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