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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Rest is something I subconsciously avoid. Consciously, I want it terribly, but when it comes along, I want to jump up and run away, waving my arms like a wasp is threatening to sting on me.

So when I read The Master’s Indwelling by Andrew Murray, it was like the wasp lost its sting. I ravenously (no, it’s not lost on me that it wasn’t restfully) started copying down his words. And these were the ones for me. I thought maybe they might be for you, too.

This was my favorite! Never really knew it was true.

It’s like he sees into my soul and names it all.

It’s nice to know I’m not the only one.

Not even when we’ve spent decades not knowing what we are learning now.

Amen! Not just the unanxious.

I can repeat these words, but the part of my brain that insists on protecting me has yet to learn it. And I know now it only learns through repetition. So this is my repetition. To read these words regularly, to read them when my guilt, my temperature or my heart rate rises, and to show my brain that rest truly is for me.

If you’d like to meditate on this idea, here is the text uninterrupted: (Or listen to the soothing audio at the top of the page.)

There is rest for me.

I believe, heartily, there is rest in the life of faith. I believe this rest is for me. I believe that there is a rest into which Jesus, our Joshua, can bring a trusting soul. I believe it is for me. I know God keeps me every hour in his mighty power.

I believe there is a possibility of such a change out of the life of spiritual death, and darkness, and sadness, and complaining, that I have often lived, into the land of supply of every want; where the grace of Jesus is proved sufficient every hour of every day. I believe in the possibility that there is such a land of rest for me.

Up to this time I have never found His rest. I have not lived that life, and I am guilty; I have dishonored God; I have been like Israel; I have provoked Him to wrath by my unbelief and disobedience. I have not glorified God by a life lived in the land of rest.

Today I begin to look away from myself and towards God. After all, the God who converted me is the same God who is able to bring me into this life every minute of every day.

It is for me.

I do believe, that God does want to give me his rest.

It is for me;

I do believe that God does not disinherit any of His children. What He gives is for every one. I believe that blessed life is waiting for me. It is meant for me. God is waiting to bestow it, and to work it in me. Glory be to His blessed name! My soul says it is for me.

I believe this unimaginable treasure is there even for me, the weakest and most frail of his beings.

It is for me.

I can never, by any effort of my own grasp it, God must give it to me.

Andrew Murray, The Master’s Indwelling

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Are you comforted by your circumstances?

Let me ask it another way: are you uncomfortable because of your circumstances?

When your comfort depends on things outside your soul, like your health, relationships, money, safety, reputation, or your control over the future, comfort is perpetually just beyond your reach. Because, as Thomas Watson would say, “The world can no more fill the soul than a drop can fill a bucket.”

When your peace needs favorable circumstances, your soul is vulnerable to circumstantial disturbance. Which means you have to constantly monitor your world. You have to track, anticipate, adjust, and brace, as if you are the manager of all that was never put under your authority.

Anxiety then grows from that feeling of being responsible for things only God controls because of an unconscious sense that you don’t quite have what you need in order to be okay.

This is a hard pill to swallow, and I both hate saying it and love what saying it reveals. That the lack we often sense is not the lack we have. We don’t actually lack provision. We lack certainty. We lack predictability. We lack the ability to forecast the future.

The Christian answer to that lack is not certain provision, it’s safety. And, you don’t need certainty and savings to be safe. You need a Shepherd, and you have one.

(I talk about this more in my audio, found at the top of the page.) Let me know your thoughts. Have you ever felt like uncertainty was uncomfortable?

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I used to think anxiety was a necessity, like preparedness or discernment. As if I were the Protector of the World, and anxiety were my control panel. How else would I stay one step ahead of what could go wrong without anxiety keeping me alert? But none of the buttons on my control panel are actually connected to the outside world. It’s a placebo. I’m spinning a steering wheel that isn't attached to the tires, convinced that my skilled driving is the only thing keeping us on the road. So I’ve effectively traded the reality of my helplessness for the high-octane illusion of control.

After all, it’s only through precise and powerful anxiety that I can do something about the future. That I can protect what I’ve been given to protect. How else can I really be considered responsible if I don’t have a degree of anxiety about the situation?

