I feel sure God created Peter so we could see ourselves more clearly.

In Luke 5, a crowd was following Jesus to hear him teach, and they were at the lake of Gennesaret. Jesus saw two ships hauled up on the beach, but no one was in them. The Bible says the fishermen who owned them were “washing their nets.” Apparently they’d been out fishing already, and now they were back and were cleaning up their tools.

But there was a crowd who’d been following Jesus, and it’s hard to teach when people are all on top of you. So Jesus got into the ship (we would call it a boat by today’s standards) that just happened to be Peter’s, and he asked Peter to “thrust out a little from the land.” Peter did so, and Jesus “sat down, and taught the people out of the ship.”

Don’t miss the fact that while Jesus was teaching the people, Peter was listening too. He was a captive audience with a front-row seat.

When Jesus was finished teaching, he said to Peter (v 4),

Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.

I imagine that just having returned from a fishing trip, Peter was tired and only wanted to finish cleaning up and go home. But here was this teacher, so how could he refuse? He began his answer by saying,

Master, . . .

Peter had no doubt heard of the man Jesus and had just listened to his teaching and maybe had heard of his miracles. We’ve heard of him too, haven’t we? But maybe Peter was still a skeptic. Maybe he was withholding judgment until he had time to learn more about this guy sitting in his boat, giving him orders. Maybe we do this too. But in the meantime, Peter didn’t want to offend the man in front of him, so he addressed him as “Master . . .” We definitely do this. It’s easy to say the words even when we don’t fully believe them. I’ll just placate Jesus until I can get out of this situation.

Peter continued,

. . . we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing . . .

Ah, there it is, the excuse. I’ll call you Master, but I will immediately follow it with a reason why your plan won’t work. (Please tell me I’m not the only one who does this.) That’s your plan, God? Well, listen to mine. I have a better one. Certainly my experience is more relevant than your idea. You’re telling me what to do? I’ve already tried that and it didn’t work. (I try not to be too hard on Peter because I’m exactly like him.) What he really wanted to say was, “Look, I’m exhausted from working third shift and I just want to go home.” (You and me, Peter. We always have an excuse.)

. . . nevertheless at thy word . . .

I can hear the resignation in Peter’s voice. Despite the fact that he already knows they won’t catch anything, he’ll go to all the work of doing what Jesus said to do. It will be an effort in futility, for sure, but just to prove he understands Jesus’ position is higher than his (roll the eyes, shake the head), he will do it.

. . . I will let down the net.

Heavy sigh.

So much work, so much bother. And I already know it will be all for nothing. What a waste of my time. I’m the fisherman here. I know when they’re biting and when they’re not. Who is this guy thinking he knows more than I, the one who was practically raised in this boat? I’m out on this lake every night, and he’s telling me how to catch fish?

If attitude could be inherited, I would say we got it from Peter. Lord, I’ve already tried to reason with my wife and she just refuses to get it. I’m sick of trying. God, I’ve already tried to get my husband to see it my way, but it’s like he has blinders on. There’s no hope anything will change.

Poor Peter (poor me). He’s so smart and accomplished, such a hard worker, knowledgeable about the sea and fishing, and no one gives him credit for it. I know my husband better than you do, Lord. I’ve lived with my wife all these years. She’s not going to straighten up. It’s a waste to even try.

But just to pacify the Lord, Peter will let down “the net.” Just this one.

But what was it Jesus told him to do?

. . . let down your nets . . .

I don’t know how many nets Peter had, but it was more than one. In the very beginning when Jesus showed up, he and his fishing partners were “washing their nets”—plural, more than one. And after platitudes and excuses and thinking he knows better than the Lord, Peter grudgingly agreed to let down one net.

Okay, let’s get this over with. The sooner I let down a net, the sooner I can wash it all over again and get home.

That is so me. I am Peter. I call Jesus Lord but doubt his ability and question his motives. I half-heartedly do what he asks of me, 100% doubting that anything good will come of it because, after all, I’ve already tried that and it didn’t work, and I know better. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Peter shows me exactly who I am.

Verse 6 might be my favorite. Remember, it’s just Peter and Jesus in the boat:

And when they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes: and their net brake.

Who is the “they” that let down the net? It could only be Peter and Jesus—they were the only two in the boat. Despite all of Peter’s doubt and attitude, Jesus was right there helping him let down his one measly, unbelieving net, probably giggling inside because he knew what was about to happen. Jesus didn’t just sit there and watch—he took part in the work he told Peter to do.

Friend, you will never let down your net alone. If Jesus tells you to do it, he will be right there in the boat doing it with you.

So you and Jesus have let down your net, and you’ve (both of you) caught a “great multitude” of fishes—more than you can imagine. So many, in fact, that it is miraculous. And your net—the net that you and Jesus let down together—bursts with all the goodness it’s trying to contain.

Listen, when Jesus tells you to throw your nets, throw all the nets you have. Don’t be dumb and hold back because this situation is a lost cause and it’s been 20 years (or 30 or 50) and nothing has changed so nothing will ever change and I’ll just suffer it until I die because I’ve tried everything and nothing worked and okay, fine, here’s my stupid net.

Can you hear yourself? I hear me.

But wait—there’s more!

Verse 7:

And they beckoned unto their partners, which were in the other ship, that they should come and help them. And they came, and filled both the ships, so that they began to sink.

When you let down your net and Jesus fills it with a “great multitude,” not only will your boat be filled, but other people’s boats will be filled too. When Jesus does a work in your life, there is spillover that covers your friends, your family, your brothers and sisters in Christ. Everyone who hears of it will be filled to overflowing.

For he was astonished, and all that were with him, at the draught of the fishes . . .

“All that were with him” shared in the joy of the miracle Jesus did for Peter.

We can learn so much from Peter, can’t we? I love that he “fell down at Jesus’ knees” after all this. I want to do the same, but wouldn’t it be great if I could do it before Jesus breaks my net?

When I was a kid, my parents were both public school teachers. Because of that, my three brothers and I and my parents all had our summers off. I remember a lot of playing with the neighborhood kids, running through sprinklers, chasing down the ice-cream truck, and riding our bikes along the paths we carved through the patches of woods in our neighborhood, now long gone.

One summer—I think I might have been 10 or 11—my father’s plan was to take classes at a state college an hour north of us, working toward earning his master’s degree. I’m not sure what happened to change his mind—maybe it was sitting in North Jersey traffic in the blazing heat with no air conditioning. But one day he turned around, came home, and told my mother to start packing the trailer. We were going camping.

At the time we had a 15-food Scotty trailer, the little turquoise and white ones with speckled paint inside that came off on your clothes if you rubbed the wall too hard. This happened often with six of us in our tiny home-on-wheels. We pulled the trailer with a Pontiac station wagon, the kind with a transmission that overheated if you sneezed wrong.

The back seat would fold down and make an area long enough for me to stretch out and sleep, and my two older brothers slept in an old Army-issue canvas tent that did not close at the bottom. I was glad to be safe from wildlife at least. Mommy and Daddy and baby Tommy slept in the trailer. We tied a red fiberglass canoe on top of the car and off we went.

Keep in mind this was in the early 1970s, long before the 55-mph-to-save-gas laws were in effect. In fact, I remember gas being 23 cents a gallon. It was also long before any kind of seat belt or child restraint systems were mandatory. Those were the days of your mother throwing her arm across your chest so you wouldn’t go flying if she had to stop fast.

But baby Tommy did have a car seat. At the ripe old age of 1 year and a few months, he had a little throne on the front bench seat between my parents in which he sat up straight and had a foam-padded bar in front of him. I’m not sure the padded bar was so much about safety as it was to have a place to put his hands and attach the clip-on play steering wheel. If he got tired of sitting there, he could slide right out the bottom, but no one was thinking about that back then. If he got sick of the whole thing, it was easy to throw it in the back of the car and just let him stand. On the front seat. While we were driving 75 miles an hour across the country. It is truly a miracle we all survived, especially Tommy.

Every year we began our trip by driving to Cleveland to visit my grandparents. This was a highlight because they had a built-in pool and because my Jewish grandfather would take us to Lax & Mandel, the best bakery in northeast Ohio. He would order a sticky pecan loaf, Russian tea biscuits, challah that made the best toast, bagels, and a huge box of rugelach. I have a recipe for rugelach, and while they’re delicious, nothing compares the ones we got at Lax & Mandel. If you were lucky and they weren’t too busy, one of the ladies from behind the counter would scoop up a handful of them and fill the front of your shirt held out like a basket, just because you were a kid and that made you worthy of this incredible gift. Those little ladies were pastry fairies, throwing rolled-up delights hither and yon. Then you had to figure out how to let go of your shirt with one hand so you could stuff your mouth full of flaky, buttery, cinnamon-and-brown-sugar-and-walnut goodness and Poppa would laugh at your dilemma. Good times.

After a few days (and pounds) in Cleveland, our next stop was Elgin, Illinois. I have no idea how my parents found this place, but there was a park where we could camp for the night that had an old fire engine just for kids to climb on. We loved it.

After that, the itinerary changed every year. One year we would go across the northern part of the country, through the Dakotas and into Montana. We would roam the Beartooth Highway, my father would take pictures of wildflowers, and my mother would cry because it was all just so beautiful and wild.

Another year we went south through New Mexico and Arizona, stopping at the Grand Canyon, and spending a few days in Flagstaff at a small hospital where they thought baby Tommy had pinworms. Turns out he was in the car too long and the doctors told my parents to get him out and run him.

After that our pace slowed and we meandered up through Colorado and Wyoming, spending a good deal of time in Yellowstone and the Tetons. We would stop and see the touristy things—Old Faithful and Grand Teton—but we preferred the out-of-the-way spots.

One of our favorites was a place called Moose Flat Campground along the Greys River, which, at the time, had no marked camping spots. It was just a big field along the river that may or may not be mowed twice a year, but there were two pit toilets and a hand pump with potable water. We could pull up right along the river and stay as long as we wanted. Occasionally a ranger would come through and collect the $2-a-day camping fee. That was where my brothers caught grasshoppers and put them on my hook for me, and Daddy taught me how to clean my own fish. The river water was so cold I could feel the oil on my hands freeze and crack.

But none of that is what got me on this train of thought. As the preachers say, all that was introduction.

What sent me down this road was a message I heard recently from Luke 19. Unsurprisingly, it was about Palm Sunday, the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, which was prophesied in Zechariah 9:9.

The passage in Luke says this:

And it came to pass, when he [Jesus] was come nigh to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount called the mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples,
Saying, Go ye into the village over against you; in the which at your entering ye shall find a colt tied, whereon yet never man sat: loose him, and bring him hither.
And if any man ask you, Why do ye loose him? thus shall ye say unto him, Because the Lord hath need of him.

Jesus sent two of his disciples into a village to fetch a donkey for him. It wasn’t like he couldn’t walk the two or three miles to Jerusalem. He was a professional walker.

It was because this was prophesied, and the Son of God would fulfill every single prophesy about himself while he was on earth to prove he was who he said he was. Long before Jesus was born, Zechariah wrote,

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

So it had to be “the foal of an ass.” A young donkey. A colt.

But Jesus was even more specific in his instructions to his disciples:

ye shall find a colt tied, whereon yet never man sat . . .

A colt meant it was young, but more particularly, one that no one had ever ridden before.

Did he think he was too good to ride on a used animal? Not at all. I believe it was so he could perform another miracle.

One of the years we were out west, we (for reasons long forgotten) wound up at a certain ranch. None of us remember the name of it or where it was or why we were there. But we were just in time to watch a bunch of cowboys trying to break a “foal of an ass”—a young donkey “whereon yet never man sat.”

It was a hot, sunny day and I remember climbing up on the first rung of the corral fence and watching with great interest over the top rail.

The donkey had a rope bridle on with a lead clipped to it, held by one man. Another man approached carefully with a set of saddlebags filled with rocks. They had to get the animal used to having something on its back before a human could climb aboard. As gently as possible so as not to startle the young donkey, the guy slowly laid the bags across its back and in an instant that animal was kicking and bucking, saddlebags flung to the far reaches of the dusty corral, the man holding the lead just hanging on for dear life.

There was a good bit of laughing among the cowboys while they waited for the colt to calm down, then someone had the bright idea to tie its lead to a fence post. Again they laid the saddlebags on and again the donkey-child threw them off.

Finally he was calm enough for the men to try again, and this time the colt did not buck. He just laid himself down in the dirt and wouldn’t budge.

Now what? They tried to get him up by pulling the lead, pushing him with a long stick, even offering a bucket of feed, but that colt wasn’t getting off the ground.

Finally one old-timer said he knew how to get the beast up. They waited while the old cowboy fetched a bucket of water and came back and dumped it right in the donkey’s ear. That colt shot to his feet and started trotting around like he was born for carrying a heavy load, proud of his bags of rocks.

I can picture this scene like it was yesterday even though it happened more than 50 years ago. And every time I read the passage in Luke 19, I think of it.

Jesus specified that the donkey he would ride triumphantly into Jerusalem before his crucifixion was to be young and one on which no man had ever sat. And herein lies the miracle.

The miracle is that the donkey—young, untrained, untried, with no knowledge of what was happening to him—submitted to the Lord. He didn’t buck, he didn’t throw his rider, he didn’t run off half-crazed. He carried Jesus calmly while people lined the streets, throwing palm branches on the road before them. Donkeys just don’t do this. It’s unheard of.

But this one, in the presence of the Son of God, behaved perfectly. Don’t miss the miracle.

Every word that God says is there for a reason. You might have read this passage in Luke before and wondered what was the big deal about how old the donkey was or whether it had been ridden before. Now you know.

Today I am trying to pay more attention to the miracles that happen all around me every day. Did the pea seeds sprout? That’s something I couldn’t make happen on my own. Did a ewe lamb or a cow calve with no human intervention? Did a bluebird lay five eggs in the box out by the pasture, and will she sit on them until they hatch, then feed them regurgitated bugs and eventually teach them how to fly, all without words or instruction of any kind? Did a husband love his wife and a wife honor her husband today?

Miracles, every one. Don’t miss them.

I have a few . . . quirks.

I prefer sitting in a dark room to one with glaring overhead lights, especially first thing in the morning. I like a quiet house, as in, no TV. At all. Piles of clutter make me nervous. I can’t stand shopping at TJ Maxx with all the things in one long rack, all mixed up in no order.

I am a minimalist, especially when it comes to decorating. The only windows in my house with curtains are in the bedrooms. I only hang real, human-made art—no prefab stuff. I keep the lid on the piano propped up so there’s not a horizontal surface for people to pile stuff on.

