Why does the command to lay aside come before the command to run?
What does the sequence reveal about the author’s understanding of spiritual endurance?
Why might the author assume that some subtraction is necessary before the race can be run well?

2. Examine the distinction

“Every encumbrance and the sin…”

Why mention both encumbrance and sin?
Can something hinder a believer without being sinful?

3. Define the metaphor

“…run with endurance the race set out for us.”

What qualities of a race does the author want us to see?
Why is endurance emphasized rather than speed?
How does the image of a runner help explain the command to lay aside weights?

4. Test the entanglement language

“…the sin that so easily entangles us.”

The image isn’t just wrongdoing but of something that wraps itself around the runner’s feet.

What does entanglement suggest about how sin hinders progress?
How is entanglement different from weight?
What does the metaphor reveal about the author’s concern in this verse?

Field Note

The author doesn’t start by asking what the runner needs to gain. He starts by asking what the runner needs to put down. Before the race can be run well, something has to be removed.

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Why does everything feel like it depends on you?

Because if no one is coming, it does.

But living like everything depends on you is exhausting. It turns every problem into a predator, and you into its prey. It’s hard work being hunted all day long, existing at the bottom of the food chain.

They say the early bird gets the worm; fear says the most prepared gets spared.

So you prepare. You prepare it all: the day, the week, the month, your life, their life, the nation’s life. You monitor, research, rehearse, worry, running every possible future through the anxious maze of your mind, before it has a chance to surprise you.

If suffering is inevitable, you want to meet it at the door with a fully developed contingency plan and a rape whistle.

No wonder you're exhausted.

After enough years of living this way, fear stops feeling like something you experience and starts feeling like what you are:

Kingdom: Animalia.
Phylum: Anxious.
Class: Vigilant.
Order: Hyperalert.
Species: Prey.

But the Bible never describes believers as prey. Sure, we’re sheep, but we’re sheep with a Shepherd. We’re called children, but we’re children with a Father.

The problem isn’t that we’ve forgotten who we are; it’s that we’ve been rehearsing a different story in which every contingency plan tells us, “It’s all on you.” Every anxious rehearsal declares, “No one is coming.” And if everything depends on you, then you’re on your own. And if you’re on your own, you’re going to live like prey.

So what’s the answer? It isn’t pretending predators don’t exist.

No. Because cancer exists. Betrayal exists. Alzheimer’s, loss, and death exist. The Bible has never asked us to deny that predators roam this world.

What it does ask you to deny is that you face any of it alone. You’ve never been prey abandoned in the wilderness. You’ve always been sheep with a Shepherd, even when you forgot He was there.

The Bible never promises the absence of predators, only the presence of God. After all, Daniel had lions. Moses had Pharaoh. Paul had prisons. But none of them faced those predators alone.

Only Jesus did.

Our Shepherd entered abandonment itself so His sheep would never have to walk through this wilderness alone.

Still fear tries to convince us that, “No one is coming.” But the gospel says Someone already came.

And once you believe that, it's hard to keep thinking of yourself as prey.

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I don't want to pray like the prodigal, who thought he needed a speech to overcome his father's reluctance to love him.

How little did he know his father?

A few weeks ago, I said that prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance, but laying hold of His willingness.

I made the biblical case that God doesn’t need our convincing. But the question has come up, if God isn’t reluctant, why do so many of us pray like He is?

I think the prodigal may know.

I mean, obviously, the leaving part of the prodigal shows us he didn’t know the value of the father’s presence, but the coming home part shows us he didn’t know the riches of the father’s generosity.

From his speech prep, he obviously knew his sin better than he knew his father. More prediction than a confession, the speech prep proved that he thought the speech would determine his father’s response.

It didn’t.

The father had already decided what kind of father he was going to be, long before the speech.

That’s why I don’t want to pray like the prodigal.

Just like the father of the prodigal, God is already willing to do what He has promised. I don’t have to persuade Him to be generous, merciful, or faithful. Persuasion assumes He’s going to resist. I mean, we persuade juries, customers, voters, kids to eat their vegetables and reluctant spouses to watch documentaries about the French Revolution.

We persuade someone who isn’t totally convinced. But prayer is in a completely different category altogether.

So why do we often feel like we’re trying to persuade a reluctant God?

The Waiting

God’s timing is not our timing, and because waiting on His timing has a way of changing what we believe about prayer, the longer we wait, the easier it is to think delay equals reluctance. But the Bible says something completely different.