I mean, consider the opposite. Consider being nonplused about the state of affairs in your family, or your country, or the world. Imagine not getting riled up or upset when things look like they are going wrong, out of control, or just plain dangerous. What would others do if you didn’t correct them, or teach them, or worry over them? Where would our help come from?

Anxiety is a kind of treasure, isn’t it? Not that I’d ever tell anyone that, but I do treat it as such. I do tend to mentally organize around it, and guard it, revisit it, and reinforce it. But there is a strange paradox in guarding this kind of treasure: the more I protect it, the more it crushes me. It is a heavy, suffocating wealth. I’m exhausted from the effort of carrying it, but I fear I am subconsciously terrified of the lightness that would come if I just set it down. It seems I treat it like gold, but it feels like lead.

I don’t just have anxiety. I keep it. I covet it. I hold onto it as if letting it go would leave me exposed. As if my life, and yours, depended on it. And that’s what makes it so difficult to let go of.

And there’s the tell.

Because I don’t treat things I hate this way. I don’t return to them, hold them close, keep them running in the background. No, that’s how I treat things I think I need.

That’s how I treat my treasure.

And I’m not entirely sure what to do with that yet.

But it does make me wonder what I believe anxiety is actually doing for me… and whether I’ve been trusting it to hold something only God was meant to carry. And if that’s the case, why am I trying to play God?

AUDIO: As a continuation of this, I’ve recorded a guided reflection centered on returning to peace in God’s presence.

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Yesterday we all went for smoothies, and when my husband turned right out of the parking lot instead of left, I started to feel uneasy.

There was a conversation going on in the car so I didn’t say anything. Until I just couldn’t control myself anymore, and I interrupted with, “I’m sorry, where are we going?” I asked like I had just come up from underwater after holding my breath for too long. I couldn’t stand not knowing why he was going in the exact opposite direction of where I believed we should be going. The fact that he might have taken a wrong turn, or that he was going to surprise us with another stop was beyond what I could handle in the particular moment.

As I thought about this desperate need of mine to know where I was going, I started to run a spiritual assessment.

What inside of me makes me so uncomfortable with the unknown, especially when that unknown was a car taking me in a direction I am unsure of?

Ok, suspend reality with me for a minute, and travel into the stuff of fiction.

Imagine being dropped, out of nowhere, into a vehicle in a city unknown to you, going somewhere you did not know, but with someone you did. Would you sit calmly by and trust your driver knew what was going on? After all, you trust them? Or would you grab the armrest as if you were sliding down a steep hill on a slippery sled and scream, “Where are we and what are we doing?”

That’s how I feel when the person who is driving takes a “wrong turn,” like I just entered the Twilight Zone. My existential angst kicks in whenever I realize I am not in control of my own destiny because I don’t know where we are going or what we are doing.

I realize this is a bit extreme, but am I alone in this?

The Illusion of Control

Do you ever feel this same kind of anxiety driven by not knowing what your future holds?

It’s an uncomfortable realization, isn’t it? The notion that we doubt our safety unless we know our destination.

Human instinct seems to tell us that if something important is going to happen, it’s safer if we influence it. That sounds reasonable, right? After all, me doing something to protect myself increases the odds of my safety. And, because of that, my brain equates agency with security.

But apply that to the things only God can control, like timing, outcomes, or other people, and you’re in for a world of hurt. If God is truly directing events, then my control is limited.

But, truth be told, we don’t feel comfortable inside that limitation, because to limit your control is to make friends with vulnerability.

It’s far less vulnerable to say God’s providence plus my vigilance equals safety. Many an anxious Christian has proven that you can trust God’s goodness while simultaneously assuming His providence alone is not enough. It’s not a question of his existence or character, but of His wisdom.

Proverbs 3:5–6 exists to speak to just such anxiety when it says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.” Our instinct is to lean on our own understanding because it feels more reliable. And it’s a tale as old as time. Abraham tried to fulfill God’s promise through a surrogate. Martha tried to manage the room for Jesus. Peter tried to control what Jesus would do next.

They didn’t reject God, full stop. They just struggled to live in a world where He determined the outcome of their lives. In other words, they couldn’t live in peace with unresolved uncertainty.

When the Israelites wandered the desert, worrying about their next meal or the timing of their arrival, they felt the tension. Sure, they knew God existed. I mean, He was a pillar of fire right in front of them. They could literally get a visual on Him.

