Even In Fear...
Hmm...what's something I’ve been scared about lately? Oh, I don’t know — how about being a HUMAN?
Being a human that is living in a world that seems to be getting crazier every day. Being a human that
happens to be a woman. Being a human that is responsible for raising another human. Being a human
whose career is centered around holding space for other humans and all their “stuff”. Being a human who
still wants to show up for the other close humans in her own life...
So, what’s my point? I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that many aspects of our humanity can be
scary and even sometimes debilitating if we let it. There’s not too many things in my life right now that I
would describe as “easy”. So what if “having no fear” looks and feels a little bit more like “having fear but
still going after it anyway”? I recently heard a sermon that reflected on the Biblical Parable of the Wheat and
Weeds; one of the points that the sermon drove home was that the presence of a good thing (wheat) does
not always equate to the absence of a bad thing (weeds). In other words, one can still prosper in the midst of
chaos, harm, and the unknown, and in fact, they oftentimes happen simultaneously.
What if we normalized fear without telling ourselves that it is a sign that we should give up? What if we
allowed fear to fuel us as opposed to freezing us? What if we knew that some of the messiness in life doesn’t
mean we’re doing anything wrong and could just mean that we’re growing? There are two things that I like
to tell my clients when we begin working together: 1) therapy often causes you to feel worse before feeling
better and 2) you may find that many of the things and patterns that never used to bother you will all of
sudden start to bother you. Neither of those two things is because the client is doing anything “wrong” but
because when one is committed to growth, you start to see things differently. I say this to say, it is wise to
recognize and be mindful of the things that scare us or the “weeds”, but please don’t allow this to keep you
from growing your garden.
xo,
tja
28 “‘An enemy has done this!’ the farmer exclaimed.
“‘Should we pull out the weeds?’ they asked.
29 “‘No,’ he replied, ‘you’ll uproot the wheat if you do. 30 Let both grow together until the
harvest. Then I will tell the harvesters to sort out the weeds, tie them into bundles, and burn them, and to put the wheat in the barn.’”
Matthew 13:28-30