Sarah’s Story
An epic tale spanning 40-ish years that makes you wonder if the heroine has a flare for drama, is writing a comedy à la Shakespeare, or is hoping it’s fodder for a Taylor Swift song.
I just want everyone to always find me delightful. Is that too much to ask? Yes! Securing the delight and approval of all humanity demanded that I navigate an impassable road up an insurmountable mountain. God love me, I tried to find a way through. My spine split from carrying my need for approval—and the anxiety that came with it—up that impossible path. Eventually, I set the burden down into the arms of Jesus. I know, I know—sounds cheesy, right? Like a Christian film where they tell you, “Modest is hottest.” But honestly, my relationship with Jesus is cheese-free. Jesus changed everything about my life. He held me together through a marriage blow-up, a marriage rebuild, raising kids, church abuse, and, more recently, cancer. Check out My Story for further proof that I am, in fact, a delight.
I have never known life without the buzz of anxiety; it’s always been my untamed imaginary friend. I spent most of my fourth-grade year awake at night making sure my heart kept beating…anxiety convinces you this is a necessary job one should do. I found ways to deal with it, mostly on my own. No one understood what I lived with, and they called me “overly sensitive,” and “prone to overreaction.”
Anxiety does have an upside, because it can disguise itself as Bravery, and Ambition. These employees helped me live as a military brat—a life characterized by all the things anxiety hates: new places, new people, being the new kid, and constant change. I survived being the new kid at nine different schools spread over four states before I left home for college. I identified with powerful women and pretended to be powerful like them. Remember She-ra or Jem and the Holograms? I found it easier to be the new kid if I had bravado, and I found I could make people laugh. When they were laughing with me, they were not laughing at me, as the adage goes. I loved music and felt so powerful singing at the top of my lungs along to Mariah Carey or Celine Dion (Taylor Swift was just learning to walk). I also fell in love with horses. I was involved with horses for twenty years. In so many ways the outlet of horse training for my anxiety kept me going.
I call anxiety my imaginary friend, because on the outside, my childhood was a good one. My parents saw my love of horses and put their resources toward my training. Our house in Vermont was on the property where we kept my horse. How magical is that? When anxiety is your modus operandi, you move it aside to be a kid and have fun. One time, having been so embarrassed at a new school I refused to go back to, my mom made a deal with me. She promised to buy me the new LA Gear sneakers if I promised to go back to school. Don’t think I didn’t walk back into that school like I owned the place. Not even She-ra’s boots were as cool as these LA Gears. As with everything in life, there were hard things I fought but there were a lot of good things too.
Something else grew up along side me as I navigated the changing world around me. The need for approval roared like a beast on all fours next to the untamed imaginary friend named Anxiety. I figured out that when people were delighted with me and marveling at my accomplishments, they did not notice the high-octane anxious gas coursing through my veins. I learned I could make a friend, get a good grade, or get someone’s attention by performing. I also learned that I was funny, and people enjoy funny people.
I graduated from Texas Tech University with a BS in Agricultural Economics, became a highly decorated equestrian and ran my own horse-training business. My life looked charmed from the outside. I was dating a serious significant other and competing two exceptional horses. I also ran the karaoke circuit and felt like a superstar. Humor and warmth allowed me to make friends easily and keep horse owners in my training program. Inside, I was striving to tap dance as fast as I could to get the approval of everyone around me. Failure to achieve became the stuff of my nightmares.
An ulcer finally landed me in a doctor’s office. This doctor explained that I needed to stress less (what a great idea, tell me more). He said less stress was necessary to get my “anxiety” under control. That was the first time someone named my imaginary friend. I set out to cure myself of it. Like She-ra on a mission to take down Skeletor, I sought the advice of healers, crystals, Reki, meditation, hot stones, and herbs. I even started counseling, which turns out to be the real MVP in my life. Approval from others always pushed its way back in. I fell back into letting anxiety drive me to impress others and racked up accomplishments.
Life moved on. Jesse, my significant other, and I got married; we had two beautiful kids, Sydney, and Brock. We had everything a good strong American family needed to thrive. But the push of anxiety left me desperately surviving every day. After all the iterations of coping mechanisms failed to relieve my anxiety, I became an absolute delight to live with as I screamed and yelled to blow off the high-octane anxiety gas coursing through my veins. Also, I chain-smoked to find a modicum of joy.
I finally broke in a grocery store parking lot. I looked up at the sky and yelled, “If you are there, show me” (not even sure what “you” I was addressing). My desperate cry to the sky caused turning of mysterious wheels, and a few months later I found myself in church.
“Come to me
all those who are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.”
In church I heard it said that Jesus tells his people, “Come to me all those who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” I didn’t know how Jesus gave out this “rest,” I just knew I needed it! I could feel my heart break open inside my chest and start beating for a new reason: I belonged to Jesus. In so many ways the weight of anxiety lifted off me, but I had yet to give myself permission to stop seeking approval. Misguided zeal for God started me tap dancing to impress God and other Christians. However, in church I found out that you can be friends with people based on love, not based on your performance for them. We developed relationships with other believers that mirror those of a tightly knit family.
Jesse could not reconcile the vibrant and undeniable love I had for Jesus with the previously known mean and distant God of his childhood. Jesse, who was desperately trying to hide his addiction to pornography, could sense God was coming for him. As only God can, He brought the addiction to light, followed by explosive anger from a previously gentle and kind man. I would not have it, and I told him to hit the road. Feeling like I was well shot of him, I made an appointment with a divorce attorney. But in the quietness of my heart, I sensed God asking, “What if I can change him like I changed you?” I wondered if God could change him, and decided to give God some time. I canceled the appointment with the attorney.