But still, the question was, could His management of their lives be trusted? Just like me in the passenger seat, they were grabbing for the armrest because the Driver wasn’t taking the route they would have chosen.

So, how do you actually surrender control? How do you move from the theory of Proverbs 3:5 to the actual practice of it? By a process of retraining both your soul and nervous system through:

The Surrender Snowball

Surrender is like getting out of debt. You’ve spent years spending what you didn’t have to spend, and now you want out. If you have ever listened to Dave Ramsey, then you know you don’t get out quickly, but methodically. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, you gain momentum, one small payment at a time, starting with the smallest debts first, so the wins start to build like a snowball.

Spiritually, that means starting small, like letting someone do something in a way you wouldn’t, making a decision without weighing every possibility, or moving on without checking one more time. These surrenders feel both insignificant and negligent at the same time. Funny how that works, but that should only stand to prove how tightly safety and control are tied together.

When nothing falls apart, your nervous system starts to register what your belief alone couldn’t seem to hold onto: that the absence of your control isn’t the same as the presence of danger.

These small surrenders build a snowball of tolerance for the uncertainty that used to lead directly to anxiety. And what you end up with, over time, is a recalibrated understanding of security, one that no longer depends on your constant intervention to be sustained.

Don’t Scratch

Control is like an itch you want to scratch. It feels so urgent, so necessary, so good, but with each scratch, you are only making the problem worse, leading to more scratching, and itching, itching and scratching. It’s a vicious cycle.

To stop the itch that is control you have to pause. Instead of going right to fixing things, stop, don’t do it. Let the text sit unsent. Let the question go unasked. Let the uncertainty be what it is.

Like the skin needs space to heal without being scratched, the brain needs space to see that the catastrophe it expects isn’t actually happening.

Spiritually, this looks like leaving the unknown alone and entrusting it to God. That means that anxiety will rise, peak, and then, without intervention, start to settle, leaving your soul with the evidence it needs to realize that nothing fell apart just because you didn’t scratch the itch of control.

Let It Go

Corrie ten Boom once said, “Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.” The struggle is real. When you hold everything tightly, your body, your breath, the outcome, you’re practicing letting go like Pharaoh holding on until the plagues are in your living room and the Red Sea is closing over your head. That isn’t surrender; it’s just being overpowered by reality.

True trust requires a physical liturgy, literally unclenching your fists and releasing your breath to signal to your heart that you are safe. Learn from Pharaoh: let go before the crisis forces your hand, and teach your soul that the Driver can be trusted long before the road gets bumpy.

Build a History of Trust

We update our internal maps through repeated experience. After enough times watching things work out without your interference, you end up with a new way of thinking. One that says, “Things can work out even when I am not the one managing them.” Thus retraining your brain to recognize that the world can function perfectly under God’s control, even when you aren’t helping Him.

Anxiety is self-protection trying to impersonate God.

It wants to foresee, to prevent, to protect. It dresses itself in calculating outcomes and rehearsing disasters while underneath, it’s still just fear holding onto control.

But once you’ve let go of the little things, you can open your hands, and surrender more fully. You can let someone misunderstand you without rushing in to correct them. That’s freedom! You can learn to trust God even when it looks like He can’t be trusted. That’s victory! That’s a peace that surpasses all understanding.

Ever wonder what the world would do without you?

What if the chaos you’re trying to fix is actually a natural process of growth that you’ve just mislabeled as a problem? A lot of times we think things are broken just because they don’t fit our specific schedule for how they should be “fixed.”

I wonder which "broken" thing in my life might actually just be growing on a different timeline than mine?

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Time bothers me more than it should, I know. But ignoring it is like trying to ignore a splinter in my toe. Sure, it’s just so small and unassuming, but still, it demands all my attention. Nothing is technically wrong, but every step reminds me that something is definitely off, and probably going to fester if I don’t do something about it.

Time discomfort comes from fairly benign stuff, like being late, waiting longer than I planned, missing a green light, or just watching minutes slip by while I try to finish something.

These are small enough irritants, so why does something this small feel so big?

