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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When I think of the week, I see it as a loop, not a calendar you flip as you progress day to day. I see it more like a racetrack without a finish line. Monday is the starting line, but Sunday just brings you right back to that same starting line, and you just keep racing and racing without an end in sight.

I don’t know if this is a decidedly female way to think about time, or if it’s just a Hayley way, but I do believe it explains the nervous system of any woman who has said to themselves or their family, “A woman’s work is never done.” And I believe this is a significant reason why women tend to struggle more with anxiety than men do. Once we tell ourselves that our work has no finish line, our nervous system, designed for finish lines, sees perpetual work as unsafe and, therefore, anxiety-creating.

My husband once asked a group, “What do you think is the three-word verse that most men would say is their favorite?”

“It is finished.”

“What do you think is the favorite verse of most women?”

“Does it have to literally be a verse? Or can it be, ‘A woman’s work is never done?’” Literally.

That is comical and convicting, especially in light of the fact that in order to have real peace, the human nervous system needs to see a finish line. I mean, work is tolerable as long as you can see an off-ramp in the foreseeable future, but when there are no off-ramps in sight, we just keep a running to-do list that never ever gets cleared and freaking out attempting it. In this view of life, everything is cyclical when it should be linear.

If you spend your mental presence looping over and over and over again in a stress-inducing cycle of service, at that point, your nervous system will start to treat the situation of your life like a permanent threat condition instead of a temporary demand, and chronic anxiety will be your chronic companion.

Unfortunately, most of our work has no real ending. There is no “It is finished” to the emotional vigilance required to keep the people you love happy, while at the same time managing everything else.

In truth, these aren’t individual tasks; they are one perpetual race. And then when you add boundaryless labor to moral obligation for good measure, and well, because you can, then attach your identity to it, you end up stuck in your own fight-or-flight club. And, like the original, no one talks about it.

As long as our work is never done, we end up roaming the savannah like an injured wildebeast separated from her pack, running from one room to the next, trying to escape a hungry lion. And, guess what. From a biological standpoint, your body doesn’t know the difference between a woman who never rests and a woman who is being chased by a deadly predator. You are both.

My conclusion? This is what practicing omnipotence feels like when you’re an impotent creature. And I know of which I speak. I’ve been living under the false premise that I need omnipotence in order for my world to run smoothly for decades. Saying I trust in an all-powerful God, yet having his back in all things, to-do list oriented. I mean, God doesn’t have time for all that, right? That lands squarely on my shoulders. Or so I thought.

If I were Jesus, I never would have gone to the cross because I couldn’t bring myself to say it was finished. I’d want one more swing at getting the word out; I’d feel uncomfortable leaving people unhealed and unsaved. I’d think this woman’s work is not done.

But when Jesus said, “It is finished,” almost nothing was finished. Rome was still in power. People still hated Him. His followers were weak, terrified, and running. Suffering still ruled people’s lives, and death still had its power. The world was not restored.

But He stopped.

He stopped.

Would my makeup allow me to do that? I am afraid not. Excruciating death on a cross aside, just leaving things unfinished would drive me crazy.

I only feel comfortable resting once I can achieve resolution, which is probably why faith has always felt inefficient to me. Once the counter is clear, the inbox is empty, and my people are asleep. Once my relationship feels stable and the future feels predictable, I can be happy. I mean, as long as nothing is about to fall apart, I can start to breath but still, I cannot possibly say, “It is finished” because I know it all starts over again tomorrow. No end in sight.

But maybe I’m confusing faithfulness with omnipotence, flipping the job description between me and God.

Mine is omnipotence: His is faithfulness.

Feels right.

And that is just wrong.

Seems that my to-do list isn’t just a list but my resume for Godhood. Me trying to Jesus my way through my plans, but without the actual power or call to back it up.

It’s a sickness, really, this need to micromanage God. As if the Creator of the universe is up there biting His nails, waiting for me to finally organize the pantry so He can get some real work done.

