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So, Memorial Day a few years ago, my husband, our daughters, and I went out on a lake at a local park. Two of us had a kayak, and two of us had a canoe. The mom that I am, I was trying to take pictures of my girls, and I was like, oh, look, let's capture this. Well, in doing so, I told them to come closer, and we capsized. We tumbled over...not the girls, but my husband and me. Oh, look, there's my girls, get a picture, uh oh, we're going down in slow motion, yet it was happening really fast. My husband was saying, don't let the phones get wet, and then we went into the water.

The thing about going into the water that I didn't quite get was this wasn't Disney World. I kid you not! I thought, the ride operators will come, and they will rescue us. They will help us out of this water. There are no ride operators in a park. It was a quick a wakeup call. We were on our own. I mean, yes, we had our daughters in the kayak next to us, and they were willing to help, but my husband and I could not get back in the canoe. Like, this isn't something we do all the time. This isn't something we've practiced or had lessons on or anything. We had life jackets on, so I am thankful for that, but it was too deep to push off the bottom of the lake, and the canoe was too wobbly and rocking for us to get ourselves in. The water was being taken on. We were in the center of the lake. There was no place to push off of. There was no side rail. There was nothing. And we weren't at Disney anymore. You know, we weren't in Kansas any longer. We weren't in Disney world anymore. It was like, this is real stuff here.

We sink or swim, literally, or we just bob around out here and float, and that's only going to last so long. I could not compute this, that they weren't coming to rescue us. We had to do something ourselves to paddle our way back and not only get ourselves back but get our canoe back. Now, fortunately, there were people on a kayak next to us, and it was quite embarrassing, because even these two little kids, they must have been like two and four, were just sitting there watching, and there's a cooler in its own kayak. This family is like, they're used to this stuff. They were prepared. They were having fun. They were relaxing. But my husband and I are, like, just trying to stay above water, even with the flotation devices on us. It was really uncomfortable. They came over and helped guide the canoe. We could put one arm on the canoe and paddle with the other, but we still had to do the work. We still had to swim all the 20 minutes back to shore. I am not a swimmer, and I was tired, and I'm a germaphobe. There were all kinds of, I don't know what in that water, but it was not clean looking. I had absolutely nothing else to do at that moment but suck it up, buttercup, and get going. Like, how long do you want to prolong this? Do you just want to stay here, bobbing up and down in water or would you like to get going so that you can get through this already and get to the other side and breathe, get out from the stuff that is making you feel like you're being pulled under and actually get to higher ground?

I say that because that lesson was a rude awakening, and yet we do it all the time. We overlook things that are our responsibilities as if we're waiting for somebody to come rescue us. Jesus already did come rescue us, but we actually have to do our part. He's the one with the rescue boat like those people that came alongside us with the canoe right and made sure we got to shore, were safe, and didn't drown, but we were also responsible for paddling. Now, it's not something we earn, right? It's something that is a grace given to us, this salvation and this power of the Holy Spirit that the Lord gives us when we're saved. But it doesn't mean we just sit there and bob up and down in life and then wait for God to rescue us. Out of our difficult circumstances, we are entrusted to actually do the work.

In fact, work was in the Garden of Eden. It was in Adam and Eve's job description before the fall of humanity, before they ate the forbidden fruit from the tree that they shouldn't have, they were to work the land. We have responsibilities. We have tasks. We need to sow good things so that we reap good things.

As I started spring cleaning and decluttering, I noticed that there were things that I'd been tolerating, I'd been putting up with as if they were going to magically change on their own. For example,  magically the silverware drawer that I try to pull out isn't off the tracks or the transition strip between the new flooring that we put down in one of the bedrooms and the carpet was going to magically appear when I didn't buy one or install it when we did the renovation or the hinge on this hope chest that we have that's been broken for years was somehow magically going to fix itself. So, I went to Lowe's and if you follow on Instagram, you'll be able to see my haul $40 later. I have about seven items that are going to fix those minor inconveniences, and I'm actually going to do them. And guess what they're going to do? They are going to save me minutes, hours, months, and years of frustration, but I have to take the time to actually implement them and do them and go forward.