As I see it, there are two types of what I’m calling OCTD (Obsessive Compulsive Time Disorder). One has to do with time interrupting my expectations. If something is supposed to happen at a certain moment, and it doesn’t, irritation bubbles up like a canker sore meeting hot coffee. Sure, you say the plan could still happen, and your day doesn’t have to be ruined, but this small disruption sets off a cascade of future disruptions where one missed second spills into the next, and then the next, and suddenly the whole afternoon is sliding downhill fast.

I don’t like cascading time; I like time that stays in line and behaves in an orderly fashion. Time that walks down the hill and arrives without grass stains on its knees.

But there is a second type of OCTD, made possible by the human brain, which, in general, doesn’t always treat language as metaphor. Sometimes it just processes it as a prediction.

So, when we say something like, “I’m running out of time?” Or, “There is not enough time.” It may sound like a harmless enough way to explain how you feel, but my brain is very literal, and it has come to believe that time is, in fact, almost gone, and that sense of urgency gives me all kinds of anxiety. I mean, what will I do if time is all gone?

When we repeatedly say, “I’m running out of time,” our brains start treating time itself like a scarce survival resource, in the category of oxygen, money, or food. That scarcity mentality then triggers urgency, and urgency, in turn, activates the stress response.

Bada bing, bada boom—anxiety. Because something essential is about to disappear, and you definitely better worry about it!

For us anxious types, time itself is a trigger, releasing a cruel taskmaster: the clock, who makes life start to feel like a timed game where the buzzer gets louder the longer something takes.

Tick.

You’re late.

Tick.

You should already be further along.

Tick.

You’re falling behind.

Tick.

You forgot something.

When you have anxiety, the clock is anything but neutral. It’s more of a moral auditor, fastidiously evaluating everything about you.

Pretty soon, your brain starts asking questions that have nothing to do with your minutes and everything to do with your value. Did I do enough? Should I have started earlier? Am I wasting time? Am I going to regret this later?

Did you know that this isn’t how calm people experience time? For them, time is just a sequence, there to organize events without attaching any moral meaning to them. They just see the clock as helping them know:

First, I do this.
Then, I do that.
After that, I’ll deal with the next thing.

And so, when something takes longer than expected, their response is something like, “That took longer than I thought. I’ll adjust.” Are your eyes bugging out right now, like mine?

Their clock informs them, it doesn’t accuse them. It’s not constantly ticking at them, saying, “Something’s gonna go wrong!”

Their minds assume something different than the anxious mind. Instead of thinking, “There isn’t enough time,” their minds assume something like, “There’s only so much that can fit into an hour.”

My trouble is that time is like my shopping bag at an everything’s-free sale, I try to fill my hour with over an hour’s worth of activity so I can get all the minutes I want while time is still available for the taking.

That’s because my brain, like the genius that it is, is running calculations in the background, deducing that if time keeps passing and this isn’t finished yet, something bad is gonna happen. Like, if I’m late, I might disappoint them. If I don’t finish everything, I’ll miss out on what others are getting.

My nervous system turns time into a predictive threat marker with the clock as its warning system, acting like some kind of PR agent attempting to prevent regret, embarrassment, and failure.

My nervous system means well. It just wants to protect me. Bless its heart. But somehow that prediction system has become overly sensitive, and now time itself just feels dangerous, always.

But time isn’t dangerous; it’s just out of my control.

Sure, we can influence it by preparing for it. We can plan carefully and start early, but we can’t command it. The clock keeps moving, whether circumstances cooperate with my plans or not. And that’s where anxiety tries to help us out.

For a mind like mine that feels responsible for making everything go correctly, a loss of control feels like showing up at the gym and accidentally running around the track buck naked.

Exposed!

But that exposure has two possible outcomes, and strangely enough, I do get to choose between them. Finally!

I can either attempt to take over more control and get more stressed out over time’s inability to do what I say. Or I can recognize the exposure for what it is: a glimpse into the difference between what belongs to God and what I’ve been trying to manhandle away from Him.

Turns out timing discomfort might be one of the most ordinary places where human beings discover they aren’t God.

In Fruitful, I wrote that irritation is one of the earliest signs that I’m not relying on the fruit of patience but on my flesh. Patience is my reliance on God instead of on my preferred sequence of events taking place in my preferred time.