But when I try to Jesus my way through my day, I’m not being holy; it’s not “what would Jesus do,” it’s delulu. I’m staying awake all night trying to keep the planet spinning, as if my insomnia is the only thing holding the solar system together. I live with the delusions of grandeur disguised as a servant heart. I think I’m being a good girl, but I’m actually just a really bad God.

I’m starting to see that the most spiritual thing I can do today isn’t to pray more or serve more or fix one more thing, it’s to look at the half-finished, the un-repaired, and the to-be-continued and just… quit. Does that feel as wrong, and yet so right, to you as it does to me?

Face it, if I wait for resolution to rest, I’ll never rest this side of heaven. I’ve got to attempt the radical, terrifying “unfaithfulness” of leaving things undone, and trust that if I’m not there to take care of it, the world won’t actually implode.

Maybe rest was never supposed to come from resolution in the first place.

But, unfortunately, because we’ve tied rest to omniscience, we can’t stop.

“It is finished” feels so foreign in the mouth of a woman whose nervous system has spent years preparing for the total collapse of a system outside of her control.

Maybe the real question to ask isn’t, “Is my work done?” But can I believe God is still working when I am not? Thoughts to ponder.

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Do you tend to take control quickly and then justify it as just being more efficient? If you want something done right, do it yourself, after all.

Do you struggle with anxiety?

These tendencies often overlap with the unconscious assumption that trust, especially when it slows things down, isn’t a good use of your time, and that’s why faith feels inefficient to a mind trained to optimize.

You would probably never say those words out loud or even to yourself. But it shows up in how uncomfortable it feels to leave anything unresolved. Inefficiency doesn’t just bother you; it feels wrong. A little irresponsible, even, like you’re failing to do your part.

I first wrote about this idea last week, in my article, Is Your Faith Efficient? And it has occurred to me since that this idea is more universal than I originally thought, but rarely, if ever, identified and dealt with.

So I’m running an experiment.

For 24 hours, I’m stepping out of my instinct to be efficient, and I want to invite you to do it with me. I’m not suggesting this because efficiency is bad, but because, like me, you’ve may have been using it in places where it has been slowly replacing simple trust.

So for 24 hours, we are going to reject the need for control for efficiency’s sake in favor of letting go of what doesn’t actually belong to us, and learning what it looks like to pause long enough to ask whether this is actually ours to carry right now.

That means we aren’t going to:

Get rid of every unresolved thing the second you notice it.
Do something just because we can.
Or use speed to give a sense of relief.

You’re still going to show up, respond, and complete real responsibilities, but without solving things that were never assigned to you. And in that, I hope we will start to notice exactly how often we’ve been doing the exact opposite.

Before we start, we need one clear definition, or this will get muddy fast.

The version of efficiency we’re talking about is this: removing discomfort by taking control and creating closure.

That’s the kind of efficiency we’re fasting from. Not wise action, responsibility, or diligence, just the reflex that says: “I can make this feel better right now, so I’m gonna.”

For the next 24 hours, instead, we’re going to interrupt that reflex.

What follows is a 24-hour experiment that will show you exactly how often you’ve been choosing efficiency over trust, and what it looks like to interrupt it in real time.

For those who want to go deeper, what follows is the full structure of the experiment and how to actually run it

The Rules of the Fast

These are not suggestions; these are the rules of the experiment.

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I love being in control. Being in control is efficient. If you want it done right, do it yourself, I always say.

Trust, like peace, is one of those interruptions to my plans. I’ve got things to do, people to see, places to be, and asking me to give up control is like telling me to let someone else load my dishwasher; they’ll never get it right.

I much prefer, and in fact always operate from a position of control, not just out of comfort, because yes, it is more comfortable, but it’s also more efficient. And I love efficiency. Time is as precious as gold, so why would I waste it?

