E20 | When Self-Help Is Not Enough: What I Found When I Finally Opened the Bible

You read the books. You went to therapy. You journaled, processed, grew, and did everything the personal development world told you to do. 

And something is still missing. Not because the work was wrong. Because there is a question underneath all of it that none of it could answer. 

Am I actually known by something larger than all of this? 

This episode is for the woman who has tried everything available and still feels like one piece is not quite in place. 

What changed when the Bible stopped being something she circled from a distance and became something she actually opened. 

And what it says about who she is that nothing else could tell her.

Here is the free guide mentioned on today's episode: The Story She Keeps Telling Herself. It is a truth-and-lie finder for the woman who is ready to stop believing everything the middle has told her about who she is and who she will become. My gift to you!

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

She is standing in front of the bookshelf. You know the one. The one with the highlighted spines and the dog-eared pages with sticky notes still hanging out of the chapters she went back to twice. Every single one of those books helped her. She is not being dramatic when she says that. She did the work. She read every word. She applied it. She grew. And she is still standing there right now looking at all of it like something feels empty, hollow even. Not broken, not wrong, just hollow. But she just finished a meal that looked exactly right on the plate, and she's still sitting at the table wondering Why she doesn't feel full. And the thing she doesn't wanna say out loud because it sounds ungrateful and she knows better, and she's done too much work to go backwards is this: something is still missing. Not a new book. She has the books. Not a better framework. She's tried four of those. Not more journaling. Her journals are full. Something underneath all of it. Something none of it could reach. And today we're gonna name what that is because if you are standing in front of your own version of that bookshelf right now, This episode is the one you didn't know you were waiting for Before I go any further, I wanna say something clearly and with love. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a counselor. I'm a woman who has been in the middle of her own story and found something she couldn't stop talking about. What I share here is not a substitute for professional support. If you are in a season where therapy is what you need, please go. Please take that seriously. That work is sacred, and it isn't in competition with anything I'm I'm going to say here today. What I am offering is something different: one woman's testimony and the voice that changed everything for her. Here's what I know about the work I did before I found what I was actually looking for. It helped me genuinely. Every book I read, every therapy session I sat through, every honest conversation I had with someone who was willing to tell me the truth. The personal development world gave me language for things I'd been living without words for years. It gave me a framework for patterns I had been running on repeat without realizing it. I'm a teacher, and I love a good framework. I love knowing why something works, and those books gave me that. But somewhere in the middle of all of that work, I hit a wall I I couldn't framework myself out of. The books could diagnose a story. They could show me where a pattern started. They could give me tools to interrupt it, but they couldn't tell me who I was underneath all of it. They couldn't give me an identity that didn't depend on my own performance or someone else's opinion of me, and I'm a people pleaser from way back, so that was a problem. they could point me toward healing, but they couldn't give me a source of truth that existed outside of myself, and there was still a question sitting at the bottom of everything that nothing I was reading could touch. Am I actually known? Not understood by another human being who is also figuring it out, but actually known by something larger than all of this, by someone who was there before the wound and the story and every chapter I had spent years trying to heal from. That question is what brought me to the edge of something I'd been circling for a long time. And here's what finally answered that question. Not a new book, not a better framework, not a more advanced version of the work I had already been doing. It was the Bible. And before you close this app let me tell you something. I, I wasn't someone who just opened it easily. I had been circling it for years. It felt like something that was for people who had grown up in church their whole life, people who had already had the language, people who their faith felt solid and settled in a way that mine never quite did. I grew up with faith in my home, but I had spent a really long time as an adult doing a lot of things that looked like faith from the outside and feeling like something was still not adding up on the inside. I didn't feel qualified to just open the Bible and expect to find myself in it, but I did. And what I found was not a rule book, not a performance checklist, not a list of everything I was doing wrong. A voice that said, "I knew you before any of this happened. I knew you before the heartbreak and the waiting and the chapters that didn't make sense. I knew you before you had a single word to say for yourself." And that was completely different from what the books were offering me. The books were helping me understand the story I'd been living. This voice was offering me a new one. And I need you to hear that distinction because it changed everything Here is what I found in the Bible about who you are. Not as a theology lecturer or theologian, which is one of the words I've learned as of late, but as a woman who found something she was not expecting and hasn't been able to stop talking about since. The Bible says you were known before you were born. Jeremiah chapter 1 says, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." That knowing wasn't contingent on your performance or your healing or how well you've handled the hard chapters or even a hard Monday It came before all of it, before you had a chance to get anything right or wrong. He already knew you. The Bible says you are fearfully and wonderfully made. Psalm 139 says, "Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it very well." The version of you that is still in process, still healing, still figuring it out, that version is not a lesser draft waiting to be finalized or perfected or tweaked. She's wonderful right now in this chapter. Now, here is where I have to stop and get specific because I think this is the part where that is easy to hear and hard to actually receive. Even after I found all of this, even after I had the verses and the church community and every reason in the world to just open my hands and let go of what was hurting me, I kept gripping it tighter. Here is how I picture it. I had a thorny rose in my hand, and God was trying to take it from me, and every time he reached for it, I held onto it harder. Not because I didn't know it was hurting me. I knew. The thorns were drawing blood. The, the harder