• The promise God made to Abraham was never in jeopardy, though literally decades passed before Isaac was born. (Genesis 21:1–2)

• Joseph waited thirteen years between the dreams God gave him and his elevation in Egypt. (Genesis 41:39–41; 50:20)

• David waited for over a decade between Samuel's anointing oil and the day he finally wore the crown.

• Israel waited four hundred years in Egypt. (Exodus 3:7–10)

So, no, I don’t think delay is the language of reluctance. The Bible never equates the two. Peter calls apparent slowness patience. Habakkuk calls it an appointed time. At Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus calls it glory. And we call it unfair. Like Martha we say, “If you would just have done something, life wouldn’t be like this.”

And can you blame her? Jesus was slow in coming to the greatest crisis of her life. Four days had passed since she urgently needed him. Her brother didn’t survive the wait. He was dead and buried. From her perspective, the window had closed, and Jesus had been too late.

But Martha was getting her conclusions from the timing.

She knew Jesus had power. What she doubted in that moment was His plan, maybe even, dare I say, His goodness.

But that delay wasn’t evidence of His indifference. It was the very thing He intended to use to show the world His glory.

So while she was judging the delay by what it had cost her, Jesus was revealing something she couldn’t yet see.

The Father We Have

The prodigal came home expecting to negotiate for a place among the servants and found a father running toward him. Martha came grieving a delay she couldn’t understand and found that Jesus had not abandoned her in it.

Neither got God’s character exactly right, but neither misunderstanding changed who God was or how He responded.

Thankfully, God doesn’t wait for people to get His character exactly right before He runs to meet them.

That’s what suspicion does. It takes what we don’t understand and fills in the gaps with a God who is less willing, less present, and less good than He really is.

But the Father has already decided what kind of Father He is going to be. Which means the greatest obstacle in prayer may not be God’s reluctance, but our suspicion. And suspicion has a way of writing speeches that love never asked for.

I’m wondering how many of my prayers have been speeches written by suspicions His love never gave me reason to believe.

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Today I’m out working in the garden and need to go inside for something. For some reason, I am still in my slippers, not in my gardening shoes. So, I walk up to the sliding glass door and take off my slippers, put on my garden shoes, and walk inside.

A minute later, I’m standing at my kitchen sink, looking down at my muddy shoes, and thinking, when were these allowed inside?

I changed my shoes without even noticing I was doing it. I was so busy thinking of the weeds in my patio stones and how to get rid of them, and if I should go to Home Depot, and while I was thinking about all that, my feet quietly took care of business.

That got me to thinking about how our brains are so complex that they can carry out complicated actions based solely on what we’ve taught them through repetition, like putting on shoes or driving to work, while simultaneously working out other mental problems. It’s like we’re running two programs at the same time.

Which then got me wondering: Could faith have a thinking side and a practicing side? Could that explain why we can believe God while simultaneously struggling to trust Him?

If my behavior is evidence of an invisible mental program, could I find an invisible spiritual reality underneath? Is this what James was getting at when he said, faith without works is dead? (see James 2:17)

After all, faith is invisible. So how do you know it’s there? James says look at what it produces. He even says, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!“ (James 2:19). Apparently, knowing the truth and trusting the truth aren’t always the same thing.

James never says, “Tell me about your faith.” He says, “Show me.” Like a doctor diagnosing an illness from its symptoms, James looks beyond your profession to your works. Not because works create faith any more than symptoms create disease, but because they reveal whether the faith we profess is the faith we get to live.

Which makes me wonder if faith isn’t first revealed in my explanations, but in my reactions. In other words, faith may be less visible in what I can explain than in what I instinctively do.

While my mind was busy solving the weed problem, my feet just did what years of repetition had taught them. Could my reactions do the same thing? Could they reveal what my heart has learned through repetition?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying faith is just a habit, like driving to work or putting on shoes, but that repeated returning to and trusting in God shapes your patterns just like repeated shoe-changing shaped mine.

Your thoughts reveal what you’re processing.
Your reactions reveal what you trust.
Just like while I was consciously deciding what to do about weeds, another part of me was unconsciously changing my shoes.

Maybe that’s why Jesus repeatedly put people into situations where their automatic responses would reveal what was in their hearts.

He put them in a storm. Asked them to feed more people than they had food for. He invited Peter to step out of the boat. He came late to the funeral of Lazarus. Again and again, He put people in situations where their reaction showed what their hearts instinctively trusted in.