Control is the part of me that makes sure I get my money’s worth out of time. And that’s being responsible: doing your best with the time you’ve been given. That’s why I manage my life the way your micro-managing boss manages your workflow. I mean, I don’t just manage my life, I hover over it, making sure it’s all getting done the way I want it done. My focus is on the outcome, and the outcome won’t come the way I want it to come if I don’t keep an eye on how it’s coming together.

That’s what makes trust so dangerous. Trust is like letting your three-year-old cut your hair. It’s like giving your teenager the keys to your brand-new car. Trust is not efficient, and it does not guarantee results.

The trouble with trust is that it doesn’t micromanage outcomes. It just lets things move forward without my input, which is crazy when you realize that everything depends on that input. That’s what makes trust inefficient. It doesn’t get things done in the time and way I want them done.

Control is not only practically efficient, but it’s also mentally efficient. If I’m in control, I don’t have to waste any time not knowing, rethinking, or fixing anything later. It takes much less energy for me to just do the things that need to be done than to let go and trust someone else with the outcomes.

So, of course, I move in the direction of control. And control and trust move in opposite directions. If you want control, it’s at the cost of trust. And in a staring match between control and trust, control wins out for me because it’s the path of least resistance; it costs me less. It’s the difference between driving home from the store and driving in a foreign country. My brain naturally wants the easier route.

Trust requires discernment, and discernment takes too much energy. Taking the time to slow down and redirect my thoughts from vigilance and preparation to hope and trust takes tremendous amounts of mental and emotional energy that I just can’t afford.

Control, now control, I can do that without even thinking. It takes low effort, and it gives me fast results with minimal friction. My brain loves that.

My ultimate goal is to minimize error, reduce surprises, maintain control, and manage outcomes. Trust, aka faith, doesn’t give me that. Faith sits in peace without giving me the future that I want, and that makes faith unpredictable and therefore inefficient.

Faith, for a person who loves control, is inefficient. There, I said it.

What’s the Opposite of Procrastination?

I realize that I’m wired for vigilance, and that wiring tells me that, “If I do it right now, I won’t have to worry about it later.” And this efficiency gene gives me a sense of mastery, of competence. It makes me feel capable, responsible, and on top of things. Which I realize now makes me feel morally on top of things. It’s like my efficiency proves my worth, AND determines the outcomes. Winner, winner. That’s the kind of person I want to be.

Trusting God doesn’t point to my mastery or competence. It doesn’t make me feel capable, responsible, or on top of things. It actually feels more like neglect or irresponsibility. Like I should be doing something other than resting, or trusting, that’s just not in my makeup.

I’m starting to think that faith isn’t as efficient as I want it to be, and that’s why control takes its place in my life. I mean, think about it, faith leaves empty space, it allows for delays, it tolerates unresolved outcomes. Trusting God doesn’t necessarily mean anything is going to change, or that results will be what I want them to be.

I prefer efficiency, no, I trust it. It feels responsible in a way that leaving things alone and trusting God never has.

Maybe my saying that makes you uncomfortable, or maybe it makes you feel not so alone, but either way, it’s turning a light on in a very dark room. And I like the lights on. It’s so hard to see without them.

Efficiency only works when the system belongs to you, and I’m starting to realize I’ve been applying it to things that don’t, like outcomes, timing, other people, the future. I’m not just being efficient. I’m taking responsibility for things that were never assigned to me.

No wonder faith feels inefficient. It keeps handing those things back. It leaves space where I’ve been filling it, and it removes the job I’ve been calling responsibility.

I’m starting to wonder if faith doesn’t feel less efficient simply because it doesn’t let me stay in charge.

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Last week, I had a moment where everything was fine. The birds were singing, the sun was shining, and I had this unusual sense of calm, which I’m unfamiliar with, washing over me. But instead of just enjoying it, I noticed it. Like really noticed the change in atmosphere from the norm, and I kinda panicked, just a little.