You cannot expect different results if you're not going to put in the elbow grease every now and then. You get a nice benefit of how well that worked out. I didn't deserve that. That was easier than expected. A lot of times God expects us to swim alongside Him to sow good seeds. So, we reap good things when we take personal responsibility rather than assuming things are magically or miraculously going to get worse or better. No, we are where we are, and we need to do something with it. We need to work the land. Whatever our land is in our neck of the woods, we need to work the land. So those are my three things. Stop waiting for someone to rescue you, take charge, be a good steward, and go live your life.

I like to listen to this woman, Cass from the "Clutterbug." She's a woman who had a show for a couple of seasons about decluttering houses called Hot Mess House. If you need some help with that. Like I said, I'm decluttering right now. She's been a huge inspiration. I love her podcast. If anybody knows her and can connect me with her, please email me at michelle@mentallhealthforchristianwomen.com, and I'd love to interview her, but she just has absolutely given me the pep talk I need. A recent podcast that she had was basically saying that she was making excuses about not working out with a personal trainer. They weren't lies, really. They really were reasonable things, but they weren't going to get her the end results. She said that the personal trainer basically told her that if she wanted to see progress, she had to stop making excuses. I think that really underlies a lot of what I'm saying here.

If we want something to be different, we need to stop throwing up our hands and assuming it can't be different, we actually have to do something about it. Pray about it. Take the action, make the plans. Take the steps. God will redirect. Don't be afraid of getting it wrong. When you love the Lord and are called according to His purpose, He lives inside of you. In Him you live and move and have your being, so you don't have to worry about it. It's not like He's this cosmic I'm going to get you if you misstep out of my will, so you have to fear and do nothing. No, He's a creative God. He's a God of responsibility. He's a God of love. Take the steps. Trust in Him. Do the things.

Certainly, if you're waiting for somebody to start swimming for you, if you find yourself capsized in the middle of a lake, just start swimming. Just keep swimming. What do we do? But we swim, swim, swim. Just like finding Nemo. We just keep going. We keep swimming. We do the next right thing, the one thing that's going to make the biggest difference. That may be things like pitching the clutter that is taking up space in your home, that may be fixing the hinges or the drawer puller outer thingies like I'm going to do today and, in all love, just suck it up, buttercup. You're going to be fine. One step at a time. Take the action now. Stop delaying and expecting good results to just happen. Work with God, not against Him. Go with the flow. Don't swim upstream. Don't make it harder than it has to be, and certainly don't wait around and a year from now, find yourself in the exact same place. Whatever it is you need to take charge of. Do it. You will feel so much freer. Your mind will be less cluttered, too.

You know, May is mental health awareness month, and I didn't really call it out because even though I was aware of it, and I knew it was, I wasn't really concerned about it because it's kind of like always mental health awareness month for me. But there is something that I do want to talk to you about, which is really about our nervous systems and how they are primed from such a young age and how the things that you trip over today, the things that trigger you, the things that hurt you, the things that scare you, the things that depress you or cause you anxiety or anger are often rooted so much earlier, before you even know that your nervous system encoded them and came up with these amazing strategies for survival.

When we think about going back in time to the pieces that make us up as we are today, of course, there is our spiritual core, and that is, I believe, the part that is God breathed. And then when we get saved, he saves us from our humanness, but that our soul, our spirit are His. They are saved, and they're covered in the blood of Jesus and redeemed. That's what I believe is our true self. However, we also have this human experience that is also reality. It is where we are right now. It is the experience that we are having, and that human experience is also sacred. God made our bodies. God made our minds. God made our personalities. He made our makeup and the way that the body makes us up, so to speak, is through our thoughts and our connections throughout our body, in our nervous system.

We have a lot of different chemicals that fire, give messages, and tell things what to do. We can think about our arm moving or that we need to move our arm, and it can do it. We can naturally focus on things if our eyesight is working well to be able to see far away or up close, or we can alter that through glasses because we're trying to help ourselves. There are often ways to correct for things that we're having difficulty with. When it's something like an arm, a broken leg, or eyesight that we can do something about that's concrete, it's easy to see.