We once bought a house that had 1970s Waverly wallpaper in one bathroom. It was so bright and busy, when a friend came out he remarked that it almost gave him a seizure. My daughter stripped the whole thing and we painted it a calm shade of something I can’t remember. But at least it was gone.

As a highly sensitive person, I have always known certain things were so because I could feel them in my body. It was not a “head knowing,” as in facts and such, but a “body knowing.” I could feel the existence of non-physical things in my physical self. I often knew a thing was true but could not put words to it, could not name it. Mostly could not even describe it, but I felt it deeply. Does all this sound vague and confusing? Welcome to my world.

I did not know being a highly sensitive person was an actual thing or had a name until I was in therapy for two years and my therapist mentioned it one day. I had spent my whole adulthood in a culture that de-valued and actually taught against women being emotional or “too much,” so I worked to keep myself under wraps, in control, not showing on the outside even a fraction of what was happening on the inside. I lived in a state of self-deprecation for being what I was not “supposed” to be. Why could I not get control of this? Why couldn’t I just be “normal”? What was wrong with me?

I learned after maybe 35 years of marriage that this was not what my husband preferred and that was an eye-opener. When you live immersed in a certain culture, you assume that everyone in that culture agrees with what is taught. When we get to heaven, I wonder how many HSPs from our “brand” we’ll find out there actually are, who, their whole lives, thought it was wrong to be the way God made them. How many people have we hurt? Be careful what you teach.

(The following information comes from hsperson.com.)

According to research done by Dr. Elaine Aron, HSPs make up about 20–30% of the population. The trait is innate, biological, not learned, meaning it is in you at birth. You come from the factory with this wiring. Sensory processing sensitivity, as it is now called, is found in over 100 species—including fruit flies, cats and dogs, horses, and more—and is thought to be a type of survival strategy, making you look before you leap. HSPs tend to be more cautious. This is an understatement for me—caution is my middle name. This part of being an HSP, more than any other, drives people crazy. “Why can’t you be excited about a new idea? Why do you always immediately see why we can’t do whatever?”

Because I am a highly sensitive person who processes every single thing in life far more deeply than the average non-HSP, so I see the difficulties most people would go breezing past in their excitement. Because I see everything that would stop a plan before it has been thought of by anyone else. Because I am wired this way.

Because God made me this way.

HSPs are “more aware than others of subtleties.” A non-HSP might see you as either mad or not mad. An HSP sees a thousand different levels of mad and feels the difference between them in their body. You don’t have to change one thing on the outside, but if something changes in your mind, I sense it. I know it. And that imperceptible (to others) shift is terrifying. I’m like a dog trained to detect blood sugar dropping when the diabetic is unaware—always on high alert.

HSPs “have what is called ‘differential susceptibility.’” This means basically they are more susceptible to influences in their environment. If one parent in the home is aloof or distant, it may affect one child not much but an HSP child intensely. Have you ever heard of a family where one kid is estranged from parents and another is not? This may be the reason. They experienced the same childhood very differently.

HSPs are “more easily overwhelmed.” When I read this, I said AMEN right out loud. I have always wondered why I became overwhelmed in situations that seemed not to affect other people, and now I know. I’m not crazy or wrong or too sensitive. I’m an HSP and this is the way I was created. My processing of life goes much deeper than a non-HSP, and there is So. Much. Input. All. The. Time.

This trait has been mislabeled “shyness,” “inhibitedness,” “introversion” (although 30% of HSPs are extroverts), and “fearfulness.” I’ve heard this last one so much that I internalized the label and always thought I was just full of fears, which I even wrote about here before I knew any better. Turns out I’m not necessarily fearful. I see sides and depths of things that others do not, and again, there is such an overwhelming amount of information coming in all the time. The overwhelm is overwhelming.

And finally, Aron says, “Sensitivity is valued differently in different cultures,” and boy if that isn’t the truth. Go to Japan and HSPs are among the most revered people. Come to America and you’re told not to be so sensitive. Research says that there are as many HSP men as women, yet the trait is seen as more acceptable for females. Men (and particularly boys) are told to toughen up, quit crying, be a man. In other words, hide your emotions because they make the rest of us uncomfortable. You are not okay the way God made you. You must fundamentally change who you are at your core so society feels better in your presence. You manage our emotions because we don’t know how to manage our own.

Maybe this is more offensive to me because I have lived with that kind of teaching, but can you imagine the damage to a little boy’s self-esteem when he believes his very self is flawed? This is the wiring he came from the womb with, not a trait that was formed in him through childhood experiences or by his own choices. This boy will always struggle with self-esteem and will never be all he could be if he were free to be himself. He will spend his life trying to squeeze himself into the mold society says he should fit. That’s tragic.

Does any of this ring true for you? Do you wonder if you could be a highly sensitive person? You can take a free self-test at The Highly Sensitive Person website. You can also read more on her blog or FAQs, and read the research she’s done.

Please let me know if you are an HSP. There is comfort in knowing you’re not weird or too much or wrong. You are not the only one.

Or is it “readers are writers”?

Either way, I remember it.

Since the advent of AI, I’ve been overly conscious of making sure what I write doesn’t sound like anything else that’s out there, lest I be accused of having bots write my material. Honestly, they would make it sound better than I do, but that’s not art. The emdashes are all mine.

I often read something (I could stop at “I often read”) that makes me think of something else and I could write a whole essay about it, but I don’t want anyone to think I’m “lifting” their material. And yet, isn’t that what it means when we say “writers are readers”? We read and we are inspired to write ourselves.

I read this essay by Shannon Guerra last week, and this very thing happened.

First she said, “… my thoughts have been unpunctuated …” and I could not relate more. The daily commentary in my head is one long run-on sentence that never ends. It just morphs from one subject to the next and back and forth and round and round. I feel this sentiment deeply.

Then she said, “We’re dealing with paradox and irony, things that do go together even though they seem incongruent on the surface” and I stopped. I feel like this has been my whole life, that I’ve been living in a world where things don’t go together but they do, and the difficulty of holding two—or more—clashing thoughts at one time is too much.

Then she mentioned a loved one with dementia and I was done. Flooded with memories of the last year and two months of my parents’ lives and all they—and we—went through, doing our best but stumbling, learning a little more each day until it was too late to put all we’d learned to use.

I thought about Daddy’s forgetfulness, repeating stories that we still loved to hear, then the day I asked him a scientific question and he struggled to come up with a coherent answer. That was the day I knew I was beginning to lose him, this man who, in my mind, knew everything.

In rehab after his stroke, his bed was right next to a window that looked out on a little courtyard. There was a metal sculpture of an old-fashioned bicycle and Daddy made up a story about the man riding it, except he was serious. Then there was another story about a goose he told one of my brothers. And then, out of the blue one day when he was in the hospital for pneumonia, he told a nurse that she should pay attention to this new drug coming out of Israel and all the amazing things it did. She looked at me and asked quietly, “Is he always like this?” and I answered, “He reads a lot.”

It was true. Even in his last days he continued to read and learn new things, and while he may not have remembered all of it, some things still stuck, like the new drug.

I remembered the day (still in rehab) he insisted he wanted to shave his beard and we were all puzzled. I had not seen my daddy clean-shaven since I was a very little girl and couldn’t understand why he was so insistent, but he kept saying it to the aide who came to help him shower. He wanted to shave his beard. The aide asked for our permission and not knowing what else to say, we agreed to it.

When they came back from the shower, Daddy was clean shaven and furious. Turns out he didn’t want to shave it off, he just wanted it trimmed. He always was particular about his grooming. I felt like a failure, not understanding what he really wanted. I should have known.

After Daddy was gone two days before the new year, Mommy did well for a while. One day she was reaching down to empty a trash can and fell, injuring her right arm. That set off a series of consequences that included severe swelling in her hand and inability—or maybe there was some unwillingness—to feed herself, which led to significant weight loss and more weakness.

She had an episode that April that no one really knew what to make of, and she went from using a walker but still mostly taking care of herself to being unable to get out of a chair without the help of two people. She was mostly in a wheelchair after that except for the days she had PT, when the physical therapist was able to get her to walk down the hall and back with her walker. She said she wanted to get better, but her actions spoke a different story.

She said every day how much she missed Daddy. His ashes and picture were on her dresser and she would sit and talk to him (she told us) every day. When you’ve lived with someone for 67 years, I imagine it’s hard to feel like doing much without them.

During that time I would come to visit almost weekly from my home 3 1/2 hours away. I would walk into her little apartment at assisted living and she would always smile and say the same thing: “What are you doing here?” Sometimes we would talk for a bit and she would say it again.

Then one evening at dinner she wasn’t eating and began crying. The aides couldn’t console her and then all that came out of her were garbled sounds. People kept asking her questions and she would answer with speech that wasn’t really speech. I wondered if she could hear herself. If she knew her words weren’t actually words except for the emphatic NO when we said we wanted to take her to the hospital.

She let my sister-in-law take her jewelry off—earrings, pearls, onyx ring—right up until Phuong tried to remove Mommy’s wedding rings, and she exploded with a loud, “No, no, no, no!” and jerked her hand away.

We went to the hospital where she was given the infamous clot-busting drug. Days in ICU with other useless tests because “they” weren’t convinced it was a stroke and that made me mad. Why couldn’t it be a stroke? Because their precious drug didn’t work? Because they just can’t help themselves when someone comes in that they could do more tests on? Because they couldn’t admit that maybe sometimes God has more control than they do?

I drove up to stay with her so my brothers could go to their jobs the next day.

One night we were alone in ICU and I saw she was awake. I leaned over so she could see me and said, “Hi, Mommy” and she said ever so clearly, “I can’t talk.” I tried not to look surprised that she was speaking words and answered that I knew and that we thought she’d had a little stroke and we’d given her some medicine to help and we were just waiting for it to work. I assured her I would stay with her round the clock until it was time for us to go home. She closed her eyes and slept.

The following morning early, before light and before the busyness of the nurses’ first shift, she was awake again, so I went and did my usual. I leaned over her and said, “Hi, Mommy.” She studied me for a moment and finally said, “It’s too late.”

I smiled and said I was still going to stay with her and we would be transferred to a regular room sometime that day, and then we’d go home.

We got to the regular room and the sweetest nurse came in to bathe her, now almost completely unconscious. She was so kind and gentle and caring as she dabbed a little lotion on the dry skin on Mommy’s face, saying, “I always feel better when my skin is moisturized.”

Sometimes it’s hard to realize that Mommy’s last words to me were “I can’t talk” and “It’s too late.” Did she know? Maybe she knew. I didn’t want to know.

I try not to dwell on the difficulties of the last year or so of my parents’ lives, but those are the things that are so clear in my memory. Of course I remember a lifetime of happy things, but the end is right here, always in the forefront.

We go through life thinking everything is fine, and then suddenly and with finality, it is not. The end happens so quickly, even when it’s a year and two months. You live the whirlwind of every day being a new issue to address and making the best decisions you know how and the phone always dinging with a new message in the family text thread.

Watching my brothers and me go through this was enough to convince one of my nieces to have at least two children so they would have someone to help them through this same experience when their own parents were failing.

And maybe that’s the hardest part—to admit that your parents are failing, these people who have always been a constant in your life, a given. Until they’re not.

There is no point to this essay, article, post—whatever we’re calling them now. It just surprised me how reading someone else’s word—dementia—brought this all up yet again, perfectly clear memories like they happened yesterday, and I thought it would be a good time to give my own words somewhere to live outside of me.

I love you, Mommy and Daddy. Miss you every day.

My husband is a dreamer, a visionary. I wrote about it here in case you are wondering what that means in practical, everyday terms. You would think after 42 years I would stop being surprised, but instead, when he says, “I was thinking . . .” I find myself bracing for impact. It is traumatic in its own way.

Last year at the end of February, Ben left his career and began working in earnest to build a company he started with a friend and coworker a year before that. We agreed to give it six months to win a government contract. Six months came and went rather quickly with nary a contract win in sight (the government still works at the speed of cold molasses), and then the government actually shut down. What fun. Then even after it opened for business again, nothing much was happening.

During all this waiting, Ben and his partner spent time researching other opportunities, trying in earnest to buy a company that apparently didn’t want to be bought, and generally working toward something that would produce income.

But there was downtime and more of it than is normal around here, which spells danger for the family of a visionary. Never let a dreamer be bored.

Ben came home one day last fall and announced he had bought three sheep from Simeon, our Amish neighbor, and would I please write a check.

Sheep.

I didn’t ask why or what he was thinking. I didn’t remind him we don’t know anything about sheep because last time I noted that (regarding cows), he replied, “What’s to know? You put them in the field and they eat grass. How hard can it be?” and it became a family joke that he now gets credit for.

Then we spent a month preparing for the hay barn build and watching it go up. Ben was sick most of December. January came with all of its ice and snow and ended with Ben’s shoulder surgery.

By this time Simeon was wondering aloud when we were going to get our sheep, which were still grazing with his flock a mile up the road.

Finally one lovely Saturday in February, our very kind son Elijah came over with his family and spent half the day helping Ben add a fourth strand of high-tensile wire to the fence around the pasture where Ben decided he would put the sheep. Surely four strands of 6,000 volts would keep our woolies in.

Their new home was to be right next to where the cows are being wintered, pretty close to the house. It would be lovely to look out and see all the animals happily grazing together.

But this is not the prophecies of Isaiah (11:6), and sheep don’t lie down with cows, at least not these sheep and these cows.

As Elijah and Amy were leaving that day, Elijah said quietly to me, “I give those sheep 30 minutes before they get out.” I did not relay these odds to Ben.

Monday morning Ben put a fresh roll of hay in the sheep pasture and had a plan for water in place. That evening he took the stock trailer and went to claim his new ewes. Apparently there is no shoo-ing them into the trailer. Simeon (whom they know and trust) had them in a pen in the barn, and he just picked them up and carried them into the trailer. Then the men came back here and decided it would be a good idea to leave them in the trailer with feed and water overnight to let them calm down a bit before putting them out to pasture.

The next morning in the rain, Ben and I went out to emancipate the sheep. We had the trailer gate and the pasture gate set up so the girls could just walk into their new home and be impressed by all the fruits of our labors.

Ben opened the trailer door and we waited. The sheep huddled together in the far end of the trailer, terrified. This was not Simeon’s farm and they knew it.

Then Ben said, “I think I’m going to have to go in there and push them out.”