That’s what makes your works important, not their saving power, but their diagnostic power. Works show us where our hearts instinctively run when life becomes frightening, uncertain, or impossible.

Suddenly, James makes more sense, doesn’t it? While what he’s telling us is that our works reveal our faith, they also are an insightful diagnostic tool, revealing the habits of our hearts.

If our reactions reveal what we’ve been practicing, then the answer isn’t just more knowledge. It’s a different response. We repeatedly respond to life's difficulties as though God is trustworthy, even when doing so feels unwise or unsafe, until trust becomes more and more our first response.

So maybe faith is more like putting on my shoes than working out the weed problem, because:

Putting on your shoes is learned.
Driving is learned.
Piano is learned.

But what about prayer, trust, gratitude, generosity?

Can those become so practiced that they start to shape your actions and even your feelings? I think they already do.

The question isn’t whether we’re being formed. The question is what we’re being formed by. And I think that’s exactly what spiritual formation is meant to do.

Through repeated acts of trusting and obeying God, He gradually reshapes the patterns of our lives until what once felt unnatural starts to feel increasingly familiar.

Jesus said, “A good tree bears good fruit,” which tracks because fruit isn’t manufactured moment by moment; it grows from what the tree has become over time. Just like we become the people we repeatedly practice being.

It's a slow process, but now, every time fear tells me to rehearse disaster, I just see another opportunity to practice trust instead. Having that plan in mind makes me less inclined to protect myself when life gets stressful.

Of course, I can attest that the first few times you choose trust over worry, or gratitude over grumbling, or prayer over panic, it feels unnatural, dangerous even. That’s because we’re practicing a new pattern while the old one still feels more familiar.

But familiarity isn’t the same as truth.

We've already seen this principle at work. My shoes didn’t change because I made a dumb decision that day. They changed because I’d practiced that pattern so many times it had become automatic. And trust becomes increasingly natural the same way. So. . .

When you think, “I'm afraid we won't have enough money,” your first instinct might be to start worrying about everything that could go wrong.

But the practice of trust says, “I’ve already done what wisdom requires. Fear isn't going to improve my future.”

When you think, “I’m afraid I left the door unlocked,” and you want to check again.

The practice of trust says, “I’ve already checked the lock. My peace isn’t found in another look.”

“He is the lock on my door.”

If you’re afraid a new pain means something terrible, don’t scan your body. That just creates a pattern of distrust and fear. Instead, practice trust and say, “My focus is my God, not my imagined disease.”

And if you’re worried people are disappointed in you, don’t replay the conversation. Practicing trust means thanking God for them and praying for them. And then moving the conversation onto the One who will never leave you nor forsake you.

None of those responses starts by changing your feelings. They start by changing where you run.

Fear asks, “Where will I run?”

Faith answers, “To God.”

And every repeated act of trust patiently teaches your heart where to run first the next time.

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Dr. Sam said, “Your body is a fortress.”

“Really? Mine feels more like a prison,” I replied. “I see how a fortress protects the people inside. But my prison “protects” me from ever leaving.”

I mean, I get occasional yard time, a good day here, a little freedom there. But if danger is imminent, and for most of my life it’s felt that way, then it’s back to the safety of my cell for me.

Which raises an interesting question: How does a fortress become a prison?

Slowly, and one reasonable decision at a time. And, not because it stopped protecting you, but because it started protecting you from everything: disappointment, uncertainty, surprise, vulnerability, you name it.

It’s like my mind became obsessed with trying to create a future that couldn’t hurt me, and I happily went along. Turns out prisons are hard to recognize while you’re building ‘em, but build one we did, me and my brain.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not controlling. I’m just discerning.

At least that’s what I told myself.

After all, somebody has to be thinking about what might go wrong. And, I nominate myself.

The irony of it all is that this power-grab happened while I was sincerely trying to trust God. I mean, I trust Him with my salvation. I trust Him with eternity, I just want a little co-ownership of tomorrow.

The real issue is that I subconsciously think uncertainty is an emergency. And my brain responds exactly the way brains respond to emergencies: it pays hyper-attention. It monitors. It anticipates and prepares. It looks for patterns. It runs simulations, and it gathers evidence, keeping one eye on the present and the other on every possible future that might be headed my way.

Like a helicopter parent, my overprotective brain takes my life into its own hands in order to assure my ultimate safety, and in so doing, it became my destruction.