But what we can't see are the things from such a young age that impacted our nervous system. For example, were your cries attended to by a loving caregiver consistently from the time of birth until you were a toddler? Did somebody meet your needs when you didn't have the words to ask for it? Did they come to your cries? Did they console you when you were hurting? Did they bring peace and regulation, or did they ignore you? Because that's still in your nervous system.  Your nervous system will know whether you have been cared for predictably and dependably, even though you probably don't remember back to being a baby. You may not trust other people, and it can go all the way back to the attachment you had with your caregivers in infancy.

Let's say that went well and you now know that my basic needs are met, and then we step it up to the toddler years, and you're starting to learn whether you can really branch out safely, whether you're safe to go on your own, and yet still have help if you need it. Healthy secure toddlers will be able to go explore but keep the parental unit or the caregiver in sight or in mind. They can go away and they can come back and they know that there's this ebb and flow that is healthy, that their back, they still, you know, someone still has their back. Then if that's not there, if they're insecure, that attachment can follow them the rest of their lives, too. It can be something where in romantic relationships later, you feel desperate, like, please don't leave me or I'm going to be abandoned and I'm not safe without you. Or if you've had a trauma where you really were not seen, not cared for, not heard, left alone, frightened, then you learned other lessons that got encoded into your nervous system.

Your nervous system is brilliant. It is here for you to survive. Then you look at the things that happened during the elementary years. How were you perceived by classmates? How were you perceived by the teacher? How were you taken care of at home? How did you feel about different things? The labels you started to get...sometimes those are the years where people start to get messages about themselves, like they're no good or they're always trouble, or they always want something and they're a bother, or they don't read well enough, or they're no good at math or whatever. There may be some truth to some talent type things. There are people who are more language-based learners and people who are more math-based learners, but people seldom have taken the time to really say, but that isn't a deficit in you. This is just your strength area, and we can also enjoy this other area and continue to also cultivate our strengths, and you are great.

However you've been created, whatever your design is, is okay, you are loved, you're acceptable. Every kid is a genius in their own way, but if no one ever comes alongside and says, you don't have to be good at this because you're good at that, everybody is good at something. Then comparisons are in there and that is something that once it starts, unless you nip that root out of there, it can continue to bother you for the rest of your life. You have to some point intentionally say, I am not going to fall to comparisons. I'm not going to be defined by other people. I am defined only by God, and I am enough because He is enough, and He doesn't make mistakes. When you can stand in that and have peace in that, that's a very solid ground to be on.

Our nervous system remembers rejection or ridicule or not feeling good enough, and it wants to compensate for it. Then you bring on the middle school years and oh my goodness, there's so many changes going on hormonally and socially and you're trying to figure out how to make that next leap into the next development period. In some ways you're still wanting to hold on to being a kid or you can't wait to get rid of the kid stuff and really be taken seriously, so there's struggle there.

Then we all know what the high school years can be like and the peer pressure and the coming into our own and trying to find our voice. Before we know it, oftentimes what people do is they end up making decisions about their life, whether they'll marry or not, what education they'll have, what they're going to do for a living, and where they're going to live. Sometimes those choices don't turn out so well, or they do for a time and then they don't or they're great. You know, it is possible to have a lot of great things. 

Overall, all of this goes into a nervous system that remembers. Your nervous system remembers any traffic accidents you had when you first learned to drive. It remembers any time where you had hoped for somebody older and wiser to give you a stamp of approval, and instead you were met with criticism or rejection or somebody who didn't get it. It remembers every time you felt safe or felt threatened. It is trying to predict the future based on all of this input that happened through all of these different relationship stages, developmental stages, and needs that were there and whether they were met or not.

So, it's really common for people to all of a sudden wake up and realize something's wrong here. What affected me so much? Some people's coping skills and ways of dealing with it, decide I'm going to deny it, move on, and not look back as if those that are affected shouldn't let it bother them like they're just wasting time and are wimps or something like that. Maybe they tell themselves, you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going. Sometimes people get stuck there and wallow and they're like, woe is me and I never had anything good, and I'll never get past this. Sometimes it's a bit of both, right?