He stepped up into the trailer and walked toward them in the back. Then suddenly one flew out like she was shot out of a cannon. I had no idea sheep could jump so high or so far, and they actually twist their bodies as they do it. The other two followed likewise and all three of them made the turn for the front fence of their pasture. The first one started to stick her head through the strands of wire and got zapped. She jumped back, spun 360°, and charged the fence, blasting through with the other two following.

Elijah, it was not 30 minutes. It was less than 30 seconds.

Fantastic. Now we have three crazed sheep loose in the big pasture and the only hot wires are on the perimeter fence around the 32 acres. The farm is divided into paddock rows, but the interior wires are only hot when they’re connected to the perimeter fence, which they are not at this time of year because the cows are all in the winter pasture.

Ben said he was going to get a bucket of grain to lure them with, and I should stand there and watch where they went.

They ran all the way to the back perimeter before Ben could get down there to push them back toward me and the gate we wanted them to go in. Where’s a trained sheepdog when you need one?

The Three Stooges began running toward me, then stopped dead when they saw me in the middle of their row. They looked back at Ben, then at me, back at Ben, then began jumping through the paddock row wires in quick succession.

I ran to the top of the pastures in an attempt to hook up wires to the perimeter, but every time I tried, they got through the next row before I could get anything attached. When they were approaching the end of our land, I realized the big gate was open by the old barn. I took off running (in my clunky chore boots) to reach the gate before they did.

Praise the Lord, I made it. I’m not sure why I thought this was a victory since they’d already proven their willingness to be electrocuted in order to escape. Ben caught up to me with the bucket of grain, and we decided to walk away from them, hoping they would at least stay inside the perimeter.

This was not to be. They shot through the last 6,000-volt deterrent and took off for home, a mile up the road.

No worries, we thought. We know where they’re going and they’ll be easy to find.

Ben spent hours that afternoon and evening walking the neighboring farms and forests looking for them. I wanted so badly to call him Bo Peep when he came in, but I didn’t have the heart.

Two days went by and we saw not one fuzzy hair of these sheep, two white, one brown. They did not show up at Simeon’s as we’d hoped.

Finally word got around the community that our ewes were missing, and both Simeon and our neighbor Mike turned out to help. They found the sheep close to Simeon’s farm and, with the help of Simeon’s flock and the sheep’s instinct to follow, they were able to get our three back to his barn.

During all the drama I suggested that, if we ever found them, we should put them in the field across the road where we usually grow out young steers. That one has true field fencing and isn’t near the cows, who the sheep might have been afraid of. So Ben and I spent Sunday afternoon fixing a few compromised spots and adding fencing to the two gates so they couldn’t get through them.

Monday, Ben went back to Simeon’s, who once again loaded three sheep into the trailer. Simeon said he noticed that one of them was “a little skittish,” so he swapped her with a calmer one. I imagine he was feeling sorry for the dumb Englishers who don’t know how to keep sheep in the fence.

This time, Ben drove the whole rig into the five acres, opened the trailer door, and walked away. Eventually they came out for the grain he’d thrown in a feed bunk not far away.

So far, so good. Laurie, Moe, and Curly are happily eating clover, ignoring the giant hay bale, and have not attempted another escape.

Please pray for Ben to find work soon.

Remember when I talked about CFT? That’s craniosacral fascial therapy. It’s the therapy that alleviated my neck pain when literally nothing else on earth could. It was the most woo-woo thing I’d ever done until I took the training to become a craniosacral fascial therapist and began to understand how it works. It’s my own, personal miracle cure.

I wrote a whole explanation of it here, and if you read today’s essay and think I’m crazy, go back and read that one to learn how and why it works. You can also find good information on the CFT website.

The TL;DR version of how I wound up in CFT is that I have had neck pain for many years, predominantly on the right side, as a result of many traumas over my lifetime. I tried all the things to get relief—chiropractic adjustments, massage, cupping, dry needling, accupuncture, physical therapy, even a steroid injection in my spine—and got none until I had CFT twice a month for a year. Now I have no neck pain and I am a firm believer in the woo.

What we know about fascia is that it is a tough web that runs throughout the body: in and around every muscle, every organ, every cell. There is nothing in the body that is not connected by fascia, and fascia is lubricated by the flow of cerebrospinal fluid. When there is any kind of trauma—physical, emotional, psychological—the body reacts by clenching—tightening up—and that includes the fascia. Where fascia is tight, cerebrospinal fluid flow is restricted, making the fascia dry and less moveable, like the rusty, creaking joints in the Tin Man. Muscles can be relaxed, at least temporarily, with massage, but fascia? It requires a different modality to release its hold and get the fluid flowing again.

CFT is a hands-on therapy, but not in the way massage is. You don’t manipulate fascia into relaxing. You give it a signal of safety and allow it to release. You don’t make it loosen up; you let it.

I see you rolling your eyes and hear you heavy sighing, but in case you don’t understand how healing from trauma (any kind) works, the first ingredient must be a felt sense of safety. If your body doesn’t feel safe, it will remain in a clenched physiology. There will be no releasing of anything. You can’t talk or fool your body into feeling safe. It knows when it’s safe and that’s all there is to it.

If you go to psychotherapy, you must feel safe with your counselor. If you go to massage therapy, you must feel safe with your masseuse or masseur. Same with CFT. I am so comfortable with my CFT therapist that sometimes I fall asleep on the table.

In CFT, the therapist begins by putting her hands behind your head, fingers at the edge of your occiput (the base of your skull just above your neck), and just sits there. She may move one hand (or both) to different places to see if she feels tension that needs to be released, and her hands’ presence in those places signal to the body that it’s okay to relax, to let go. Very often when I am being worked on, my stomach gurgles. That’s a sign that fascia in my abdomen is relaxing and stuff is now freely moving around. It truly is all connected.

Anyway, here’s what I learned this week that blew my mind.

I began having CFT twice a month for a year, starting in August 2024. My neck pain was gone after maybe 7 or 8 months, but I kept going because my body was responding well to it and I wanted that to continue. Then last August (2025, a year after starting CFT), I noticed that I was squinting. It wasn’t like I was squinting because I couldn’t see; it was more of an involuntary thing. My face muscles were just doing it on their own. Over the next few months it got worse and worse and by December it was driving me crazy. Many times during the day I would take my glasses off and put my hands on my eyes and cheekbones to make them stop squinching (a technical term). Since I have a family history of glaucoma and cataracts, I decided it was time for a visit to the eye doctor. My insurance only pays for an eye exam every two years and at this point it had only been one year, but I thought it was worth paying for out of pocket to make sure nothing was wrong with my eyes.

At my appointment, he did a full eye exam complete with dilation and all the stuff they look for. He pronounced my eyes perfectly healthy and said the squinting was probably blepharospasm, aka eyelid twitching, possibly caused by stress.

That didn’t sit right with me and the squinting did not get any better despite all of my efforts to regulate my nervous system and deal with stress in healthy ways. So yesterday I went back and said I just wanted a refraction (where they put the goggle thing in front of your face and change lenses, asking you which is better, one or two, three or four), which he did not do at the previous appointment because the problem appeared (to him) to be medical rather than vision-related.

So I had a refraction. Here’s my old prescription (from December 2024):

Yes, the astigmatism in my right eye is pretty severe. It has been my entire life.

And here’s my new prescription (February 2026, 14 months, one year of CFT, later):

Do you see the change in sphere and cylinder in my right eye? The sphere changed from .75 to .25, and cylinder changed from -6.75 to -6.00. In case you’re not good at math, that’s an 11% improvement in my vision in just over a year, unheard of in a 64-year-old with severe astigmatism. AI tells me that the top limit for correction in nearsighted individuals is -6.00, and I was beyond that. No wonder my optician had so much trouble making glasses that worked for me.

I was squinting because my eyes were over-corrected.

The only thing I did consistently during that time was CFT.

Notice my left eye did not change at all. Do you wonder why?

It’s because the tension in my neck muscles and fascia has always been on the right side, and the tension extended up into the right side of my head and face, which includes the eyes and all the soft tissues that controlled them. When the fascia in my neck was finally released, the fascia in my eyes followed and my vision improved.

Of course I had to go looking for information on this and was unable to find much other than a few anecdotal instances. Here is the best explanation I found. Granted, this info was written by the person who developed CFT, Dr. Barry Gillespie. But it makes perfect sense to me, and now I have seen the results with my own eyes (ha) and neck. Maybe we will hear more stories like this as CFT becomes more mainstream and we all start paying attention to what our bodies need.

CFT is not a quick fix. I was committed to have the therapy twice a month for more than a year, but in one year’s time, my vision improved enough that I needed a lower prescription. If you try this, please let know (a year from now) if you get the same results!

In the meantime, I will enjoy getting new glasses.

Years ago when Jill Winger wasn’t a name but just some random woman with a young family who bought a homestead on the bare, windswept prairie in Wyoming, she started a blog called The Prairie Homestead to share what she was learning about self-sufficiency in all its forms: cooking from scratch, animal husbandry, growing a garden when you regularly get hail the size of tennis balls, and other handy-to-know stuff. Not long after its inception, I became a follower.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, Jill also has a successful essential oils business with a popular MLM-structured company, which is how she—at least in the beginning—could afford a lot of their larger projects. So don’t feel bad if you can’t do everything she’s done on her homestead.)

I began learning about the difference between heirloom seeds and hybrids and why, if you want to grow the same vegetables next year, you should find heirloom seeds. I followed along when her family began raising beef cattle, and then when they added a few dairy cows. I learned a little about keeping chickens and cooking basic, homemade food. I bought her cookbook as soon as it was released and learned how to make homemade yogurt without the help of a fancy machine. I learned the pros and cons of raised beds.

When Cov*d hit and sourdough bread became a thing, I dutifully bought a kitchen scale because, according to the experts, you must weigh your ingredients rather than measure them like a barbarian. And if you weigh them in grams instead of lowly American ounces, your bread will rival that of the most accomplished European bakers. I followed all this advice and produced failure after failure (and stressed myself out) until Jill said I could throw the scale out and keep my starter perfectly happy with a measuring cup and a wooden spoon. I’ve been keeping us in homemade bread ever since.

And her salted caramel coffee creamer is to die for. Thanks, Jill.

I’ve learned a ton from her, and I’ve enjoyed her ramblings and nodded along with her lack of interest in the Grammys, the latest political scandal, or her AI-generated caricature.

This essay is in no way intended to diss Jill or all of her accomplishments, which are many. It’s just to share my observations and maybe explain the trend of statements I’ve been listening to her make for the last few months.

Because I am a subscriber, I receive Jill’s essays (aka blogs) in my email inbox. A few weeks ago I read her article called “Unfiltered Confessions of a Small-Town Restaurant Owner.” A few years ago she and her husband purchased the old Chugwater Soda Fountain (I actually have a photo of my parents standing in front of it years before Jill bought it.) and refurbished and added to it. What a fun project for her. But because her area of Wyoming is so sparsely populated, she depends on the locals to keep her business running.

In this article, she begins by talking about how she’s proud of what they’ve brought to life there in their little corner of Wyoming (as she should be), and how the locals keep them going, even though there are only 200 of them (locals, that is). Then she says, “But today I’m going to say the parts I usually don’t say out loud because, well… I feel like it. And some of it just needs to be said.”

Uh-oh.

When you say the parts you don’t usually say out loud because you feel like it and some of it just needs to be said, you might be approaching a slippery slope. Not that you can’t say whatever you want—you certainly can. But there will be repercussions. People will have opinions.

Then in other articles she talked about how not belonging is a gift (I agree) and how she is no longer allowing social media and the internet as a whole to hijack her nervous system with the pressure to be and do and create (also agree and support her in this 100%).

But then a new article showed up in my inbox and my eyes got big and I said right out loud, “What the world?”

The title said (I’ll clean up the language for you), “What the H*** Happened to Homesteading?”

Excuse me?

Then the most recent one came today: The Cage Was Never Locked. In it, she shared this quote: “Mid-life is when you finally do the things your sixteen-year-old self wanted—but stop apologizing for it.”

And I knew.

I’ve seen this before. I’ve lived this before. Been there, done that.

Jill is 40. All the frustrations she has been voicing in the last few months are really just on the surface. The bigger issue is way down deep and it’s as old as humanity—at least, female humanity.

It’s not her personality and it’s not that she’s getting hateful or bratty. It’s that she’s losing estrogen.

The great female filter

Obviously I don’t know Jill personally, and I don’t know what’s going on in her body. But here’s what do I know: when a woman is a few—or ten or fifteen—years away from menopause, she enters a phase of life called perimenopause—literally “around menopause,” when hormones begin to fluctuate and wreak havoc. Estrogen begins to diminish and with it goes the great female filter.

It’s not character, it’s hormones. Let’s talk about the biology.

When women are younger (think teens and 20s and 30s) and specifically of child-bearing age, they need to be able to find and keep a mate in order to reproduce, which is what the female body wants. There is an innate drive in women to have babies, and in order to do that, a female must attract and keep a mate. In our day, in our culture, the best way to do that is to “be sweet.”

During this time, her prefrontal cortex is in control, monitoring her social behavior and decision making and making sure she is “sweet” (read compliant) enough to snag a man.

Does he leave his dirty clothes all over the floor for you to pick up? Be sweet. Does he expect you to read his mind? Be sweet. Put up with whatever he dishes so that you have someone to help you make babies. (We’re only talking about the biology here.)

Somehow this works when you’re young and your primary drive is to procreate, but only because you are loaded with estrogen. This magical hormone enables you to put up with things that bother you and helps you keep your mouth shut about them so you can “be sweet.” Remember, it’s all about finding and keeping a mate.

But when you hit your 40s, you’re usually at the end of—if not finished with—child bearing and you don’t need a mate for that anymore. Estrogen begins to fluctuate wildly. One day you’re “sweet” and the next you want to throttle the man who helped you make babies. By this time, your relationship should be about a lot more than having children, but what if it’s not? What if he still leaves his laundry everywhere and expects the impossible from you? What then?

This is where it gets complicated. Your estrogen is dropping, and with it your willingness to tolerate the things you used to tolerate. No longer do you have patience for his self-centeredness. The dirty clothes lying around infuriate you. You stop caring whether he wants you to read his mind or not. It’s the age of the big Whatever.

Your give-a-flip meter has pegged and your filter has broken because lack of estrogen has hijacked your whole body.

Have you ever wondered why women “lose their minds” in their 40s and 50s? It’s not that they’ve lost them; it’s that they are just now honestly seeing what’s in them, what estrogen has filtered all these years.

Why do people get divorced in middle age after 30 or 40 years of marriage? Because wives suddenly feel like they don’t have to put up with their man anymore. They are sick of his nonsense and they don’t need him to make babies, so why stay? It’s hormonal.