My brain doesn’t need proof that I’m in danger; all it needs is a sneaking suspicion. I mean, this headache could be happening because I’m getting cancer. That conversation could have just ended the relationship. This business venture might leave me homeless. And worst of all, my child might have to suffer, and I just can’t bear that.

Anxiety keeps my mind living on a tiny plot of land in the savannah, with a hungry predator on my heels, sneaking up on me and chasing me round and round the watering hole until I’m so tired I can’t even sleep, all I can do is keep running.

All this, because my brain thinks, “If I keep checking, there must be a reason I’m checking. And if I keep researching, there must be something urgent I need to figure out. If I’m keeping watch, there must be a predator.”

And when I’m that vigilant, my brain isn’t listening to my theology; it’s listening to my behavior.

This is the exact truth Dr. Sam, and I unpack in The Overprotective Brain: Your brain is always learning from the story you repeatedly tell it. Not the story you claim to believe, but the story you rehearse, talk about, and practice.

Did you know your brain believes your behavior, more than your theology? And that’s why so many believers can trust God and still struggle with anxiety.

I actually find it easy to believe God is in control and still spend three hours rehearsing every possible terrible future.

I can believe He provides and simultaneously obsess over the outcomes I can’t control.

I can even believe God is with my child, while monitoring, anticipating, preparing, and worrying as if her future rests entirely on my shoulders.

And the reason: anxiety became my nature because my brain got confused by the evidence I kept giving it. I mean, I can’t spend all day acting as though the world is a terrifying, unsafe place and then wonder why my brain agrees with me.

But there’s some good news in all of this: if the brain learns danger by experiencing danger, either real or imagined, then it can learn safety the same way.

So I set out to give my overprotective brain evidence that I could stop running and nothing terrible would happen. That I could give up control, and the world wouldn’t implode. To do that, I had to stop giving my nervous system reasons to run, like having more to do than time to do it.

And instead, I allowed myself to just sit and breathe in His presence without an agenda or a place to go, proving to my nervous system that I wasn’t alone on the savannah with a predator, but safe with a Shepherd in green pastures.

This might seem like a no-duh moment, or an oversimplification, but my anxiety needed the easiest and smallest prescription it could get, so that’s what I gave it, because, if suspicion is enough to teach my brain danger, then repeated small experiences of no danger are enough to teach it all is well.

Why doesn’t anybody ever teach us that attention isn’t neutral; it’s the instruction your brain takes on how to think and feel. So the goal isn’t to convince your brain that danger doesn’t exist, but to prove that danger isn’t the only thing that exists.

Have you noticed how the Bible seems remarkably uninterested in making danger the central character of the story? So many people of God lived with real danger, even predators lurking, but they seemed completely convinced that danger wouldn’t have the final word.

In the lion’s den, the danger was real, but there was a presence more powerful than it, and Daniel’s eyes were on Him. And in the fiery furnace, death was imminent, but that danger wasn’t all that existed because there literally was Protection in the fire with them.

The problem with anxiety is that it obscures the real story until all we can see is the lion and the fire. But the lions and the furnace, even death itself, though a part of the story, were not the whole story.

Anxiety has a way of reducing the world to whatever feels most threatening in the moment. But faith expands the picture by remembering that God’s presence, purposes, resources, and faithfulness are still there in spite of all the imminent threats around us.

For years, I assumed that to have faith, I had to convince myself that everything was going to be okay. A feat I rarely achieved. But faith doesn’t give us certainty about the outcome; it gives us confidence in the presence of God.

Which is why I’ve spent the last year completely captivated by the overprotective brain. What started as a conversation with Dr. Sam Tyriver about chronic pain turned into hundreds of hours of neuroscience research and eventually a book, called, not surprisingly, The Overprotective Brain, which releases this August.

But the research didn’t just change how I think about pain. It changed how I think about anxiety, faith, uncertainty, and even my own relationship with God. I started to see how often I was treating uncertainty like an emergency and vigilance like some kind of virtue. And I think I can say that most of my suffering isn’t coming from what I’m experiencing, but from what my brain is trying to keep me from experiencing.

I guess the real question is what story is my attention teaching my brain?

Because if someone followed me around for a week and watched what I monitor, rehearse, research, anticipate, and prepare for, would their conclusion be that I think danger is the main character in my story? Or that God is?

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Three things I can’t stand: delay, problems, and suffering.