A marriage blow-up in the first year of my new Christian life was a steep learning curve. While wondering if God would clean up this mess of a marriage and family, my daughter became a Jesus follower. I mean, come on, how cool is that? What’s more, God used the marital separation to bring Jesse to faith as well, and we reconciled—a mysterious miracle for me to see in real life. My sweet son declared one day the next year, with all his six-year-old might, that he believed in Jesus too and did not want to be the only one in our family not baptized. Lest you are picturing some sort of fairy godmother snapping her fingers to fix everything, please know this is a very clean and tidy paragraph about a very messy time in my family’s life. This time was full of tears, but also the regeneration of all involved. Make no mistake though….it was a dumpster fire, kept to a small inferno by Jesus.
Ambition and bravery fueled by anxiety, turned into the pursuit of Jesus fueled by zeal and my love of how the Lord transformed my family and me from the inside out. Bible studies would not satiate my thirst for knowing more of God. Because of my constant harassing of Jesse to enroll in a Bible program, he relented, and we uprooted our family and moved to Michigan to attend Ethnos 360 Bible Institute (formerly New Tribes Bible Institute). Even though I devoted myself to study, study does not instantly free you of old patterns. Old habits die screaming as you walk with Jesus. That need for approval kept sticking its head up and sniffing the air.
I wanted to implement everything I was learning about being a follower of God as quickly as possible. A commonly accepted teaching about the roles of men and women in the church is men lead, women follow. I believed that teaching, and pursued submission, specifically to male leadership, and my husband. Submission in women constituted the highest calling in a woman’s life. Anxiety, disguised as the need for approval, pushed me to become the most submissive woman the church had ever seen.
Pursuing submission instead of Christlikeness makes you do things to prove your submission that God does not ask of women. My zeal to be stamped as submissive found me striving to contort myself into a mold that did not fit me. No matter how many submission hoops I jumped through, I could never convince the leadership of the church that they were looking at an excellent submissive woman. And what broke my heart was that because they disapproved of me, I believed God disapproved of me too. I suffered under this heavy-handed leadership for years. When leadership makes you feel like God is mad at you, and you have to do what leadership says to get right with God, this is called spiritual abuse. When a church employs this tactic, it won’t survive forever. We witnessed the breakdown of our church caused by this kind of leadership.
Jesus used my zeal, ambition, and failure to reach optimum submissive status to get me to Dallas Seminary. The beautiful soul in me, brought to life by Jesus years earlier, got splashed with Technicolor. Every class I took healed some broken part of my heart and corrected bad teaching I had picked up. I learned my gifts were just that, gifts from God, he wanted me to use. Pursuit of Christlikeness holds the spot of highest calling in my life, not submission. God has surrounded me with people who encourage me to be funny, lead people and pursue Jesus. Christlike leadership does not lord power over anyone but instead lifts people up.
The beautiful soul in me,
brought to life by Jesus years earlier,
got splashed with Technicolor.
I understand now telling women to pursue submission is the perfect way to abuse them and control them. I will tell anyone who will listen how wrong it is to make women feel like they are supposed to stay behind men.
2024 brought a new challenge. I was diagnosed with stage 1b breast cancer. Like a perfectly good Christian, I yelled, “What the heck, God, you want me to stop studying Hebrew to deal with this?” With fists clenched pointing up at heaven I yelled, “What the heck, God, am I going to die and leave my husband and kids to fend for themselves? They can’t even load a dishwasher!” (Because I value honesty here, you must insert a bolder swear word in those declarations to God, because that is how I roll.) I rallied when I thought, “Well, stage 1 is not that big of a deal, I’ll be done with this hiccup by March.” Bless my thoughtless heart.
I knew I needed to draw close to God, but all my go-to’s suddenly didn’t fit. I found it hard to sit still and focus on reading the Bible. Praying turned into me just yelling at God with teenage petulance. To my surprise my artful side bubbled to the surface, and I found a gold mine filled with God. I could commune with God when my hands were creating…enter embroidery, which I love as much as I love humor. Creating physical expressions of how I was feeling on the inside helped me worship God and talk to him. I traveled deeper into my relationship with God than I understood was possible.
God used cancer to strengthen my marriage. This is not a small thing since many people find themselves drifting apart in the tumult of cancer treatment. Jesse stood tall when I could not get up. He displayed selflessness second only to Jesus (this is not hyperbole). He called to make appointments and ran interference when I needed to insulate from the world. He took me to every appointment and treatment. He messed up his Apple Music algorithm to play Taylor Swift for me during the car ride. Now that is love.
In my journey with cancer, God worked on my soul as much as he worked on my physical body. Bright surgical lights exposed unsoundness and old patterns, while my physical body endured surgeries to rid me of cancer. God was shoring up my foundation and reconstructing the potholed patterns. I am now cancer-free thank God. Three surgeries found me finally feeling and looking like myself again. I’m still healing but will walk out of my cancer journey a woman more secure in God’s love and less obsessed with seeking approval.
In 2025 Jesse and I will enter our empty nester era. I have found that one of the biggest joys in this life is watching your kids chase after their dreams and seek their own relationship with God. I hate that we have to survive the toddler years and then just when kids get to be cool, they move away. My kids are the coolest people I know, so if they go too far, I will have to chase after them. I am hoping to continue working toward my Master of Theology from Dallas Seminary in the spring of 2025, but we shall see.
Thank you for reading my story, I’d love to hear yours. Hit me up on the contact page!