Except that’s not the whole picture.

We are more than just biology and praise the Lord for that. While we are definitely physical, we are also emotional and spiritual. And when we go through life only paying attention to the physical and ignoring the emotional and spiritual, we are trying to sit on a one-legged stool and we will eventually fall.

So what do we do? How do we get through this eye-rolling, I’m-sick-of-your-garbage phase of life?

How to prepare for the loss of the filter

1. Don’t outsource your biology. You are responsible for what you know about your body. Don’t wait for a doctor to tell you what your hormones are doing. Learn about them for yourself and that knowledge will help you conduct yourself with understanding.

2. Explain the biology to your husband. Chances are about 99% that he does not have a clue what is happening in your body. If you want him to dwell with you according to knowledge (1 Peter 3:7), you have to give him the knowledge.

3. Start preparing while you’re young. If you wait until you and your husband are in your 40s or 50s, it’s too late. When you’ve only been married a few weeks and there’s tension in your relationship—even if it’s over something as silly as dirty laundry—don’t ignore it. Speak the truth in love and with honor, but speak it. If something irritates you now, when the filter is gone it will infuriate you and you’ll think it’s grounds for divorce. Again, if he is to dwell with you according to knowledge, he needs to know you and what you need/want and how you want to be treated. Don’t be a mystery.

4. Don’t suppress your emotions. As a young married woman, I was taught that no man wants an emotional wife, and if that’s the case, then no man should ever get married. God himself has emotions and we are created in his image, so obviously we are going to have them as well. Stuffing emotions down inside is unhealthy for both parties. Learn how to handle your emotions in a healthy way, seeing them as indicators without letting them rule your life, but do not suppress them. That’s akin to dropping Mentos in Diet Pepsi—there will eventually be an explosion.

5. Don’t be a victim of your physiology. Understand what is happening in your body and practice acting in a godly way. You won’t always get it right, but you can always get back up and keep trying. That’s character.

6. Invite God into the process. It’s not like he doesn’t know what’s going on—he created you. “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men [and women] liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (James 1:5).

After last week’s shallow dive into what God says about quiet, my brain picked up the scent of a mini rabbit trail. (Does this happen to you too? It’s why I can’t ever get through a scripted Bible study in the appointed time.) It all started with Jeremiah 47:6, which says,

O thou sword of the LORD, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? put up thyself into thy scabbard, rest, and be still.

This was one of the verses that came up in my search for the word quiet. You can see that in the prophet’s urging to be quiet, he equated it to “putting up oneself into his scabbard,” in other words, put your weapons away, stop fighting, stop striving. And rest and be still.

God infers a relationship between quiet and rest in several other verses:

So the realm of Jehoshaphat was quiet: for his God gave him rest round about. (2 Chronicles 20:30)

For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest. (Job 3:13)

I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. (Job 3:26)

The whole earth is at rest, and is quiet: they break forth into singing. (Isaiah 14:7)

And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places; (Isaiah 32:18)

So will I make my fury toward thee to rest, and my jealousy shall depart from thee, and I will be quiet, and will be no more angry. (Ezekiel 16:42)

This doesn’t really prove anything, except that there is some kind of relationship between quiet and rest. If we take seriously God’s command to “study to be quiet,” it seems like it should bring rest to our lives, our bodies, our souls.

Then I thought about that passage in Hebrews 4 where God is talking about entering into his rest and how unbelief is the thing that keeps you from entering it. Then he says in verse 10:

For he that is entered into his [God’s] rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.

So when we enter into God’s rest, we cease from our own works. We stop trying to control our circumstances, stop striving to make things happen, stop working to be accepted or good enough. We just rest in everything that God already is.

But then if we go back to Jeremiah 47:6, in the same breath God is telling them to be quiet and rest, he is also telling them to “be still.”

O thou sword of the LORD, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? put up thyself into thy scabbard, rest, and be still.

And here’s where the rabbit took off.

If I asked you to quote a verse that uses the phrase “be still,” 98% of you would say, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). In this passage, God is reminding us that enemies will come against us and storms will rage in life, but the battle is not ours. It is his, and if we will “be still,” we can watch him handle it all far better than we could ourselves.

Remember when Moses was leading the million or so children of Israel out of Egypt, out of bondage, and they came to the Red Sea? Pharaoh and his armies were coming up behind them, and the people looked at them, then at the expanse of sea, then back at the Egyptians closing in on them. Panic began to take hold and they demanded of Moses why he didn’t just leave them in Egypt to be slaves. At least they didn’t die there, and Moe, this is all your fault!

And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will shew to you to day: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen to day, ye shall see them again no more for ever.

There’s nothing you can do to save yourselves right now, but watch what God does to save you. When he made this statement, Moses did not know what God was going to do. He hadn’t been given the plan ahead of time and dry ground was only a pipe dream. But he trusted God enough to KNOW that he (God) would complete the plan he’d put into action.

God said to Moses (v16),

But lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea.

Get this (This is not actually part of this study, but it jumped out at me. Preachers call this a freebie.): God gave Moses three commands here: YOU, Moses, lift up your rod, YOU stretch out your hand over the sea, and YOU divide the sea. YOU do it. YOU part the Red Sea. Can you imagine? I can see Moses looking around and asking (in Robert De Niro’s voice), “You talkin to me?”

Surely Moses didn’t part the sea in his own power, but God allowed Moses to experience God’s immense power through his own hands. What a gift. (That was a sub-trail.)

But I wondered where else in the Bible God told his people to be still. There are only a few times God says this exact phrase as a command. (It is used a few times in other contexts.)

Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah. (Psalm 4:4)

You can’t commune with your own heart until you learn to be still. Anxious worry is not being still. Catastrophizing (my specialty) is not being still. Ruminating about how you’re going to exact vengeance on your enemies is not being still. Standing in awe, as the first part of the verse says, sweeps all those other things away and forces you to focus on the One who can actually do something about your problems. Stand in awe . . . and be still.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10)

When you learn to be still and acknowledge his God-ness, he is exalted even among the heathen. I have seen this happen so many times. Again, the focus is on the Lord and all that he is.

Be still, ye inhabitants of the isle; thou whom the merchants of Zidon, that pass over the sea, have replenished. (Isaiah 23:2)

God is telling the people of this once-prosperous area to hold on a sec, don’t get so excited because judgment is coming. Just be still and wait for it. Stop all your self-righteous activity and watch the righteous judgment of God.

O thou sword of the LORD, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? put up thyself into thy scabbard, rest, and be still. (Jeremiah 47:6)

God has been using other nations in judgment against Israel, and now he wants them to stop. Put your sword in the scabbard, rest, and be still. God controls it all.

And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. (Mark 4:39)

We’ve all heard the story of Jesus and the disciples out on the sea after a long day of teaching and preaching. They launched the ship and Jesus went below to get some sleep. When a “great storm of wind” arose and the waves “beat into the ship so that it was now full,” they woke Jesus up and demanded, “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” The ship is full of water and the wind is crazy and we’re going to die! Have you ever felt like that in life? I have.

Jesus’ response is a whole life lesson. Without hesitation “he arose, and rebuked the wind” and told the sea to “be still.” And look at the result: “there was a great calm.”

Being still (whether it’s you being still or the storms of life) produces calm. It gives us a chance to take a deep breath, slow down our racing heart, and remember that he is here. He sees us and our situation. He knows we can’t create our own calm so he makes it for us.

If I have learned one thing in this life, it’s that God is infinitely more able to do whatever needs to be done than I am. I have all these great ideas of how he could handle stuff. I think I know what a certain person needs or how a situation should be dealt with. And I usually try to sway the Lord to my way of thinking, as if maybe my idea hasn’t occurred to him. He probably sits up there on his throne chuckling at my silliness.

But when I finally remember to be still (stop striving and working, focus on him), rest in him and his perfect understanding and power, and just let him be God, everything goes better.

I loved the book and had to share my thoughts on it, which I did in “Quiet, part 1.” If you missed it, you can read it here.

While I was reading Quiet, the Bible verse that kept coming to mind was 1 Thessalonians 4:11, which says,

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you;

At this point in his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul was giving instruction regarding how Christians should live, what they should and shouldn’t be doing.

It is very likely that I am drawn to this verse because my particular brand of Christianity has always hyper-focused on the third part of the verse where it says, “… and to work with your own hands …” as if there is no greater thing you can do than physical labor and no worse sin than not doing it (and doing it a lot). I went years without even knowing there were other commands in that verse. I have literally never heard anyone preach on the “study to be quiet” part. It’s as if it doesn’t exist.

But a few years ago, even though I’d read over that verse many times in my annual pass through the scriptures, I actually saw the quiet part and it made me stop and consider.

Study to be quiet? It didn’t make sense to me at first because who has to study to be quiet? That’s how I naturally am as an introvert. But since I am a (very) amateur student of the Word, albeit no Bible scholar, I wanted to find out what God had to say about this concept so I started digging.

The word quiet appears 31 times in the Bible (in the version I read, the KJV). I made a list of all the verses and printed it with space between them for writing my own notes.

Here’s what I found.

In a lot of the cases, quiet refers to a land or kingdom or nation, and it speaks of the land (or kingdom) being quiet. In other words, at rest from war, peaceful, enemies defeated, no worries. Everyone can take a deep breath and stop being hypervigilant for a minute or a few years.

In 2 Kings 11, verse 20 tells us of Israel doing away with a bad ruler:

And all the people of the land rejoiced, and the city was in quiet: and they slew Athaliah with the sword beside the king’s house.

“The city was in quiet.” Turmoil and strife and worry were gone along with Athalia, who, when her son the king died, killed all his offspring so she could rule. Killed her grandchildren (all except the one the king’s sister hid from her). It didn’t take long for the captains and guards and whatnot to crown the king’s son and execute Athalia. Can you feel all the people relax?

In 2 Chronicles 20, we read about Jehoshaphat and how God helped Israel defeat their enemies. Then,

So the realm of Jehoshaphat was quiet: for his God gave him rest round about.

Same thing. The enemies were squashed and they could relax.

When I copied all these verses and saw them together, I saw a pattern. Quiet was almost always associated with rest, peace, security, lack of active enemies. When quiet reigns, people can relax. Quiet is more than just silence; it is a nervous system that is calm.

Let’s keep going.

Job uses the word quiet in his chapter-3 wish that he’d never been born. After wondering why his mother even gave birth to him, he says in verse 13,

For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest.

In this case, quiet refers to a state of peace in death: no problems, no stresses, no loss of your family and everything you own, and no body covered with sores and your wife telling you to curse God and die. His nervous system was wrecked by loss and grief and hurt. No wonder he wished for quiet.

Psalm 107:30,

Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.

In this verse, “they” refers to waves, also known as outside circumstances or storms. People are glad when the waves of life are quiet and they can get their feet back under them.

And Proverbs 1:33,

But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.

Here, quiet is associated with safety and no fear of evil. Again, rest and peace.

Isaiah 14:7 tells us

The whole earth is at rest, and is quiet: they break forth into singing.

At this point, Israel had rest from Babylon. They were quiet: no enemy coming for them, no war. They could get a breath.

Isaiah 32:18 promises that when God’s Spirit is poured out,

… my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.

his people will dwell in a peaceful place, safe, secure.

Conversely, there is Jeremiah 49:23, which says,

Concerning Damascus. Hamath is confounded, and Arpad: for they have heard evil tidings: they are fainthearted; there is sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet.

The enemy is about, they’ve heard scary things, they’re afraid. “It cannot be quiet.” Not possible.

Sometimes quiet is used to describe a person. “And this Seraiah was a quiet prince” (Jeremiah 51:59), or even God himself:

So will I make my fury toward thee to rest, and my jealousy shall depart from thee, and I will be quiet, and will be no more angry. (Ezekiel 16:42)

God can choose to be quiet: not angry or jealous or furious. This one was interesting to me because we typically think the emotion of anger is not something we can help. It just springs up in us. Yet God has told us to “study to be quiet,” the opposite of anger. Obviously he wants us to work at being quiet: not angry.

Then we come to the New Testament, where quiet is used only four times.

In Acts 19, Paul was in Ephesus teaching and preaching with a few disciples, and verse 29 says “the whole city was filled with confusion.” People were angry about what he was teaching and they were all het up, as my grandmother used to say. Finally, the townclerk got everyone’s attention and said in so many words, “Look, we all know Ephesus worships the goddess Diana, and who cares if he speaks against that?”

Then he said in verse 36,

Seeing then that these things cannot be spoken against, ye ought to be quiet, and to do nothing rashly.

Quiet: calm down and think before you act. As my daughter the middle school teacher used to tell her students, “Don’t do stupid stuff.”

In 1 Timothy 2, Christians are exhorted to give thanks for and pray for those appointed over us,

For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.

Quiet: a life without strife, without fear of evildoers, safe and secure. The reason we pray for authorities is because it leads to a quiet and peaceable life.

And finally, we come to 1 Peter 3, where God is addressing wives.

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives;

While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.

Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel;

But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

In verse 1, the reason for “subjection to your own husbands” is clearly stated. It’s not because you are a second-rate citizen or you are somehow less-than. It’s so that if your husband is not a Christian, he may be won to Christ without you having to preach at him (which never endeared you to anyone). Instead, he will see your godly actions and be drawn to God because of them.

And while we’re here, let’s understand that in verse 3, God is not telling you not to braid your hair or wear jewelry or nice clothing. He is telling you that what’s in your heart—a “meek and quiet spirit”—is of much greater value than what you do to the outside of yourself. The nastiest woman can dress up and look good, but remember, God looks at the heart.

So what is a “meek and quiet spirit”?

Meek is not mousy. It does not mean being a push-over or a doormat. Moses is described as being “very meek, above all the men that were upon the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3), and look at all he accomplished.

Meek involves having humility (not thinking of yourself more highly than you ought to think) and self-restraint (not blurting out everything you think; knowing when to keep your mouth shut). It is having patient endurance and gentleness. I’ve heard many preachers call it “power under control.”

Moses’ meekness did not prevent him from doing a lot for the Lord. Instead, he knew his own limitations and depended on God to work through him. You, wife, should do the same.

What about a “quiet spirit”?

If we look at how God uses quiet through the whole Bible, it’s easy to see God does not expect women to be silent (except for that one pesky verse in 1 Corinthians 14 we don’t like to talk about). He never says we can’t share our thoughts and opinions. He never tells us not to be leaders.