Any of those things makes me restless and anxious because when I don’t get what I want, it frustrates me. It irritates my soul. If I were a more patient person, I would be able to accept or at least tolerate delays, problems, and suffering without getting annoyed or irritated, but alas, I'm not a naturally patient person.

I like getting things done and done fast. I'm not as worried about getting them done right as I am about getting them done quickly, so I can move on to the next thing.

I have a lot to do, and when circumstances or people keep me from getting to my list, frustration quickly turns into anger. It doesn't even have to be someone or something completely stopping my forward progress; the mere fact that they have slowed me down ticks me off.

Most people call it waiting or boredom: I call it misery.

The problem is that the older I get, the more easily I find myself bothered by people. I avoid busy stores. I do what I can to minimize opportunities for irritation. But all it’s really done is leave me more frustrated. My efforts to avoid patience have slowly turned me into a bit of a control freak, and that’s not a pretty picture.

So I decided to take another look at patience.

I figured that if God is patient, and He hasn’t stopped being God in the process, then maybe I’ve misunderstood what patience actually is. Maybe patience isn’t the threat to my independence that I once believed it was. Maybe it’s not here to kill me. Maybe it’s here to set me free.

To change my opinion of patience, I did what I often do with difficult ideas: I looked at the opposite. Not surprisingly, impatience is the most obvious opposite of patience. But sometimes impatience doesn't seem like as big a problem to the impatient (me) as it does to the cause of that impatience (you), so to renew my opinion of patience, I found a more disagreeable and therefore more motivating opposite of patience to be 'irritation.'

Unfortunately, irritation is often the perfect word to describe what I feel when I'm around other people. They all have the capacity to irritate me, and with that comes annoyance, anger, conflict, and the frustration of my perfect plan, undone by the arrival of another person with less perfect plans than mine, who somehow wins.

If you’re easily agitated, testy, moody, frustrated, or grumpy, you probably know the feeling. At its core, irritation is an inability to accept delays, problems, or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious. And that’s where things became uncomfortable for me. Because the more I examine my irritation, the less it seems connected to righteousness and the more it seems connected to me not getting my way.

A lot of what wears on my patience isn’t people breaking God’s law. It’s people breaking my law. I don’t have a written code of conduct or anything, but I’ve realized I do live by a set of invisible expectations, and I expect other people to follow them. Most of my irritation comes from people breaking laws I’ve written in invisible ink on my heart.

Things like:

Don’t be late.
Keep your word.
Respect my time.
Think before you speak.
Use common sense.

I have a lot of rules like that, and for some reason, the people around me never seem to get the memo.

And to be clear: my laws are smart. They make sense. They're just. Everyone should follow them… or at least, that's how my emotions see it.

But here’s the truth: The breaking of my self-made law is not grounds for me to break God’s. And until I recognize that, I haven’t really understood how deep my problem with impatience goes.

How many times have I justified impatience because someone “deserved” it?

How many times have I excused my irritation because another person violated one of my invisible rules?

Too many to count.

There’s nothing wrong with valuing punctuality, responsibility, or kindness. But when I allow someone else’s failure to give me permission to abandon patience, I’ve elevated my law above God’s.

That realization convicts me.

So now, whenever I feel irritation rising, I try to remember that God’s law is higher than mine. He is the Judge. Not me. And when I’m willing to exchange my law for His, I discover something surprising: I have far less to be irritated about.

And far more room for the Spirit’s patience, steadiness, composure, understanding, grace, and peace.

This essay is adapted from a chapter in Fruitful. If you’d like to read the rest of the chapter or explore the other fruit of the Spirit, you can find the book at Amazon or Audible!

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“Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance,
but laying hold of His willingness.“
—Martin Luther

Let me say that again in my own words: Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance, but laying hold of His willingness.

And again, in even better words:

Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance, but laying hold of His willingness.

Ok, I’ve been trying to improve on Luther, but it just can’t be done.

But is he right?

Let’s find out.

On the subject of prayer, Jesus said:

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.“ (Matthew 7:7)

Then a few verses later, He says: “If you then, although you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11)

The beauty here is palpable. Jesus isn’t arguing that God is capable of giving good gifts. He is arguing that He wants to give good gifts.

Jesus also said:

“Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because a friend of mine has stopped here while on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him.’ Then he will reply from inside, ‘Do not bother me. The door is already shut, and my children and I are in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything.

’I tell you, even though the man inside will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of the first man’s sheer persistence, he will get up and give him whatever he needs.” (Luke 11:5–8)

It’s easy to read this like, “Just keep bothering God until He caves.”

