Roaming the halls of office building, church aisles, and the local Texas HEB is a woman who is always strong.
She's the woman who is up early and stays late and makes sure everything is ready to go. And if others don't have the time and space, you can almost always count on her to figure it out and make it happen. Sometimes she's out in front leading; other times she's at the back of the room watching. She can be loud or quiet; shy or the life of the party. And you know her. In fact, you may be her.
I was shocked.
I thought, "How can he say that about her?" The woman in question was extremely skilled and capable. A leader. An innovator. A heart-to-Jesus teacher.
And then, I heard another man say the same thing. About HIS wife.
And the statement that stumped me? "She doesn't have much capacity."
I'd never heard men speak about their wives in that way before, and I wondered, "What's wrong with those men?" It kind of offended me for the women's' sakes. I mean, aren't all women just taking care of whatever business needs to be taken care of?
It never occurred to me that those men might be right about the women in their lives. Not because their wives weren't capable, but because they have a different internal limit of what they can carry emotionally and mentally.
And this baffled me. My personal motto? "Pick yourself up by the bootstraps and get it done." It doesn't matter if your heart hurts, your body is weary or there is a crisis. Make. It. Happen.
All women juggle. Not all women juggle the same things. And it doesn't make one woman better than another. But it does often color how they see the world.
Are you the woman who says, "I'll figure it out" when faced with a challenge or opportunity?
I bet you've even learned to switch out the word 'problem' for the word 'challenge.' You're the woman who eats challenges for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That, in fact, obstacles and challenges are the place you get more fuel for living. If you aren't learning something new, you may even feel a bit stale.
Would you be like me and tell yourself, "I can figure it out" if you have to learn something new? On top of that, would you keep it to yourself if you didn't know how? Yet. And then spend hours behind the scenes watching videos and reading books and scouring the internet for tutorials? Just so you can walk in the next day proficient and knowledgeable?
Welcome to the world of the high-capacity, ambitious, never-say-die woman. Who is likely carrying around a fear of failure, or of looking stupid, or not wanting anyone to think she's weak, or frail, or incapable.
There is an emotional toll to holding the position of the always-strong woman.
Because if you are the one everyone goes to for support and strength and answers and reliability, where do you go when you don't feel steady?
A lot of us pick up some unhealthy habits. More, just ignore the stress until they find themselves in the ER with a panic attack. But some have begun the work of balancing the identity of a strong woman and unmasking the myth of having it all together.
Some of us are born resilient. It's our DNA. However, most have learned resilience as a survival instinct because we believed no one was coming to help us or rescue us.
Unfortunately, you can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You never ask for help, so those around you don't think to help.
I have a dead tree in my yard. It was an amazing beauty until the snowmaggedon winter storm in February 2021. It recovered a bit and then, just after soft spring leaves appeared, we had another deep freeze. The summer brought a drought with just-this-side-of-hell temps. And that was its demise.
Oh. It tried. It really did. A few brave stems rose up from the heart, but there wasn't anything inside to feed them.
I was worried the spring and summer thunderstorms would bring some of the larger limbs crashing down on my neighbor's house. $600 later, and most of the limbs were gone. But there's one stout barrel of a branch that's just over my storage building. And it's got me eyeing it watchfully.
When my son and I were bringing Christmas decorations in from the storage building, I noticed something had been digging at the base of the tree. Possum, maybe? Looking for bugs? And then yesterday, I saw that something had been a bit more aggressive and part of the trunk is dug out.
That tree trunk is soft and damaged. And on those remaining branches, the bark is starting to come away and fall to the ground. The outside bears the marks of the years of struggle. It put up a good fight. And maybe if I'd known what to do, I might have been able to save it. But now, it needs to be removed completely.
If we aren't careful, that tree's experience can be our story, too.
We thrive. But then hit after hit after hit can crack our core faith and belief. And when that happens, we're trying to survive on our own.
Uncovered, we are prey.
My tree is now the habitat of ants and parasites and a heart grown cold.
But the damage began long before the snow and heat and drought.
Woodpeckers. Beautiful red-headed woodpeckers filled the upper branches with holes and opened the wood to invasion.
There are places in all of us, that leave us open to prey.
But when you are strong and capable and the dependable one, it's easy to ignore those seemingly unimportant attacks. We don't have time for those, right?
But left unattended, our emotions, carefully hidden, deeply and intentionally kept out of the spotlight, become the fuel of destruction. And if we aren't careful, we too will have a heart that's grown cold.
How do we balance it all then?
Well, Sister, first we have to admit there is an issue. I didn't know woodpeckers were bad for trees. Until I did. I'm fairly certain I couldn't have done anything about the damage because it had been going on for years before the tree became my responsibility. But once I knew, I could easily see the damage they'd done.
Next, I believe it's important to discover why we think it's so important to be strong. I'm not talking about doing a deep dive into your childhood years, but recognizing how the pattern developed and how it continues can be a good thing. For me, it began because my mom was not well when I was little. Somewhere I developed the belief I had to take care of myself. Right or wrong, there it is.
And you have an 'origin story' too.
For the Christian woman, our next step is to take that to the Word of God, to prayer, to the Presence of the Lord and find out what He says about that. It's just possible that not only are we locking out people, we're locking out God.
Beyond that, talking to women who understand the passion that drives the vision that drives me, made an enormous difference.
I'd be honored to be that woman for you.
Let's talk about it, okay?
Because you can remain the woman God made you. You'll just do it from the right place of strength instead of a crumbling core.