If, as we’ve seen, quiet has the idea of rest, peace, safety, security, no enemies, not angry or jealous, then we can understand the concept of a quiet spirit. In your home, does your presence induce an atmosphere of peace and rest or does it incite anger and strife? A quiet spirit should allow your family to relax, to dwell securely, to take a breath and rest.

So back to our main verse, 1 Thessalonians 4:11.

And that ye study to be quiet …

While I would love to take credit for already being good at being quiet as a natural introvert, obviously there is a lot more to it than that, and the command is not just to women. It includes men. “Ye” means all of you. All y’all.

Are people at peace in your presence? Can they rest? Do they feel safe? Can they take a breath and relax? Are their nervous systems able to be calm?

That’s quiet.

When I was a child, I could easily play by myself without feeling lonely, though I didn’t do it much. My BFF lived two blocks away and that was when a five-year-old could walk two blocks on a dirt road without fear of being kidnapped. But if my friend wasn’t available, it didn’t bother me to stay home in my own little dreamland.

By the time I was a teen, I lived in a small oceanfront town where my friends and I spent our days on the beach and our nights working in the restaurants, serving the thousands of tourists that invaded our little hamlet from Memorial Day until Labor Day. Those days on the beach were, for me, more a time of mental restoration than just hanging out with buddies. I could lie in the sand all day and not say a word, even today.

I went off to college not actually understanding what an introvert was, but knowing deep in my soul that I was not the outgoing, talkative type. I detested “mixers” and having to make small talk. The first-day-of-class-go-around-the-room-and-tell-us-who-you-are ritual was torture.

Then I married a man who is the complete opposite of me, 100% extrovert who would always do all the talking for both of us and I thought I’d come up with the perfect solution. I could hide behind all his words and never have to come up with my own. It sounded heavenly back then but it turned out to not be very healthy.

That’s not the way it works in real life. After decades of him doing all the talking and me doing none, I began to feel not only hidden but almost squashed, even though I was the one who’d chosen to be squashed. I started thinking of all the things I wanted to say but didn’t (again, my choice).

So I started a blog back when they were a new thing. It was mostly just daily drivel, nothing heavy or deep. I wrote for the satisfaction of getting thoughts out of my person and into the world, but from the safety of an unseen keyboard. By this time I was knee-deep in homeschooling five children and moving every five or seven years as a military spouse, and I only half-heartedly kept up with the stream of nonsense I posted on blogspot. I loved this because I could write when I wanted to and there was no pressure to keep up a schedule of communication. I wasn’t being timed or judged. I got to “hang out” with other homeschooling moms and share our daily wins and losses.

Then for reasons since forgotten, I walked away from it. As far as the internet knew, I ceased to exist until many years later when I came back as Beyond Momlife on WordPress, which within two years disappeared into the ether one day. Poof. Words gone. Something about the webhost sending me renewal emails that I never got. I vowed I was done and crawled back in my hole.

Then came The Accident in 2018 and so much changed in my life. That was the period in which I thought I was crazy, losing it, (insert all the mental health pseudo-terms) and eventually started therapy, which was great but also began to uncover a lot of other unlovely stuff that had happened through my life and which I unsuccessfully tried to bury without acknowledging but basically exploded into my life whether I wanted it to or not.

I had no choice but to start dealing with my issues and their root causes, and that is what has sent me down the intersection-of-faith-and-psychology rabbit hole. It’s a whole thing. And here we are, reading the book Quiet.

Mostly my studies in the last seven years have all been focused on the question I asked a zillion times: What is wrong with me? And while I still don’t have one definitive answer, I can say what I’ve learned is that mostly there is nothing wrong with me, as I have thought literally since childhood. I am a normal human experiencing normal human things. My issues are that I have tried to be who I am not for myriad unhealthy reasons, and it hasn’t worked out too well. I firmly believe that every high school senior should spend a year in therapy. It would have helped me so much back then.

I have pretty much always felt that I am an introvert, even when I didn’t know the word for it. That doesn’t mean I always want to stay home, holed up in my bedroom with a book—although that is an attractive option sometimes. I love being with people as long as I’m not being pressured to be fake.

But the subtitle of this book was what drew me: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

The Power of Introverts . . .

Haven’t we all learned that the extroverts are the ones who have all the power? Aren’t we told that introverts should come out of their shells, as if there is something wrong with us? What power could we possibly have?

The author spends the first part of the book describing her experiences at Harvard Business School (you don’t get in unless you’re an extrovert) and a Tony Robbins event (I can’t imagine surviving this). She tells about HBS requiring leaders to make quick decisions, even if they’re wrong, and that is an introvert’s nightmare (she explains why later in the book). Early chapter titles include “How Extroversion Became the Cultural Ideal” and “The Myth of Charismatic Leadership.”

Then she dives into the biology of personality, which is what really fascinated me. Actual brain structures and chemicals. Did you know introverts and extroverts process dopamine differently? Extroverts are typically much more reward-sensitive, chasing the “feeling” of achievement. When an extrovert tells you about some great thing she is going to do in the future, she is already experiencing the hit of dopamine as a reward for something she hasn’t even accomplished yet.

Extroverts don’t really want to hear from people with opposing views. Cain says, “If you focus on achieving your goals, as reward-sensitive extroverts do, you don’t want anything to get in your way . . . You speed up in an attempt to knock these roadblocks down.”1 They have sort of a “damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead!” approach to life. Don’t bog me down me with details.

She goes on, “Introverts, in contrast, are constitutionally programmed to downplay reward . . . and scan for problems.”

“As soon as they [introverts] get excited, they’ll put the brakes on and think about peripheral issues that may be more important.”2 She describes this as “a hedge against risk.”3

I’ll try to grossly oversimplify the book’s explanation of why this is.

We all have an “old brain” and a “new brain.” The old brain is the limbic system, which is “emotional and instinctive” and is “sometimes called the brain’s pleasure center.”4 Its job is to get excited and say, “Yes! Let’s do this new thing! It will be fun!”

The new brain is the neocortex, which is “responsible for thinking, planning, language, and decision-making.”5 Its job is to say, “Hold on a minute. There could be danger here, there are unknowns, and we haven’t evaluated the risks yet!”

In a nutshell, Ms. Cain theorizes, the tendency to be controlled by the old brain is what makes you an extrovert. The tendency to listen to the new brain is what makes you an introvert.

Maybe this doesn’t matter one bit to you, but for me, it is validating. I have spent my adult life married to an extroverted visionary who always wants to do the next big thing, whatever it is. And I have always been the person who slams on the brakes and thinks of everything that could go wrong. I what-if every idea to death and want to examine all the angles. Our extrovert culture calls this being a “killjoy,” and I have absorbed that conclusion with all the guilt and shame associated with it. And the broad conservative Christian culture shames wives who “aren’t supportive,” who don’t immediately jump on board every crazy idea because their brains are wired to evaluate risk first.

Now I know that I am not actually a killjoy. I am a cautious considerer, just like my daddy was, because it is wired in my brain that way. I came from the womb with this bent toward higher sensitivity to risk, just as my husband was born with his bent to charge over every hill without knowing what was on the other side.

I am sure God gave me and my husband to each other specifically because of our extreme oppositeness. I needed a little spark to move and he needed some whoa-there.

I have much more to share about being quiet—namely, what does God say about it?—but since I’m already over 1600 words, I’ll continue next week with part 2. Stay tuned.

I’ve been thinking about the past year as we do in December and trying to distill it into a few themes and have had zero success. (Using the word distill makes me think of my daddy.) As much as I try to incorporate reflection in my life, it doesn’t really work—maybe because I am stuck in survival mode. But I do have a thought after this very long year.

Two nights ago I started putting together english muffin dough, which I do after dinner so it can ferment all night, then be shaped and cooked in the morning. I was making a double batch so I got out the big bowl.

First I reached for the half-gallon jar of sourdough starter in the back of the fridge. I looked at the level and knew that after I removed what I needed for the english muffins, I would have to feed it before I could make bread the next day.

Measure out starter and put it in the big bowl. Then add warm water to the starter jar, stir, and add flour. Oh wait, first I need to refill the flour canister from the five-gallon buckets in the pantry. Now add flour to the starter, stir, and loosely cap the jar. Set on the counter in the laundry room.

Next in the big bowl is milk, two cups. Pour the first cup, then realize there is not another full cup in this jar of milk. Grab the next jar out of the fridge, but I haven’t yet skimmed the cream off this one and if I want to make butter tomorrow I need to do that first. Grab the small ladle and a clean quart jar. Skim cream. Label and put cream in fridge. Measure out the second cup of milk.

By now at least twenty minutes have passed and I have only two ingredients in the big bowl. Do you see what I see? (Did you sing that?)

When we make everything from scratch—truly from scratch—it takes an enormous commitment of time. Ben cares for the cow, gives her hay, drives to the feed store to get specific high-protein feed to lure her into the head gate, provides fresh water, keeps her healthy. Then he milks twice a day. He brings a big can of milk into the kitchen and I strain it into jars, label with the date, and put them in the refrigerator. Then I disinfect all the equipment. It’s a whole thing, morning and evening.

If I want butter, I have to skim some cream off each jar of milk and store it separately until I have a full quart. After witnessing the mess of making butter in a KitchenAid, and almost losing my right arm to an old-fashioned crank-style churn, I had the good sense to buy an electric butter churn on Amazon.

But still, there is effort involved. The electric churn takes about an hour, and you can’t walk away because when the butter “makes,” you have to be there to shut the machine off so it doesn’t over-churn (whatever that is). Then you drain off the liquid, wash the butter in ice water until you’ve removed all the “buttermilk” (which is not actual buttermilk, but that’s what the old-timers call it), then work salt into the butter if you want any joy in your life. Please don’t eat it unsalted. Ew.

Now you may butter the bread you start at 7 am and finally bake at 5 pm.

We have been raising cows and chickens for a few years now and added milking just this year. We started this mostly because Ben decided at 55 he wanted to be a farmer, but also because we want more control over our food supply. I’ve talked enough about it here that you understand the amount of work involved.

But the added benefit I am only now realizing is that it is producing slowness in my life. That can be difficult to understand and even see. I am busier now than I’ve ever been, and there is always a to-do list waiting. Sometimes—often—I get impatient at how long things take, especially when the kitchen canisters have to be replenished from the buckets in the pantry.

But producing food this way forces me to slow down and be present, to feel the change in the butter’s consistency as I wash the milk out and squish the salt in. It allows me to notice the crispness of the outside and tenderness of the inside of an english muffin that Thomas’s wishes they had. There is something very grounding about looking at your plate and realizing you grew everything on it. Remembering the days last summer of weeding and nurturing and picking and canning, the fiasco of raising chicks in the basement (which you will never do again)

and trying to integrate the new ones into the existing flock without them all killing each other,

the days of sweating every calf that was born and hoping the mama wouldn’t be stupid and let it get under the fence to be eaten by vultures.

It has dawned on me that this is what my therapist was talking about. Noticing. Being present. Grounding in this moment. Who knew it took all this work? But God is faithful and will give you the circumstances you need even when you fight them tooth and nail.

Slow food is satisfying in a way I could not have imagined, and I am thankful that God allows us to grow as much as we do. When you’ve done all the labor of bringing food from its natural state to the table, you tend to savor it a little more. You pay attention to the flavors and colors and textures, and it’s a lovely way to enjoy a meal.

frying turkeys and spring rolls outside,

playing hockey in the basement,

a real-live in-house barista who brought all his equipment,

and a house full of children and grandchildren plus a few strays,

I am back with some thoughts.

Control

On my first day back at work (from home, praise the Lord), I realized with great clarity that being an editor satisfies my need for control. I open a document someone else has written and the first thing I do is turn on the Show/Hide All button. That’s the one with the little paragraph icon. Have you ever tried it? If you haven’t, go ahead and click it and see what magic appears on your screen. It shows every invisible marking in your document—every space (and whether it is non-breaking or not), every return, every soft return (these are a nightmare for the layout person), every tab, and every position of every jot and tittle, to use a good King James phrase.

I always turn on Show/Hide All because I want to be in control of the exact number of spaces and how we got to the next line and how much line space is in front of or after a heading. I want to know whether two words will stick together or be split between lines, and I want it all to be exactly the way I want it. Seriously, if you’re ever feeling like life is getting away from you, just use Show/Hide All to be in charge. It’s a great non-confrontational dopamine hit.

Mammoth March

Have you heard of this? I hadn’t until my daughter asked if I’d like to participate in the Virginia Mammoth March with her next April. I wondered what we would be marching for, but it turns out this is just a long hike—20 miles. The Virginia event takes place at Pocahontas State Park just south of Richmond and I thought that sounded like a fun way to spend a few days with this daughter who has a husband and six children and I don’t get to spend nearly enough time with. So I asked, “How many days is it?” and she answered, “Just one. You have eight hours to finish.”

Okay then. It’s been a while since I hiked 20 miles in one day (actually never), but I figured if other people can do it, surely I could do it too. She went on to tell me about the Tennessee event at Fall Creek Falls State Park, and said she might sign up for that one too.

Then two days after they all left to go home, she texted to tell me she’d signed up for both. She said the Tennessee one would be more challenging since it included a lot of elevation change, and said she would be training for that one. I replied, “Heck, I’m going to train for the flat one!”

So training commenced with yesterday’s 4-mile walk. That’s a normal distance for me, but I pushed myself to walk faster than I usually do. There must be a balance between go faster and girl, you are 64 so simmer down. Hopefully I will find it between now and next April.

Anxiety

I have not tried to hide the fact that I struggle with anxiety. A while back I wrote this piece about it, and since then I have been trying to put my own words into practice. Sometimes I hate when I preach to myself. But there is my advice, staring me in the face waiting to be acknowledged and acted upon.

In the essay, I shared what my youngest daughter said to me about anxiety and which I wish I could forget but can’t. She said,

Anxiety is rooted in a spirit of control. When I feel anxious, I ask, what am I trying to control that’s not mine to control?

This does not apply to editing.

Back in early November when it became clear our daughters and their families wanted to come for Thanksgiving, we started planning. That would also be the time our son-in-law would build the hay barn, so it worked out well. They all drive nine or ten hours to get here, so it’s kind of a big deal to make it happen.

And as I do every year, I immediately started feeling anxious about it. Where would everyone sleep? (One daughter has six children.) How would I feed that many people for that long a time?

Typically my anxiety pushes me to make a detailed plan so I can feel in control of the situation, but this year was different. After the initial feelings of serious angst, I found myself . . . not planning. I don’t think I planned a single meal until the day before they were all coming when I wrote down a few ideas in Sunday school (sorry, Dan) and made a brief grocery list. I kept waiting for the panic to come and it just did not, maybe because I loosely adopted the idea that my daughter feeds eight people 21 times a week and how hard would it be for her to add a few more? I would get a ton of fresh vegetables, I stockpiled eggs for weeks before they came, and I knew I had a freezer full of beef.