It’s like how I imagine it would feel if you were walking a tightrope with no problem, enjoying the view, when suddenly, you looked down and realized that you were 100s of feet off the ground, standing on nothing but a rope, and so you freak out and fall to your death.

When that feeling hit me, I couldn’t help but look for something more familiar to hold onto. So, I thought about a difficult conversation from earlier in the day and started replaying it because I felt strangely unsafe just sitting in peace.

I found a problem in the way the person had spoken to me, and I locked in. Now I had something to work with, something to interpret, something to adjust, something to hold onto. And if I’m being honest, that felt better than peace, and by better, I mean more familiar.

Maybe I don’t so much struggle with anxiety as I do with peace. Maybe I’ve gotten it all wrong all this time. It might just be that I, through years of practice, find anxiety more ordinary and therefore more a part of me.

See, I’m uncomfortable with not doing stuff. I like getting things done. I like being busy and making progress, and peace doesn’t give me anything to do. There is no checklist for peace, no to-do list, and that feels like underachievement.

For a high-functioning person like me, underachievement is the kiss of death. I’m just realizing this in real time, so forgive me if I’m beside myself right now. I mean, talk about barking up the wrong tree for most of my life.

My current research has taught me that our brains are trained by repetition, not intention, desire, or even awareness. Which means that your nervous system organizes itself around what’s familiar, and what’s familiar is whatever you repeatedly do or think, not whatever you know is true.

So that means that if you’ve spent years, as I have, replaying conversations, scanning for threats, and looking to people for cues to your safety, then when peace comes along, it feels like a frustrated spouse telling you to just calm down, and we all know how well that works out.

So, now I’m starting to wonder if anxiety isn’t interrupting my peace, but peace is interrupting my anxiety. (Bolded that so you’d read it twice.)

Peace interrupts my progress in the area of control, management, and work. If I’m at peace, then my usual job is no longer getting done. My work of interpreter, problem-solver, emotional regulator, and anticipator of everyone’s needs is suddenly neglected, and that makes me feel unproductive and reckless. So my brain gets me back to work because not being productive feels like vulnerability to a brain I’ve trained to thrive on vigilance and hard work, and being reckless is just plain crazy.

Because peace messes with my system, I run away from it in order to regain control and get the system back up and working.

Not being busy seems like a dare to me; a dare to figure out what I should be doing, and what I need to do next. And once I know that, peace isn’t relief, it’s neglect, cuz I got things to do.

I can turn peace into anxiety in a split second just by thinking about it. It’s like peace is a tightrope, and thinking is looking down. The moment I start asking why I feel this way, or whether I can afford to rest, I’m no longer walking; I’m calculating, adjusting, and trying not to worry about it, and by then, I’ve already lost it and plummeted into the depths of anxiety.

We say we want peace, but we fight it because peace is a whistle-blower. Blowing its whistle on the unpaid emotional labor of doing things that aren’t ours to do.

When I am at peace, I am not:

• Trying to stay ahead of problems that haven’t happened

• Making sure no one is mad at me

• Replaying a conversation that happened a week ago

• Setting the conditions under which rest is permissible, or

• Solving the world’s problems

These are God-sized tasks, and they are massive, heavy, and structurally unsound for a human to carry. It feels like responsibility, but it’s functional atheism: acting like the world is gonna stop spinning if I stop worrying about it. I stay busy so I don’t have to face the terrifying reality that I’m not actually in control of much at all.

But peace isn’t a reward for getting your life, or anyone else’s together; it’s the physiological necessity of being alive. It’s watching the birds instead of scanning for a predator behind every bush.

We don’t need to learn how to do peace. We need to learn how to stop being afraid of what happens when we stop doing everything else. We need to learn how to breathe like we aren’t being hunted. Because the truth is, the lion isn’t there; it’s just our fear of the future aggressively roaring and stalking us whenever we stop running.