But if that’s what Jesus meant, it would give us a really strange picture of prayer. It would be something like:

God is sleeping.
You ask Him for something.
He gets annoyed.
But eventually helps because He’s tired of being asked.

But Jesus distinguishes himself from the friend when He says, “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Jesus goes from the lesser to the greater, essentially saying, “If even a grumpy neighbor eventually helps, how much more will a loving Father help?”

The point is that God is better than the reluctant neighbor.

If Jesus is right, then “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8). So when you pray, you aren’t informing or convincing God of anything because He already knows. You aren’t a trial lawyer making a case. And He’s not a reluctant judge and jury.

In fact, “If anyone is deficient in wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and without reprimand...” (James 1:5)

He doesn’t admonish you for asking. He doesn’t say, “You again?” He just gives generously.

“Therefore let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace whenever we need help.” (Hebrews 4:16) Notice the order; the throne is already a throne of grace before anyone approaches it.

You aren’t trying to convince the King to be merciful. In other words, you are approaching grace, not creating it.

So, we never have to think, “if I pray hard enough, maybe God will listen,” because “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, freely give us all things?“ (Romans 8:32)

Note to self: The cross forever removed God’s willingness from the list of things we need to worry about.

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Imagine being handed a human soul at birth and being told, “For the rest of your life, you will help this person understand who God is. You will teach them about His love, His presence, His power. You will comfort them when their hearts break. You will be the one they look to for answers when they wake up at 2 a.m., unable to sleep. Every time they fail, you will be there to make sense of failure. You will shape the entire atmosphere they live in.”

“Teaching them, day after day, minute by minute, whether the world they live in is fundamentally safe or not. Whether peace is something they can ever have or if rest can be trusted.”

And that soul is you.

What are you teaching your soul about God?

Self-discipleship happens in the background track of your life, hidden in the web of your worries, rumination, and spiraling thoughts, which all tell your soul what to think about God. And your soul listens. Taking notes and learning through what you focus on, repeat, live with, and rehearse.

You could say that for years, I have discipled myself in the art of fear, only because I fear the worst outcome is more feasible than the best one. And I’d never say this out loud, but if you analyzed my thought patterns, you might think that I thought that God was not actively loving me through all of the trials of my life, but instead has set me adrift at sea, leaving me to figure out the storms on my own with nothing but a tiny boat and a Bible.

I know all the facts about Him, but sometimes my thoughts suggest that he doesn’t actively affect my environment.

Ask me, and I’ll tell you he does, but ask my soul as it cowers in the corner of the boat rocking back and forth with the waves, and you’ll discover how often I’ve trained it to expect danger more readily than deliverance.

But how did it get this way?

I think that it’s my propensity to give far more attention to what I fear than to Who I trust. Fear tells me to hurry up, look out, be afraid, be very afraid, and that urgency pulls my attention. Fear constantly points out what might go wrong, what could be lost, and all the futures that need preparing for, and I frankly feel remiss if I don’t pay attention to its alerts.

So why wouldn’t my soul start drawing conclusions from what I repeatedly make it dwell on? Truth be told, I think it cares less about what I claim to believe than about what I consistently rehearse.

And the conclusion it reaches, apart from my belief and trust in God, is that everything depends on me. That if I’m not vigilant enough, danger is going to strike. In the fear of discomfort, uncertainty, embarrassment, or just being out of control, I have spent much of my life taking on roles God never assigned to me: provider, protector, predictor, and Prince of Peace.

So, I guess what concerns me isn’t that my theology is wrong but that my soul has been attending a different church than my mind.

My mind attends the church of God’s sovereignty. My attention often attends the church of fear.

Every day, both are preaching. One tells me God is trustworthy. The other warns me that everything rests on my shoulders. One reminds me that He is always present. The other keeps scanning the horizon for signs that I’ve been forgotten. One proclaims that God is already waiting in tomorrow. The other whispers that I have to get there first and make sure nothing goes wrong before we get there.

And the longer I sit under those sermons of fear, control, scarcity, outrage, resentment, and dread, the more real they become. Not because they are true, mind you, but because they’re repeated so often. My soul learns from what it lives with. It learns from whatever holds its attention the longest.

If you were conscious of the soul you were given to disciple, would that affect the sermons you daily deliver? The thoughts you rehearse, the memories you focus on, the complaints you cling to for safety?