Every so often I made it a point to notice that I was not panicking, that everyone was getting fed, and that all we had to do was keep cooking. As soon as one meal was over we were working on the next one. Make bread every day. Fill them up with fresh, raw milk. Nobody went hungry and aside from the amount of work involved (which was pretty much constant), it wasn’t that bad.

In my last session with my therapist in January, she said if I only remembered one thing, it should be to notice when I felt safe. She suggested that if I would keep paying attention to when I was not anxious, that it would become normal for me to not feel anxious.

I’ll be the first one to say I am not good at actually doing in real life what she tells me to do in the office, but apparently I have remembered enough to make a little bit of difference. I don’t know how to explain the change other than to say that this year was better somehow. Just as much stress, but less stressful feeling. Does that make sense?

The long and short of this year is that I am working on being okay with not being in control and boy-howdy that’s a tall order. I am reminding my body that I am safe even when things appear chaotic.

Then I heard my middle daughter having a conversation with a young lady who came for the holiday, and Leah said, “You don’t get to be in control because only God is in control. When you try to be in control, everybody suffers. And further, when you try to control others, you are doing to them the exact thing you don’t want done to you.”

Ouch. My difficulty with this is that, okay, I can accept not being in control, but you don’t get to be in control either. As soon as I feel like someone is trying to control me, I’m fighting back with some control-grabbing of my own. Just me?

Phew. Life is hard.

So what’s the point of this ramble?

First, anxiety is rooted in the desire for control. Second, when you let go—even a little bit—anxiety decreases and nobody dies and you are still “safe enough.” Third, stop fighting for control. If you feel like someone is trying to exert control, hand them over to God (daily, hourly—minutely if you need to). He is much better able to reign them in than you are, and you can stay calm in the meantime.

Finally, I can’t leave without sharing this gem from Spotify in this year’s Wrapped:

What does this say about me? That I am scatterbrained and don’t know what I like?That I am multifaceted or I can’t make a decision? That there is way too much going on in my head and I am trying to figure out what pacifies me? My top-five favorites included Steven Sharp Nelson (a cellist), Mozart (always a safe bet), and Elevation Worship (who needs doctrine). I also listened to some Indian flute music (calming), some popular stuff from the 1970s (I am surprised how many songs didn’t actually end, they just faded out. Didn’t they know how to finish chord progressions back then?), and a fair amount of classical guitar (the free spirit in me enjoys this).

Here’s to almost making it through another year. Remember, every day we are one day closer to spring!

I read this recently:

Your brain doesn’t believe what’s true. It believes what you repeat.

And that reminded me of how hard it is to jump off the thought train and make sure I am grounded in reality. It also reminded me of the Lord’s admonition to think on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. God knows the power of a thought locomotive and he tells us how to counteract it. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, just that he knows the struggle and gives us tools to help with it.

I’ve talked before about a little grounding habit I like to use: the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise. Stop where you are and name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can feel, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. This is so powerful that simply popping a strong mint in your mouth can help bring you out of a panic attack if you are aware enough to find a mint in the moment.

This new habit, the one Emily P. Freeman calls These Are the Days . . ., is like that one, only it takes place over a few days or weeks. You just notice what your current days seem to be full of, and that helps keep you paying attention to your actual life so you don’t get caught up in thoughts that are not true.

For me right now, these are the days of being a sad chick owner. I won’t re-tell the story of the four chicks I am raising (you can read it here in case you missed it), but it’s not turning out the way I’d hoped. It’s the price you pay for buying ultra-rare premium chicks at Tractor Supply.

The chicks are now almost 12 weeks old. They were moved to their outside coop a few weeks ago, but still separate from the big girls until they are old enough to defend themselves in the pecking order.

Then last week one day I went out and one of the Buff Brahmas (Bitsy) was just sitting in the shavings, not running around excited about the scratch grains I give them every morning. I held out a few kernels to her and she pecked them out of my hand, but still didn’t move. I picked her up to see if she was injured and it didn’t appear she was, but she wasn’t moving her legs.

Long story shortened, we couldn’t find anything wrong with her other than the obvious paralysis of her legs that spread to include her wings. All indicators point to Marek’s disease, a sickness that affects chickens and causes paralysis. She’s been in chick hospital since then and I keep putting food and water in front of her, which she takes almost like normal. We’ve had to wash her back end every day since she can’t move out of her own poop.

After doing a lot of reading about the disease and talking to our farm vet, Bitsy has been sent over the bridge to chicky heaven. I’m thankful for a husband who is willing to put a chicken out of her misery for me and do it kindly, if there is such a thing. RIP, Bitsy. You were a beautiful bird.

Now we have to decide what to do with the other three chicks, who have surely been infected. Do we spend $250 per bird getting them tested? Do we call them a loss? Lesson learned: get your chicks vaccinated from a good hatchery. Sometimes farm life stinks.

These are also the days of crisp fall walks under blue skies with leaves crunching underfoot. I love these so much more than the sweltering ones of summer and I am reminded of Tara Dickson, who always says to “lift up your eyes.”

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. (Ps. 121:1)

Even on the saddest days, in the most trying of times, there is beauty all around us.

These are the days of technology hiccups, and surely those are my least favorite things on earth. One day you log in to Substack and everything is as it should be. The next day, you get a landing page that says “Launching Soon!” and it takes a few minutes for your brain to comprehend that something is not right. Eventually you trace it all back to GoDaddy and realize you have to reestablish your custom domain with Substack and that is a whole thing that maybe I will tackle tomorrow when the stress of sick chickens is a tiny bit lower.

These are the days of So. Much. Milk. that we are driving around blessing the whole church with it, thank you, Sweetheart (the cow). On Sundays when jars are returned I come home with bags and boxes of them ready to be filled again. Have you ever had raw milk? You don’t know what you are missing.

These are the days of remembering to look at where my feet are planted and what is arching over me. I am alive on this beautiful earth that is full of loveliness and heartache, joy and sickness, gain and loss.

But we can always know that no matter what happens, we are right here and Jesus is with us.

The Lord of hosts is with us. (Ps. 46:7)

If you are a human in 2025 you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “the body keeps the score.” The phrase originates from a book by the same name: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It is the first book I read regarding how the brain and body react to and deal with trauma, and it was quite helpful in the beginning. It helped me understand that I was not crazy, but that I was reacting to trauma exactly the way I was designed to. It gave me a lot of validation and comfort.

In the years since I read that book, I’ve learned a lot more about trauma (both big T and little t) and how its effects show up in our bodies and minds, but there is still so much I don’t know or understand. So please don’t take what I say as gospel; I’m telling you what I “know” based on my reading and my experience with it all, and I share because I want you to know you are not alone or crazy or wrong. You are human.

One of the things I’ve learned recently is that when an event unfolds, the sensory data comes in through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin, and that information goes first to the amygdala, our brain’s threat detection center. In less than one second, our brain makes a determination: threat or no threat? All of this happens BEFORE the sensory information reaches our prefrontal cortex, where rational thought and decisions occur.

So if your child hides behind a door and jumps out to scare you, your amygdala decides it is a threat and you jump and scream BEFORE your prefrontal cortex realizes it is your child and you laugh at the situation. All of this happens beneath your conscious awareness. You do not control the initial reaction of fear. Good old amygdala does it for you. It is doing its job of keeping you alive.

Think about touching a hot burner. Your finger is in contact with the burner long enough to make a blister before you are consciously aware that there is a problem. Your amygdala makes the decision to pull your hand away before your thinking brain is able to make sense of the sensations. Good job, amygdala.

Then next time you approach a burner, you will automatically be more careful, maybe holding your hand above it to see if it’s giving off any heat. Your brain has learned that stove burner = threat and your hippocampus (memory and learning) and prefrontal cortex (decision making) have learned that it’s wise to be careful.

Maybe the next time you walk down the hall in your house, you are on edge, waiting for someone to jump out and scare you. Your amygdala is making a prediction of future danger based on a past experience, and your prefrontal cortex cannot override it, no matter how ridiculous it seems. Your body remembers the feeling of fright and your amygdala wants to avoid that, so it sends you down the hall on high alert. Remember that Dr. van der Kolk said,

Trauma shows up as a reaction, not as a memory.

Even though your child jumping out and scaring you may not be trauma, the mechanisms work the same. Amygdala predicts danger, body reacts by being on edge, hypervigilant, then some time after that, prefrontal cortex catches up with all the information. Every human is wired the same way. Our brains all do this. There is nothing wrong with you.

Then I started thinking about how this applies to all the things we experience every day. If we set the coffee pot to come on a 6 o’clock every morning, we will always wake up happy, taking a deep inhale of the lovely aroma coming from the kitchen. Our body remembers the pleasant sensation of that first sip, the relaxation, the comfort, and it anticipates it each day. We may even find ourselves wanting to go to bed just so we can experience that ahhhhh feeling in the morning.

And this is the crux of the issue. Our body learns—through the work of the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex—to anticipate an outcome, whether good or bad. It’s not just our brain anticipating it. It is our body.

If a child has an abusive father, maybe his body anticipates a negative outcome when he hears Daddy’s car pull in the driveway at night. Conversely, if Daddy is loving and happy, the child anticipates a positive outcome when he hears Daddy coming in the door. Our bodies learn, courtesy of our brains. And the more experiences we have—positive or negative—the more ingrained the lessons become in our bodies, which do not forget.

Suppose we are friends and one day, out of the blue, I punch you. You don’t see it coming, you don’t know what set me off or made me do it. I just punch you. Social norms dictate that you are not allowed to retaliate or yell “Ow!” or act like anything out of the ordinary has happened. You are not allowed to rebuke me for it. You just have to take it. You are baffled and wonder to yourself, “Where did that come from?”

Then a week or so later, I punch you again. Same scenario. You don’t know why I did it or what precipitated it. You are not allowed to react. You have to keep your head down and your mouth closed and just take it. You can only wonder, “What on earth?”

Next time, same thing, only now you are wondering, “Am I doing something that is making her punch me?” You rack your brain to figure out what comes right before the punch so you can maybe head it off before it happens next time. You begin wondering, “Is it me? Am I doing something wrong?”

This goes on for many years because you are a good friend who wants the relationship to last. Over the years I gradually punch you less. Maybe I go months between punches, but it still happens occasionally and you never see it coming. You never know when it is coming but you always know it is going to happen again at some point. Over the decades you become hyper-aware of my moods, my vibe, always trying to figure out what makes me punch you. You are always trying to predict when it will happen but you are never able to. It is completely unpredictable. You are always walking on eggshells, wondering when it is coming, waiting for it to happen.

Your anxiety and cortisol levels stay high in this hypervigilant state. Just about the time you think you can relax, I punch you again and the anticipation starts all over.

You are never allowed to confront me about it, never allowed to rebuke me, never allowed to punch back. You can’t ever tell anyone about it because that would make me look bad. You just have to resign yourself to being punched periodically, never knowing when it is coming or how hard of a punch it is going to be.

Eventually you develop symptoms: chronic pain, emotional dysregulation, easily startled, poor sleep, hypervigilance, never able to relax. Your nervous system is now, after decades of being punched at random intervals, unable to function the way it was designed to. It sees danger all the time, everywhere, whether it is there or not. You live with a high level of cortisol that, over time, damages your adrenals, shrinks your hippocampus (the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory), and enlarges your amygdala (the part of the brain responsible for emotions, including fear, and the seat of your fight/flight/freeze/fawn response). You may develop an autoimmune disease or cancer or worse.1

By now you have begun living in one of the four F responses, let’s say fawn. That means you live every day constantly scanning the environment, looking for ways to prevent the next punch. You are a human Zamboni, smoothing the way for me and everyone around you so you can alleviate whatever it is that makes me punch you. Sometimes you feel like you are successful, but then *bam* the punch comes again when you least expect it, and you feel like a failure, like you will never be good enough to stop me from punching. You think it must be your fault. You must be doing something wrong to deserve all these punches.

That is your brain’s way of trying to make sense of a situation it cannot make sense of. It is assigning meaning (your fault) where there is none.

In between the random punches there is love and laughter, and that’s what keeps you sticking around. You reason that the punches aren’t really that bad, and the love and laughter outweigh them. So you stay.

This is how trauma works. It changes not only the function of your brain, but also the actual physical size and shape of various parts of it. Your brain is not malfunctioning. It is doing its primary job of keeping you alive and creating ways to survive what you are experiencing.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, I highly recommend seeking someone to help you, preferably someone who has good understanding of trauma and its effects and how to help the person who is suffering. A qualified counselor (LPC, LMFT) who shares your faith can be invaluable.

Do you use the Notes app on your phone? I use mine all the time, in the figurative sense. I’m pretty sure there is not a day that goes by without me opening that app at least several times, some days many more. I have a folder for recipes, one for writing ideas, one for short devotions I’ve published, daily stuff to keep track of (like the door lock code for the F250 that barely runs but we still own because we cannot under any circumstances get rid of a vehicle) and a few others. Sometimes I only have two seconds so I jot down a couple of words hoping I remember what they mean later. According to the app, I have 253 individual notes.

Yesterday, since I have a cold and am trying to keep myself from actually doing anything that requires effort (you know, resting), I started reading through my notes to refresh my memory of what’s there. It was so interesting!

I have notes from when a missionary friend spoke to our group at the very first Rocky Mountain Outreach in July 2020. It is titled “Disciples Are Continuers,” and if I can get his permission, I might share his thoughts.

I also have notes from a John Maxwell session I attended in 2022 when I was going to make millions selling the supplements I still take. (Seriously, they are great if you’re interested in what we’ve taken for 14 years.)

A recipe for essential oil tick spray, notes from an Anna Quindlen podcast, a few of the children’s responses to my question about what we did both well and poorly as parents (you don’t want to know), a list of Colorado hikes I would love to do, and the story of me struggling to figure out 1/3 of a pound of walnuts using a kitchen scale that measured in grams.

I have quite a few notes about writing ideas and no idea where they came from. What recently made me cry? (Why would I write about that?) Then there’s one that says “God speaks to us in threes” but I could only think of two examples, so that’s probably why I haven’t written that essay. I have a list of Ben’s weird and crazy sayings (“jumping through my butt backwards”) and at least twenty different notes that contain information that was supposed to help me write a book. I should probably delete those.