I gripped, the more it would cut. But letting go felt like losing something, and my hands didn't know how to do what my mind was telling them to do. The rose was beautiful. That is the part I need you to sit with for a second. It wasn't something ugly I was holding. It was something that had been real, a relationship that had genuinely beautiful moments and meanings, a dream that I had carried for years, an expectation I had built my whole future around A version of my life I had prayed for and planned for and could almost touch. And then the page turned the chapter closed. Not because it wasn't real, not because it didn't matter, but because it was finished. God had already written the next page, and I was still standing on the old one, refusing to move my feet. You don't grip something tightly because it meant nothing. You grip it because it meant everything, and somewhere in you, the idea of opening your hand feels like you're saying it didn't matter. like agreeing it was not worth keeping. But that's not what open hands mean. Open hands don't mean the thing didn't matter. They mean you trust the one asking you to release it more than you trust your own grip. My mind understood that before my heart did, before my habits did, before the little girl in me did. The one who learned early that holding on felt safer than letting someone take things from her. Even when the thorns were drawing blood, even when everyone around her could see it was time, she held on because holding on was what she knew how to do. That little girl is in a lot of us, and she doesn't need to be shamed into opening her hand. She needs to learn that the one asking for the rose is safe, that he is not taking it to hurt her, that what comes next is worth the release. Finding the truth and living from it are not the same moment. There's a gap between them, and that gap is not failure. It's just what it looks like to be human in the middle of healing. The Bible says you're not defined by what has happened to you. Romans 8 says, "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." The story of your wounds doesn't have the final word on who you are. It is one chapter, not the book. The Bible says you are being made new. 2 Corinthians 5 says, "If anyone is in Christ, she is a new creation. The old has passed away and the new has come." You're not stuck in the version of yourself that the hard chapters produced. You're being made into someone new daily. It is already in motion right now, even in this chapter, and that is what the books couldn't give me. Not because they were bad, because this is something different entirely. This is a voice that knows me specifically, that was present before the wound, that was still present in the healing, that doesn't require me to earn my way into being known So if you've been here before And as I take a, just a deep breath and a pause, like my students who have found my podcast and now are listening, and if they listen to this, this is my little nod to them that we're gonna take that momentary pause, the Selah. And if you've been here before, then you know what we do during this time. And if it's your first time, I wanna welcome you This is where we take a pause, we breathe, and we write one word. It could be a thought. All depends what pops into your mind when you hear the question. And whatever it is, you're right on time. So the question is, what are you still gripping that you already know it is time to hand over? And if you're driving or walking right now, hold that word or thought in your mind. Come back to it. Write it down when you can. Because the fact that a word or thought came up means something. You already know. You've known for a while. The question is just whether you're ready to trust the one who is asking for it. And here is what I want to say directly to you before we move forward. Open hands are not empty hands. They are hands that are finally free to receive what comes next. Your hands aren't busy holding onto that thorny rose or that pain or that wound or that trauma, but you're letting go to receive, to receive what is for you in this next chapter on the next page. And there is something I put together for exactly this moment. It is called the story she is telling herself. Because here's what I've learned working with women in this space The reason we grip so hard is not just emotion. It is the story grinding underneath the grip. The one that says, "If I let go, I lose." The one that says, "I have to hold on or nobody will." The one that says, "Maybe God forgot about this part of my life." The story she is telling herself is a guide that helps you identify the story underneath the grip and begins to replace it with what God actually says about you. It is in the show notes, it is free, and it is my gift to you. And if this episode found you at the right moment, that guide is your next step. So take it, download it, sit with it, let it ask the questions underneath all the other questions Because here's what I know about the woman who has done all the work and still feels like something is missing. She doesn't feel forgotten in the dramatic way. She's not in crisis. She's not falling apart. She's showing up. She's doing the things. She's holding it together. But underneath all of that, there's this quiet ache, a sense that She's been faithful and consistent, and something still hasn't moved the way she thought it would by now. And she doesn't wanna say that out loud because it sounds ungrateful, because she knows she has things to be thankful for, because she doesn't want to be the woman who complains when other people have it harder. So she keeps it inside, keeps doing the work, keeps showing up in hopes that eventually the feeling will catch up with the effort. This is for her. This is for you. You aren't forgotten. The ache you've been carrying quietly is not evidence that God has moved on or that you're somehow outside the reach of what He's doing. It is evidence that you're in the middle, and the middle is the hardest place to trust the author because you can't see where the chapter is going. But He sees it, and He's not lost, and He has not lost your page. You've been working hard to find what you're looking for. But believe me, it has been looking for you longer than you have been looking for it. So if you're in the middle of doing all the right things and still feeling like something is missing, here is what that might be. Not more work, not a better framework, not the next book on the list. A voice that knows you specifically, that was there before any of this, that has something to say about who you are, that no human being can fully give you. And if you are still gripping that rose, the relationship, the dream, the expectation, the version of your life you thought was coming, if your hand still has not figured out how to do what your heart already knows it needs to do, That is okay. He is patient. He's not pulling harder to make it hurt more. He is waiting for you to be ready, and He will still be there when you are. The story she is telling herself is waiting for you in the show notes. Take it, let it meet you where the work left off. And before you leave, as always, I want you to remember that you are seen, you are loved, And your story is still being written in His hands. Until next time, grace and peace