The healthiest way when you acknowledge something isn't giving you peace and joy is to figure out what's happening here and do I need help with it, need more education, or need to take personal responsibility to change something or get more skills? What do I need to do to be responsible for me, so that I don't cause damage to other people's nervous systems, nor do I prolong my suffering here with what my nervous system has learned to try to manage and deal with. It can look different than how it looks at first glance, right? It can look like maybe trusting somebody you wouldn't normally trust, or realizing there's a problem when you didn't think there was or realizing that you're not the problem and maybe it was your environment that was the problem, or maybe the people you were around were the ones who were toxic. We have to kind of figure out where the lies got in there about you and where the lies and the not helpful coping skills came from. 

They probably served well at some point.

Your coping skills probably served you well at some point, but when they start to not work in certain situations or they themselves start to hurt, that's often when people need to call for counseling because they don't know what to do anymore. The way they manage things isn't working anymore, and they don't have anything else to rely on oftentimes because they thought they had it. Sometimes people think I am going to find my value in dating, and then they find that they're put down in dating, and that didn't work. So now what? Or I'll find my value in just rising up the corporate ladder, and then they get laid off, or they don't actually like their job, and they're like, well, that didn't work for me. These times where we have to reevaluate are not failure. It's a learning experience. All of life is a learning and growing experience, a refining a journey, and we both get hurt and we heal.

Just like with that arm, that is so easy to fix with a cast, we can see that as a concrete example. But when we move forward, we can do that in other things, in other ways in life, we don't have to constantly be stuck. We can take these certain actions that teach us different outcomes, that tell us the truth, that help us to regulate our nervous systems, that help us to see ourselves more clearly and say no to the things that are hurting us and breaking us down. Instead, we can get something like a cast through support from other people, through our faith, through telling ourselves the truth, through going through trauma therapy, through learning new tools and reading more books, listening to more podcasts, and applying it. Life does not have to cause undue distress forever. It just doesn't. But you have to do something different to get something different.

When people have such horrific things repeatedly, over time, they might have what's called chronic PTSD. So, PTSD would be the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. That's like replays in your head, feeling like you're back in time, feeling like something present is still connected to something that happened in the past, but you don't know that the past is over. It feels like it's this continuing thing that follows you. If that's happened repeatedly during your development or your growing up years, where you continually had trauma, it can really wreak post-traumatic stress, and then they call that CPTSD because that chronic nature, that ongoing nature, is harmful. We get used to those things, and we don't even realize to challenge them.

So, I want you to take a look at where in your life you're struggling today and see what patterns might have come from way back. What experiences does this remind you of? When did you feel like this previously? Because that is the wound or the hurt that may need to be healed. It's pretty easy if there is a one-time big trauma like a car wreck, and you can put the casts on the arm and the leg to heal those, but if you have a trauma and, in your mind, you can't stop hearing the horn blaring, tires screeching, someone screaming, or anything like that, it is still causing you triggers and pain. That kind of situation is a one-time trauma, but it still has invisible expressions. It needs a cast; it needs support. Even though you can't see it and it's not tangible like an arm or a leg, if untreated, it can cause more mental health issues. It can make anxiety worse; it can make depression worse. It can just bring on a whole host of things in the body and the mind and even mess with your spiritual life.

So, I just want to encourage you that mental health awareness month is not the way I want to focus on it for you because we're not talking mental illness, although it is illness when something is not well in our system, in our nervous system, in our mind, in our relationships, it can cause us to feel sick or to be sick or to act sick. So mental wellness, mental health is to recognize when we're showing symptoms of hurt, pain, or trauma to our nervous systems because of the history of what we've lived through and survived, we get help now to heal the stuff from the past, heal us in the present, and help us to go forward in the future a lot healthier than we are today.

If something is troublesome today, don't beat yourself up for it. There's no point to that. Take a look with compassion and grace to see what you've lived through and how that may have been something you strategized with to try to keep yourself safe and surviving. I'll bet there are more threads there that you'll notice if you look at it through that lens. If that's the case, then you'll know what's still needed, what needs to be healed, or what type of help might be beneficial.