I have a note that details the circumstances of the day I had my very worst panic attack ever and one that has a recipe for chicken worming tincture. One has the dimensions for the two closets in my house that still don’t have closet rods and shelves (and doors, but I am realistic about my skill level) and another has two voicemail recordings from my mother so I can still hear her voice. One says simply: I spent 1350 days pregnant and I wish I could remember if I felt good or bad about that when I wrote it.

Another says, “It is good.” I glanced at that one and wondered what I wrote it for, and continued my scrolling.

But I couldn’t forget it. I started wondering what was good that I wanted to remember, so went to the Blue Letter Bible app and typed in “it is good” to see what popped up.

In the King James Version, which is the one I read, the phrase “it is good” appears 20 times. Two of them refer to God’s name being good (Psalm 52:9 and 54:6). In one, Naomi is talking to Ruth while she’s trying to set her up with Boaz, and Naomi tells Ruth, “it is good . . . that thou go out with his maidens, that they meet thee not in any other field.” In other words, stick by them and you’ll meet the guy I want you to meet. Naomi was the original Yenta.

God tells us in Psalm 73:28 that it is good for us to draw nigh to him, and in 147:1 that it’s good to sing his praises. The writer of Psalm 119:71 says, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.” It doesn’t feel good to be afflicted, but God says it is good for us because we learn his words.

In other places he tells us it is good to eat honey, to eat and drink and enjoy the fruit of our labor, to fear God, to hope, and to bear the yoke in our youth (work hard). In all three gospels, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up on a mountain and he is transfigured before them. Moses and Elijah show up at the meeting and Peter, who just can’t ever shut his trap, says, “Lord, it is good for us to be here.” Ya think? Why do some people always have to say something, even if it’s something dumb?

In Romans and 1 Corinthians, Paul writes that it is good for us to not make our brother stumble by what we eat, good not to touch a woman you’re not married to, and good to remain unmarried unless you’re burning up with passion and have no control over yourself. And finally in Galatians 4:18, he says it’s good for us to get stirred up over a good thing.

So what’s the point?

There are sixteen separate things about which God says, “it is good.” (FYI, he says “it is not good” seven times).

Here’s how I’m receiving this quick mini-study: While I may feel like a few of these don’t apply to me (e.g., it is good not to touch a woman you’re not married to), some of them are easy to understand and actually do. So now that I know them, I need to do them.

Draw nigh to the Lord. Sing his praises. Learn about his word from my afflictions. Enjoy the fruit of my labor. Hope. Be zealous in good things.

These are the things he says are good.

Have you ever read the book of Job and wondered what was the point? For me it’s every single time.

But recently I listened to the whole book while I was driving, and as always happens, I noticed something new (to me).

Job’s friends assumed he was guilty of sin and that’s why he’d been judged. They assumed all that happened was judgment or punishment and that Job earned what he got with his bad behavior, and they spent many chapters trying to convince him of how right they were and how wrong he was.

Job insisted on his righteousness and went to great pains to give examples of it. He agreed that if he’d done something wrong he would deserve God’s punishment. But he also made the case that his righteousness should earn him blessing.

It seems even God would have agreed since, in the very first verse of the book, God wrote:

There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.

Then just seven verses later,

And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

God was the one who brought it up. He was the one who described Job this way, so one would think that was his (God’s) assessment of the man Job. But he gave Satan permission to destroy everything Job had: all of his children, all of his animals (i.e., his wealth), all of his servants. All he had left was his wife.

Next time Satan came to visit (Job 2:3), God said the same as before, but with a little more information:

Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.

God said, “without cause.” All this calamity was not happening because Job deserved it.

The trials continued with Job being covered in boils and his lovely wife telling him to “curse God and die” (2:9). What a blessing she was.

Then Job’s friends showed up, and while we are really hard on them and the stupid things they said for the next 30 chapters, the first thing they did was perfect. Verse 13 says,

So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great.

When we see that someone’s grief is very great, the best thing we can do is just be there. No words, no looking for the bright side, no rebuke, no reminding them that their loved one is in a better place. Just be so the grieving person knows they are not alone.

But eventually the friends had to open their mouths and we spend the next 30 chapters rolling our eyes—not just at the three of them, but at Job’s answers too. The friends insisted Job deserved what he got because of sin. Job insisted he earned God’s favor by being righteous. So much deserving and earning going on in their minds.

You know what this is? It is ego-centric. Me-centered. They are the center of their own stories, whether good or bad. They were the ones in control of all the cosmic happenings. Did you get that? They were the ones in control. Have you ever felt that way? I sure have—not that I’m a control freak or anything, but I do like me some control. Don’t you? Don’t we all? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to predict the outcomes in our life based on whether or not we were good enough?

Job and his friends believed that our behavior results in God’s response of either giving or taking away tangible blessing. That God is a responsive God. That he only does things in response to our actions. But doesn’t that make us the center of everything? Well . . . but . . .

What if everyone involved was looking at it all wrong? If you’ve read the whole book of Job, you know they were.

Finally, God jumps in and sets them all straight.

“Who are you?” he asks. “Were you there when I created everything? Do you know how I make the ocean stop at the sand? Why one deer finds another and procreates? Do you know how I made darkness and light?” (And so many more questions—80 verses worth.)

Finally, God says to Job,

Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? he that reproveth God, let him answer it.

You think you know more than I do? Give me an answer.

And suddenly, Job’s goodness looks pretty small and insignificant, and God reminds him that his (Job’s) righteousness equals condemnation toward God (40:8).

Because all along this story is not about God reacting to our good or bad behavior. We are not the center of our stories; God is. This is about him being God, the one whose knowledge and understand are so far beyond ours it is incomprehensible.

So go ahead and be righteous. In fact, God commands it and expects us to be so. Disobedience may result in chastisement, the natural consequence of our actions. But understand that being good does not earn you blessings.

Blessings are the result of God’s immeasurable compassion. They are not payment for a job well done. They are (maybe) given to us in God’s perfect timing and with his perfect understanding of what is good for us. And if they’re not? Or if they’re taken away?

He is still God and he never changes.

My family knows this about me and they love me anyway. In fact, my skills came in handy when my kids were in college. I was the in-house proofreader.

I keep a folder of photos on my computer’s desktop of errors my kids spot in the wild. I love that they share my passion for correct English—or maybe they’re just humoring me. Either way, it makes me smile.

My mother was an English teacher, and I remember my grandmother laughing about mistakes she saw in the newspaper back when they still printed those. One day she told my mother she’d been reading an article about owls, and it said they were “wonton killers.” I’m almost 100% sure they meant wanton killers, but I guess there’s an outside chance owls enjoy Asian food. She laughed about that for years.

And speaking of newspapers, a few years ago I saw a headline that read, “Brown turned himself into police late Sunday and was released after posting bail.” and I immediately thought, “That’s amazing! How did he do that?” One missing space changes the meaning entirely.

Then there was this oh-so-common misspelling which is fine if you’re looking for fast coffee or want to be laughed at by the Italians:

My younger son sent me this one. Was it in the program at someone’s funeral? A church bulletin?

A few more of my favorites:

I used to think sportscasters were the worst (they usually are), but this from The Weather Channel in 2018 was so extraordinary I saved the screenshot.

This is just a disaster all around:

And the fact that the production of this sign took the collaboration of multiple people is alarming:

And finally, this gem was handed to me the last time I applied for life insurance:

Years ago I read a book called The Great Typo Hunt, in which two buddies travel America with Sharpies and White-Out and correct mistakes on public signs everywhere they go. I thoroughly enjoyed it and could see myself doing the same thing if I were young and without adult responsibilities. One of their last corrections involved a permanent sign in a national park, and they were subsequently charged with defacing federal property. Their quest to raise the American grammatical bar didn’t end like they hoped it would. But doesn’t that sound like fun? Imagine the dopamine hits!

Three of my favorite books (this and this and this) were written by Bill Walsh, the late copy editor at the Washington Post, who I actually got to meet IRL at the American Copy Editors Society conference in 2015. He taught me that you can be a language snob without being a jerk—at least I hope I’ve learned that. Thanks, Bill.

Pretty often, someone will send me a message and apologize on the front end for the improper grammar or misspellings that are coming. I wish that didn’t happen. I don’t ever want anyone to feel less-than. I’m what they call pathologically kind and want everyone to get a trophy.

Have you ever seen the T-shirt that says “I’m silently correcting your grammar”? I wish I could say that wasn’t true, but it is like a sickness that cannot be cured. I can’t not see errors when they pop up in life, but I promise I won’t be a jerk about them. I will never embarrass you or call you out publicly, unless you’re paying me to edit. Then I make no promises.

But please, if you ever see mistakes in the wild, please snap a photo and send it along. It may be featured in an upcoming episode of To Err Is Human!

If you’ve been here a while, you might remember me talking about the chronic pain in my neck (not Ben). I’ve had knotted muscles in my neck and shoulders for years, but after my head-on wreck in 2018, it became more pronounced and harder to live with. So in 2022 I finally began the quest to deal with it.

First stop was my regular doctor since Tricare won’t let you blow your nose without prior authorization and a written referral. I’m a little sketchy on the exact timeline, but over the next two years I was seen by multiple orthopedists, had X-rays more than once, a CT scan, and an MRI. I tried chiropractic, many massages, cupping, electro-stimulation, months of physical therapy, dry needling (which is as fun as it sounds), and acupuncture (more fun). Finally I went to UVA and let them inject a steroid into my spine, which was its own special kind of torture. Each thing was my last-ditch effort and each thing failed to give me any relief at all.

Finally my daughter asked me if I’d tried CFT.

Me: “What?”

Leah: “Craniosacral fascial therapy.”

Me: “Again, what?”

I can’t remember how she described it, but she said she’d been going for a while and it had helped her a lot. So of course I did what every intelligent adult does and Googled it. The explanations I found didn’t help my understanding at all, but here I was at last-ditch effort #9, so I wasn’t waiting around for clarification. If there was even a 1% chance of this helping, here’s my wallet, take all my money.

So I found one of the two practitioners in all of Virginia and I went. Then I went again. I really didn’t feel any better, and then my father had a stroke and we began the year-and-a-half-long family crisis in which we lost both of my parents, and the neck pain was put on the back burner. Crisis has a way of dulling other hurts.

Then last year around this time I was back to being desperate, so I called my CFT gal, who lives almost two hours from me. I told her briefly what the last year had held for me and that I wanted to start treatment again. That’s when I found out she was coming to Lynchburg (just one hour from me) two Saturdays a month. The angels sang and my gas bill greatly diminished.

From my perspective, I still wasn’t too confident this was going to help me, but what else could I do? I’d tried literally every other thing that might be a benefit. Since I couldn’t even explain what it was or did, Ben and I referred to it as “woo-woo” therapy. D, my CFT therapist, would have me lie on the massage table fully clothed, and place her hands very lightly behind my head, on what I now know is my occiput. She was barely touching me. Not moving or pushing or doing anything. Sometimes we talked, sometimes I slept. Occasionally she would move one hand and place it lightly somewhere else—fingers on my temples or on a shoulder. Then we graduated to her having one hand under my sacrum (this is where the cranio and sacral parts come in—they are the two ends of the spinal column) and the other hand maybe on my stomach or the side of one leg. Still she didn’t move or push or actually do anything.

Every few weeks I would ask some questions, trying desperately to understand how this was supposed to help me, and with each “explanation” I began to grasp a tiny bit of the process. And ever so gradually, my neck pain began to diminish. The improvement was barely noticeable until the pain wasn’t there.

I am guessing here, but I would say it took a solid 7 or 8 months of regular treatments for me to say I had no pain in my neck. My range of motion increased to what I think is normal for a 64-year-old. And it has taken me a full year to really understand how CFT works. I’ll try to explain it.

Imagine yourself wearing a Spiderman suit. It covers you from head to toe, all one piece of stretchy fabric, perfectly form fitting with no loose spots. If you grab the fabric at your shoulder and pull, it distorts the fabric all the way down your leg to your toes.

Now imagine that stretchy fabric is inside your body, underneath your skin. That stretchy fabric is called fascia. It is:

. . . the body’s connective tissue, providing a framework that helps support and protect muscles, organs, and the entire body as a unit. It is an all-encompassing web found throughout the body that protects the entire body as a whole. It surrounds organs, muscles, brain, spinal cord and all other body parts for protection from outside trauma. It supports the musculoskeletal system and allows us to perform functional activities like walking, jumping, running, or simply changing position.1

You might notice fascia when trimming steaks or getting chicken ready for the grill.

It’s tough and strong and everywhere in your body. In the CFT training, we watched a dissection that removed one intact layer of deep fascia that started at the tongue and ended at the toes. While it was still in the cadaver, if you moved the tongue, you could see the toes move. It truly is all connected.

The craniosacral system encompasses the cranium and brain, all the way down the spinal column to the sacrum. It pumps cerebrospinal fluid throughout the system to keep everything lubricated and nourished and to remove toxins. It actually pumps in a regular rhythm.

Did you know you have a “brain cycle”? It’s true. Your craniosacral system, when moving freely, has a natural rhythm of expansion and contraction that keeps the fluid pumping everywhere it’s supposed to be. You probably can’t feel your own brain cycle, but someone who is trained should be able to. A short brain cycle (quick expansions and contractions) indicates more tension in the fascial web. A longer brain cycle shows the system is working more optimally and with greater freedom.

So the craniosacral fascial system includes the brain, cranium, spinal column, and sacrum, and also extends to the fascial web that runs from one end of the body to the other. Why does this matter? Because

A healthy system allows for the free flow of cerebrospinal fluid from the brain, down the spine, to the sacrum, and into the fascia.2

Now you’re asking, “Karen, what does this have to do with your neck pain?” and that’s a great question.

The short answer is that

All of us have experienced trauma—difficult birth, surgery, accidents, falls, concussions, dental work/orthodontics, and emotional trauma, to name a few. Starting from birth, traumas accumulate and can create strain and toxicity in the craniosacral fascial system, restricting critical brain motion.3

So the cumulative effect of all my concussions, accidents, and trauma was that my fascia tightened up so much that my brain cycle at my first CFT visit was 16—that’s 8 seconds to expand and 8 seconds to contract. It should be at least 100, optimally over 200.

So I had tight fascia, which, because it is over and under and throughout everything in the body, prevents cerebrospinal fluid from flowing properly. When cerebrospinal fluid is restricted from flowing freely, it is unable to nourish and detoxify the brain and body, which can limit range of motion and cause a lot of other problems. In my case, severe neck pain that no other treatment helped.

Enter craniosacral fascial therapy.