It’s yes for me.

Realizing that every word I repeat is a sermon on the very nature of God and His presence in my life has changed the way I speak to myself.

I’m recognizing that a lot of my thoughts don’t just react to life; they teach my soul what to expect from God.

Every fixation becomes a sermon about reality; a witness to my soul about what kind of world it lives in. And every choice I’ve made to either spiral into panic or look up to where my help comes from has been preaching a different message. Over time, those messages have become expectations, and those expectations, my subconscious thoughts on God.

The truth is, we are all preaching to ourselves all day long. The question is, what’s the sermon on your mind?

The gospel according to fear, control, outrage, self-protection? Things like:

Everything depends on me.
I’m on my own.
Disaster is probably already on its way.
Rest is irresponsible.
Peace is something I can visit for a moment, but never really live in.
Stay vigilant. Stay alert. Hold it all together.

That’s not the gospel according to Jesus. That’s a hostage note.

But the true gospel says that:

“God doesn’t need you to help manage the world.”
“You are not alone.”
“No future arrives without God already standing inside it.”
“Rest comes from a position of trust.”
“God is peace.”
“God does not need your fear to faithfully care for your life.”

If you really were given a fearful soul to lead to Christ, what would you tell it about the wonders of His love and presence? How much of your time would you spend doubting that, and how much would you spend in awe of Him?

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A woman once asked Augustine of Hippo how to pray. He told her that prayer is not about informing God, but about your desiderium (your desire).

He said, “In most cases, prayer consists more in groaning than in speaking, in tears rather than in words.” Her desire was her prayer, manifested in her groans.

That got me to thinking. I’m very well versed in groaning. It’s the tenor of most of my thought life. “Why do I feel this bad?” I groan. “How can I get this done?” I moan. “What will I do? I whine.

Does that mean that I, without even realizing it, am praying without ceasing?

I always thought that was impossible, the without ceasing part. I mean, no one speaks without ceasing (well, almost no one), but most of us do return to the same thoughts all day. Revisiting our same worries, same wants, and same fears. Our minds are on a constant loop, at least mine is. My attention circles the same three topics over and over agin.

And that repetition is closer to praying without ceasing than those spiritually energetic and dedicated moments where I sit down and try to use my words to pray.

Maybe we are all, without realizing it, praying without ceasing, trouble is we might just be praying to the wrong gods for the wrong things.

Truth be told, if I’m groaning about my suffering, my prayer is really: “Comfort, come and save me.”

If my anxiety is over my to-do list, the theological conclusion is: My productivity proves my worth.

My groanings about feeling overwhelmed or anxious. My vigilance to find the cure to what ails me are most often sending me seeking answers in the kingdom of the fixable: more magnesium, better time management, finishing my to-do list.

With that in mind, I thought I might apply the law of reverse engineering in an attempt to trace these symptoms back to their foundational object of worship.

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In a doing contest, I can do anything faster than you. Ok, at least anything I’m used to doing, like walking, or talking, or eating. I do those all really fast!

I used to think I was better than slow doers. But turns out, I’m not better, I’m just more stressed. All this time, my rate of speed has been conveying so much urgency to my brain that it has decided all of life is one big catastrophe waiting to happen if I don’t hurry up.

But then I discovered that your brain takes repetition as a sign that something is significant. Add to that doing it really fast, and your brain gets the idea that this really matters!

And if that’s not bad enough, when you do everything fast, the old brain thinks everything matters, all of the time. And if it matters, then that means delays, interruptions, or changes in plans are suddenly like kryptonite to your brain, to be avoided at all costs lest you lose all your superpower.

When your brain thinks stuff is urgent, it assigns the responsibility of that stuff to you. And that assumed responsibility leads to assumed control, which just means taking on what belongs to God.

So speed isn’t just a bad habit, it’s my functional theology of control.

I know I talk about functional theology a lot, but it seems to me that if we say one thing about God, but behave in the opposite way, then we need to recognize it so we can align our conscious belief with our unconscious theology.

I say I believe God is sovereign, and that I trust His timing and that he holds outcomes, but my pace tells myself a different story. Because when I live like everything is urgent, I’m whispering to myself like Gollum, that my “precious everything” is mine to manage.

At some point, you have to notice the gap. Because if your behavior contradicts what you say you believe about God, then your behavior is revealing what your brain really thinks about the subject.