Peace can’t survive the inspection of a mind trained to manage stuff. So I can’t work to maintain or hold onto peace, but I can let it exist without assigning myself the job of keeping it, understanding it, or figuring out what to do in it, because that’s when I slip back into work mode.

There is a lot to unpack in that one statement, because the urge itself doesn’t feel like I’m disrupting peace; it feels like responsibility. I mean, I’m paying attention, and I’m no dummy, I know you’ve got to stay ahead of stuff, or something could go wrong.

My instinct is always to assign meaning, to figure out what this strange feeling is, how long it will last, what I’m supposed to do inside of it, etc. I guess you could say my instinct is to turn peace into a project. And the moment I do that, I’m back to work and no longer living in peace.

Peace feels unsafe for the same reason grace does. It removes my job. And if you’ve spent your life managing what was never yours to carry, then the absence of responsibility doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like failure. Ah, peace, when did you become failure?

Here’s what I’m saying, peace would be more peaceful if I didn’t feel guilty for experiencing it. Which is ironic, considering how much I’ve studied and written about it. Turns out, knowing what peace is and letting myself live in it are not the same thing. (But this is something I’ve been coming back to when I can’t seem to stay there.)

I think I need to go reread my book on the fruit of the Spirit. Join me?

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In my twenties, shopping was my coping mechanism.

Bad day? Target run.
Feeling aimless? New throw pillows.
Stressed? Add to cart.

I didn’t realize I was using spending to regulate my emotions until I was $20,000 in debt and surrounded by things I didn’t actually need, and feelings I never actually faced.

That’s when I started to understand something psychologists have long known:
Just the act of imagining a future purchase, browsing, saving, or even just curating can light up the same reward centers in the brain as actually buying.

It’s called anticipatory dopamine.

Turns out, our brains don’t just like having things; they like collecting visions of what could be.

That little lift you feel while scrolling, while imagining your future kitchen or your future wardrobe or your dream house, feels so good because your brain is wired to respond to the possibility that something better could be just ahead.

Which is why I now consider Pinterest the gentler, wiser version of shopping therapy.

No checkout.
No guilt.
No clutter.
Just ideas.
Just hope.
Just a little window shopping for the soul.

But that feeling, the lift, the almost-beauty of what could be, isn’t just about stuff. It’s the same part of your brain that responds when you stand at the edge of the ocean. Or when a song wrecks you in the best possible way. When you get that unexplainable sense that life could be fuller, richer, and more alive than it is right now.

That’s the part of us that was made for awe.

Shopping just borrows that awe and shrinks it. It gives us a counterfeit version of transcendence, something you can hold onto, control, and bring home in a paper bag. But consumer awe is hollow awe, and it offers nothing but a finish line. Once the item is on your shelf, the awe of possibility dies. The sparkle fades, the dopamine dips, and you’re forced to start the hunt all over again.

But awe doesn’t die off like that, and neither does worship, because they don’t end in you possessing something that loses its sparkle, they end in adoration.

That same pull you feel when you’re curating a life you’d love to live is the same feeling you get when you see the power of a waterfall, or consider the billions of galaxies like ours, and realize we haven’t even made it to the edge of this one.

Shopping therapy may feel natural, but we weren’t wired to be satisfied by the purchase, but by His beauty, His power, His presence. We were made to be drawn to His goodness and to feel the ache of thinking there’s got to be more than this, and then to discover that More.

So go ahead, pin that She Shed, those lemon-blueberry scones, that walk-in pantry with the glass jars. In a world that can feel gray, there is a sweetness in practicing imagination and delighting in beauty, a capacity God designed you for. Only don’t mistake the gift for the source. Be careful that your dream boards don't become monuments to discontentment, but rather prompts for gratitude.

Because Pinterest may stir the feeling and even give you a glimpse of what your heart is reaching for, but it trades the real thing for a version you can control. Which means that feeling you keep trying to satisfy with something new might not be asking for something new at all. Maybe it’s asking for something that doesn’t fade once you finally have it.

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