CFT techniques are designed to gently unwind and release accumulated fascial strain. This allows optimal mobility and better brain function. When the craniosacral fascial system is loose and open there is free flow of cerebrospinal fluid to help nourish and cleanse toxins, and that allows the body to heal itself.

Now listen, I still have a lot of questions, such as, why does one hand have to be on the occiput or sacrum and the other can be somewhere else? How does barely touching a place of tension signal it to release? I don’t know the answers right now, but I know this has worked when nothing else did. When I learn the answers, I’ll share them.

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Sometimes we know something is true because we read it in the Bible. I’ve been reading the Bible for more than 40 years now, so there are lots of things I know because I read them year after year and they’re still in there. They haven’t changed.

But other times we KNOW something is true because we have personal, firsthand experience with it.

In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to take his only son Isaac up a mountain and offer him there “for a burnt offering.” Can you imagine? I cannot, but apparently Abraham could. So he packed up some supplies on a donkey and took two of his servants and Isaac and headed for Moriah. Apparently it was a long journey, because it says “on the third day,” Abraham finally saw the place God was telling him to go. Verse 5 says,

And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.

Don’t miss that part where Abraham tells his servants that he and Isaac will “come again to you.” Abraham was just obeying God and he had 100% faith that God would work it all out somehow. Also don’t miss the part where Abraham considered what he was about to do “worship.” Obedience in any form is an act of worship toward God, even if you’re not standing in the auditorium with the worship band playing, lights turned low, and people singing with hands raised. Worship looks a lot of different ways, and sometimes (often?) it’s not glamorous.

As Abraham and Isaac climbed the hill carrying the wood for the fire, a torch to start it with, and a knife, Isaac asked his dad, “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” and Abraham replied, “God will provide himself a lamb.” Isaac trusted his father just like Abraham trusted his God. And God did provide himself a lamb a few thousand years later, in the form of Jesus. He was the perfect, spotless Lamb sent to bear the punishment for the sins of the whole world—you and me and everyone in between. But that’s another story.

When they got to the place God told Abraham to go, he set the wood in order and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the wood. Are you paying attention? Abraham tied up his only son and laid him on the altar. He was still obeying God, still knowing that God would work this out somehow. As I read these verses, my heart is pounding and my body is tense, even though I know the outcome. The fact that a man has that much trust in God blows my mind.

Abraham pulled his hand back to plunge the knife into his son and God said,

Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. (v12)

Every time I read this story I get to this verse and think, “It’s a good thing Abraham was listening and didn’t miss this part.”

But here’s the point: God is omniscient. That means he knows everything—past, present, and future. He knew Abraham would obey. But he said, “now I know . . .”

Now I KNOW. God, who already knows it all, said now that I’ve tested you, I KNOW you fear God. It almost sounds like he wasn’t sure before this event. Maybe he had a head knowledge, but not a heart knowledge. He knew in his mind, but afterward he knew in his body, in his experience. Is that possible? I don’t know, but I know what he said.

For months I have had this thing I knew I was going to have to do. I agreed to it even though deep down I really didn’t want to. Most people would think it was a fun thing, but most people are not me with all my difficult experiences and traumas and reactions. It scared me on a lot of levels. But I said I would do it, so I knew it was coming.

Mostly I didn’t think about it; denial is my strong suit. But when it came up and I was forced to think about it, anxiety ratcheted up like nobody’s business.

And do you know when anxiety likes to ratchet up best? In the dead of night. Daytime would be less effective with all the things of life to distract me.

No, anxiety likes to show up at 3 am when the house is dark and quiet and everyone else is asleep. When I can’t get up and do something to take my mind off it because I don’t want to wake others. That’s when anxiety comes out to play and demands my attention.

So what do I do? I lie silently in bed or on the couch and ruminate. I think of all the things that could go wrong and all the facets of this thing I’m afraid of and I roll them around and around in a never ending mind-loop, getting more and more dysregulated. My body shakes and my heart pounds and my cortisol goes through the proverbial roof. I get angry about the situations I am making up in my head and cry because I just don’t want to do the thing. My brain is completely hijacked by my amygdala and it is in full fight-or-flight mode.

And do you know what a brain that’s hijacked by the amygdala can’t do?

Form words. When our nervous system’s stress response is highly activated, our prefrontal cortex—the seat of reason and logic and verbal processes—is not connected. It’s unavailable. In the O-F-F position. Putting feelings into words is not even possible. Have you ever been so shocked you were speechless? This is why.

And do you know what happens when we can’t form words?

We. Can’t. Pray.

The one thing I could be doing that has a big chance of helping, and I am cut off from my ability to pray. Do you think God knew this was a possibility? The one who made our bodies and brains and amygdalas and prefrontal cortexes? Do you think maybe he anticipated there would be times we would be unable to utter words?

God says “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), and instead I am on the intrusive thought carousel. Round and round I go. He says, “in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God,” and I am riding the roller coaster of emotion instead, unable to get off.

Sometimes I am actually aware that this is happening while it’s happening, and if it were daylight, I could do something about it. I could shake my body to expend all the excess energy created by an overabundance of cortisol. I could put a bag of frozen peas (if I had one) on the back of my neck to activate my vagus nerve, or hum, or put my fingers in my ears and pull down. I could go for a brisk walk to give my brain the bilateral stimulation that helps it process difficult things. But remember, it’s 3 am.

I feel stuck and helpless and hopeless.

My inner critic says, “What a loser you are, Karen. You could be communicating your fears to the Father, the Shepherd of your soul, but instead you’re wallowing in your anxiety.”

But God is much kinder than I am. Do you know what he says?

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26)

The Spirit helps our infirmities.

If you’ve never been overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts, you just don’t know how infirm it feels. This doesn’t just refer to physical ailments, but emotional and psychological and spiritual ones as well. And God says his Spirit helps them all.

We don’t know what to pray for.

I think this is true much more often than we want to admit. When someone is sick, it’s easy to know what to pray for: we pray for them to be healed. Same when someone loses a job or their car breaks or a thousand other situations. The answers are obvious to us.

But when the problem is anxiety, rumination, intrusive thoughts, panic attacks, we get so up in our amygdalas that we lose all sense of reason and our ability to find words for what we feel. We don’t even know what to ask for, and there’s just about nothing more desperate feeling than that.

We don’t know how to pray for that, but the Spirit does.

The Spirit intercedes for us.

What a relief. I don’t have to find words. God doesn’t sit up there like he’s talking to a crying two-year-old saying, “Use your words.” He doesn’t need them. Guess what: God doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t speak French or German or Mandarin or Urdu or Sango. He doesn’t have a first language and then other languages he learned after that. He speaks none of them and all of them. He does not need words—those are for our benefit.

God does not need my words.

His heart communicates with my heart. Sometimes there are words involved that help me feel better about the communication. But God doesn’t need them. He is so much bigger than that.

The Spirit takes my groans and hands them to God, who fully understands what they mean and the deep hurt they come from

I am reassured. I already feel better. I can take a deep breath and know that God hears my heart even when there is no language involved. He understands communication through raw emotion. What pure love.

Then the day after I’ve lost hours of sleep and am sitting at my computer trying to work through the high-cortisol aftermath of intense dysregulation, the answer comes.

God answers the prayer I didn’t even pray. He responds to my anxious late-night spiral with empathy and mercy and grace and the help he promises to be. How is it possible we can know a God like this and call him Abba, Father, Papa?

I have always known the Spirit intercedes for me. I’ve read it a hundred times. I have carried that head knowledge around with me for more than 40 years.

But now I KNOW it. I have firsthand, bodily experience with God’s Spirit interceding for me and God answering the words I did not pray.

Now I know.

In very basic layman’s terms, you have a web of fascia that is throughout your body and it’s all connected. So tension in your shoulders tightens up the fascia in your feet. Yes, the ankle bone is connected to the leg bone, but it’s much more complicated than that. I hope to be able to give you a better explanation next week.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this recirculated post about how to have a healthy emotional breakdown.

In the first chapter of 1 Samuel we read the story of Elkanah and his two wives, Hannah and Peninnah.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s the TL,DR version.

Peninnah has lots of children and Hannah has none. Peninnah is mean and nasty to Hannah because she’s barren, and Hannah has an emotional breakdown. But it all turns out happy in the end.

The verses everyone knows from this chapter are when Hannah takes her firstborn son Samuel and presents him to the Lord, and she says to Eli the priest, “For this child I prayed; and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him: Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord.” She gets her baby, and the baby is dedicated to God. Warm fuzzies all around.

But there’s a lot of heartache before we get to that, and God gives us a beautiful picture of how to have an emotional crisis.

Wait, a beautiful picture of an emotional crisis? How can an emotional crisis be beautiful? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

Not at all. God has emotions, and since we are made in his image, we have them too. They are God-given, God-created, and God welcomes them just like he welcomes every other part of his image-bearers. We are the ones who somewhere along the way decided emotions were bad, that we should hide them like something to be ashamed of, like we are less-than for showing them. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Elkanah had two wives, Hannah (no children) and Peninnah (lots of children). Every year the family traveled from their home in Ramathaim-zophim to Shiloh to sacrifice to the Lord. Remember, this was pre-Jesus, when you had to make a sacrifice for your sins every year.

In Shiloh, Elkanah gave a portion to Peninnah and all her children, but he gave a “worthy portion” to Hannah because he loved her. Peninnah was a jerk and the Bible calls her Hannah’s adversary. It says Peninnah “provoked her sore, for to make her fret, because the Lord had shut up her womb.” Peninnah mocked Hannah because she had no children. The hatefulness of this is stunning. No wonder it doesn’t say Elkanah loved Peninnah—she was a witch.

Peninnah did this every year they went to sacrifice, and the year of this story, Hannah reached her breaking point. The Bible says, “therefore she wept, and did not eat.” This is where the emotional crisis begins.

Elkanah noticed his wife’s suffering right away and asked Hannah, “Why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? am not I better to thee than ten sons?”

Elkanah loved her, but the man was clueless.

Hannah was barren. Infertile. Could not have children in a culture where women were valued only for their ability to produce sons. Can you imagine the heartbreak? The shame? The natural, God-given longing for a baby?

I have never struggled with infertility, but I watched my daughter go through it and the anguish is more than I can fathom. Hannah was distraught.

Throughout this chapter, God tells us that Hannah is sad, can’t eat, is grieving and bitter, cries exceedingly, feels afflicted and forgotten. Her spirit is sorrowful—FULL of sorrow. Elkanah asks if he’s not better to her than ten sons and the answer is a resounding NO. A loving husband is a wonderful gift from God, but he is not a son, not your own offspring. Not the same. The two are totally different in a woman’s heart.

Verse 15 says she poured out her soul before the Lord. Poured. Emptied. Wrung out until there was nothing left.

I don’t know if you’ve ever really poured out your soul before, but you can’t do it half-heartedly. You can’t be reserved when you pour out. You can’t hold back, can’t pretend you’re holding it together. You can’t be worried about whether the priest will think you’re drunk. Can’t put on a brave face. There is no dainty dabbing of a few tears; it’s all ugly-crying. To pour out your soul you have to let it all go, gushing out without restraint. You have to be like a taco and fall apart, ending up a splattered mess on the plate.

This is what Hannah was doing when Eli the priest saw her. Apparently he didn’t have much experience with women, because he accused her of being drunk. She assured him she hadn’t been drinking, but that she had poured out her soul before the Lord. She said, “out of the abundance of my complaint and grief have I spoken hitherto.”

I was reminded of the verse in Matthew 12 that says “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” What was abundantly in Hannah’s heart is what came out. She was so full of sadness and grief for the life she wanted but did not have that it couldn’t help but come out. She was a shaken bottle of soda, a Diet Coke with 50 Mentos dropped in it.

It’s the same with you and me. We can stuff our emotions down and try to fake it, but at some point what’s in there abundantly is going to come spewing out. In Hannah’s case it was sadness, grief, bitterness, affliction, and feeling forgotten. That’s a heavy burden and God did not expect her to just sit on it and act like nothing was wrong.

I’ve been there, so full of anguish I could not form words, but somehow the anguish had to come out. God already knows our feelings and thoughts, but he still wants us to tell him about them. He wants communication, which is a two-way proposition. He talks to us and we talk to him. So don’t hold back thinking God is going to think you’re “strong” or able to handle it on your own. He knows better. Go ahead; pour out your soul.

Eli heard Hannah’s explanation and he was overwhelmed with compassion. He answered, “Go in peace: and the God of Israel grant thee thy petition that thou hast asked of him.”

Now listen, Eli had not one ounce of power to answer Hannah’s prayer. He couldn’t give her the child she longed for. But he listened to her. He acknowledged her and agreed with her in prayer. He had compassion for her.

Hannah felt heard. She was supported and not alone in her sadness and grief, and isn’t that what we all want? To be seen and heard and feel like we—and our sorrow—matter to someone?

Then look what happened: “So the woman [Hannah] went her way, and did eat, and her countenance was no more sad.”

She “went her way . . .” According to the Google, Ramathaim was around 12 miles from Shiloh, give or take a few. That’s a full day’s journey on foot. So Hannah went for a long walk. When emotions are bubbling up, moving your body helps to expend excess energy so you don’t explode. And if you’ve already exploded, walking provides a form of bilateral stimulation for the brain, which is key in processing events and emotions. That’s why you feel better after a walk, and also why you get creative ideas while walking. So go for a walk.

Then she “did eat,” and probably not Twinkies and Coke. She would have eaten something nutritious because she was on a Mediterranean diet, which everyone knows is super healthy.

“And her countenance was no more sad.”

This is the most fascinating part to me. Hannah was still not pregnant. She still had the witchy sister-wife to contend with. Her husband still thought he was better to her than ten sons. She did not have the answer to her prayer and didn’t know if she would ever get it.

But she had poured out her soul to the Lord—all the sadness, all the grief, all the bitterness, all the anger and feeling afflicted and forgotten. She poured it all out before the God who created her with the intense desire to bear a child, knowing he could handle all her emotions and trusting that he would do what was best.

When she went away with a no-more-sad countenance, she did not know if she would ever have a baby. She just told God how she felt. She did not hold back or try to sound spiritual. She was simply 100% honest with God and left it all there at his feet.

We can do that too.

God is not afraid of your feelings. He can handle the biggest of emotions.

So bring them. Dump them at the throne of grace where he is waiting to hear every word, catch every tear. Bring someone with you to hear you and agree with you in prayer and say, “Amen, so be it.”

But don’t not have an emotional breakdown because you think it’s unspiritual. The Bible is full of them, and Hannah shows us just how to do it.