And you know what, it isn’t so much that I’m racing, it’s that I think I’m being timed. I move through my day like someone is tracking my pace, like I’m living a real-life version of The Amazing Race, where every delay leads me closer to being sent home.

So, my brain determines that slowness is trying to steal from me something I won’t ever get back.

I’m not even sure I’m just trying to get things done, I think I may be trying to prove something, like I’m capable, I’m not behind, or failing. Maybe I’m racing to justify my very existence.

And doesn’t that change everything?

The reality is that the same way my words say I trust God, my pace is saying something of its own. And now I’m wondering which one I actually believe.

Does anyone else live like this, or is it just me racing through existence like I’m being timed?

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Anxiety makes everything feel like an emergency. To my anxious body, everything is urgent, as if it’s a matter of life or death. Which either feeds or is fed by my functional God complex: a condition in which my nervous system seems to believe that all outcomes, situations, and experiences depend solely upon me.

One attribute of said God complex is my recently uncovered but deep-seated need to be infinite. Intellectually, I know that God is the only infinite being, and that nothing about me compares or keeps up with that attribute, but my nervous system finds it too limiting operating within a finite nature, and therefore I walk through life within a dominant, yet unconscious, infinite narrative which defines my responsibility as boundless, and my energy as the same.

Being human, I am by definition limited; I know this. I cannot do everything, attend to everything, respond to everything, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna try.

Infinity, as I live it, is not a grand delusion of power. It’s a perpetual assumption of availability and need wherein I live as if I should be able to hold everything open at once, every task, every possibility, every responsibility, because there is too much to be done not to attend to the next thing I become aware of needing my attention every moment of every day.

Like my internet browser, I have 15-20 tabs in my mind open at any given time, with the full intention of getting back to all of them. I guess you could say that I’m a glutton for responsibility.

The result is a life that never resolves anything. I’m always in motion, but rarely at rest. Always doing, but not really finishing anything. My attention cannot land long enough on one thing to allow my body or mind any peace because somewhere in me is the persistent belief that I should be able to keep up with everything all at once. I must continue onward, filling the expanse of unfinished tasks, until there is no void to fill, which you are probably realizing is never. Hence, my need to be infinite; there is too much to do not to be.

And ironically, my system treats “too much to do” as an error condition that I’ve got to fix by doing more. That’s like asking the fire to put itself out; it can’t, all it can do is grow bigger and more destructive. My capacity to act was never meant to be infinite. It was designed to be limited, requiring me to live more by faith than by sight.

For decades, I have lived by the code that awareness creates obligation. If you send me a text, I have to answer it immediately. Your emergency is my emergency. If I see a wounded bird on the side of the freeway, I have to stop and rescue it at my own peril. It’s an emergency. If there are dishes in the sink, I must clean them, though I was just about to rest. (Emergency!)

As I sit here writing, the birds outside are chirping at me to refill their feeder. It’s another bird emergency. My first instinct was to drop everything and do that next thing. And once I got out there, I would find five other things that needed to be done, and suddenly I, like Buzz Lightyear, would be moving to infinity and beyond without looking back.

But knowing that infinity is not a human attribute and that sovereignty is not my job, I’m reminding myself that not everything I notice is mine to manage.

BTW five more things just popped into my head as I looked around the room. This is why people say it’s hard to work from home; there is just too much to do. Is that true, or is it just our way of avoiding the spiritual truth that we feel more pulled to responsibility than worship?

How many of us have chuckled at Martha, who, being in the very presence of Jesus, couldn’t stop working and just worship like her sister? Yet how much easier is it to do that very thing when His presence is no longer sitting in the room, but dwelling within us? We shake our heads at her distraction, all while living with the same Lord inside us and refusing to sit still.

Fortunately, what we are doing wrong is very close to what we were made for. We were made to be attentive, just not to everything. We were made to respond, just not to every job that passes in front of our eyes. There is a difference between what we notice and what has actually been placed in our hands, and much of our unrest comes from treating those two as the same.

Martha did not fail because she worked. She failed because she assumed everything in front of her required her, so much so that in the presence of Christ, she expanded her responsibility instead of letting it narrow.

Many of us who struggle to live within our limits do the same; we treat the awareness of something that needs to be done as a direct assignment, and in doing so, we take on more than we were ever meant to carry.

To live as a finite person is to let our attention settle on Him and then to allow some things to just go undone without chasing them. To trust that we don’t have to carry what God hasn’t given us to carry.

Maybe the question is, what are we still trying to hold together?

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