Most of us move through the day without noticing this pattern. All we know is that we feel rushed, behind, and slightly stressed from morning until night. Which begs the question, what do we do with this awareness?

Renew your mind

While we all necessarily live within the constraints of time, this side of heaven, we have been taught to conform to the authority of time by assuming that productivity corroborates worth, efficiency proves competence, falling behind equals failure, and the clock determines our value. When you internalize these assumptions, the clock becomes a kind of moral authority telling you when you are failing, behind, or just plain insufficient.

But the Bible calls us to refuse the systems of evaluation that the world uses, and that includes the idea that time is your judge.

Romans 12 tells us not to be “conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” And refusing to be conformed can include refusing the belief that the clock is your judge and jury.

Christian theology has always treated time differently from the world because of who God is. He isn’t bound by time. For Him, “a thousand years are like a day.” We, on the other hand, do live within time’s limits, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to treat time as our ultimate authority.

Renewing the mind on the subject of time means learning to see it as a tool rather than a judge. When we move time from the space of boundary to arbiter, we misplace our allegiance. Time was never meant to become the decider of our worth.

An anxious relationship with time reveals a hidden conformity to the world’s system of evaluation, where the clock determines our worth. We renew our minds on this matter by stepping out of that system and remembering that time belongs to God, not to the pressures that try to rule us through it.

But how does that actually happen in real life?

The way the mind changes is both fairly ordinary and magical at the same time. Anxiety is negative faith, having more confidence in a negative outcome than in a good one. Once your mind has formed those conclusions, it tends to hold to them for dear life unless something completely contradicts them. So, the renewal of the mind starts with baby steps, not a full-scale worldview shift.

Your brain learns through accumulated experience, which ironically, takes time. And we’ve all had a lot of time to complicate our relationship with the clock, but it doesn’t take as long to unwind the problem as it did to wind it up.

Think of it as interrupting an old pattern. Time is saying it’s almost up, you are running out of me, but instead of reacting how you usually react, speeding up or panicking, you make one slightly different choice.

You pause.

And you let the moment unfold long enough to see what actually happens next.

That tiny interruption is where you start renewing your mind, because your mind can finally observe something you rarely allow it to see: the timeline slipped, but the world didn’t collapse as anticipated.

God worked this out in the lives of the Israelites in the wilderness. When the people were hungry, and there wasn’t enough food or time in the day to get more, God didn’t give in to their frantic schedule and give them food for the week. He just gave them enough manna for the day. If they tried to store tomorrow’s portion, it spoiled overnight.

The lesson is the same for us as it was for them; tomorrow’s outcome is not ours to control. We all have to move through this hour and trust God over and over again with each passing minute.

Is that such a terrible predicament to be in?

Renewing the mind works the same way. The old instinct says, fix the timeline now. But the new response is different. As you stop looking to the clock as your judge or master, you start to trust that time is in God’s hands.

For example, imagine you run into traffic and realize you are going to be late. Your mind instantly predicts the worst: This is going to mess everything up. And so instinctively you start to rush, reorganize, apologize ahead of time, all in an attempt to prove to yourself that the timeline is still under your control.

This is where small shifts happen.

Instead of fighting the clock, you can allow the disruption to exist for a moment, to be still, in that moment, and know that He is God. You will head to your destination, of course, but you can resist the urge to panic on the way. Instead, let the schedule wobble rather than forcing it immediately back into place.

So, you arrive a few minutes later than planned, but the conversation still happens. The meeting still starts. The day continues moving in roughly the same direction it was already headed.

Just recognizing moments like that starts teaching your brain something new. The timeline slipped, yes, but life continued anyway. As the author of Ecclesiastes reminds us, “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride. Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8–9)

Your nervous system may have predicted catastrophe, but reality produced something far more ordinary. Each time that happens, the prediction loses a little authority. Gradually, the clock stops sounding like an alarm and becomes what it always was, a way of measuring moments rather than a judge of your worth.

Which makes me wonder if the clock was ever really the problem.

Maybe timing discomfort is just one of the places where the illusion of our control gets exposed. The clock is going to keep ticking either way. The only thing that changes is how we experience those ticks, as something slipping through our fingers, or as something safely kept in God’s hands.

I’d love to hear your experience with time, whether it’s similar to mine or completely different.