White Knuckles and No Plan

Spoiler: I am not faithful under pressure.

Shocking, I know. Take a moment. Collect yourself.

I try. I genuinely, desperately try. I try to stand on my own two feet and figure out every plan, every contingency route, every problem and roadblock before it even shows up at my door. I have what I've come to affectionately call my spiral technique — a uniquely special trauma response where I can vividly envision every single problem six steps ahead of whatever is currently happening around me. Like a really stressful gift. One I did not ask for. One I would like to return.

And then foster care showed up. Didn't so much show up, as coming slamming into my husband and I.

Oh, foster care. The gift that keeps giving — in chaos, in heartbreak, in growth I absolutely did not sign up for but apparently needed. Because if you want to stress-test a person's tendency to spiral, put a teenager in their home who has survived more in fifteen years than most people face in a lifetime. Put her there, and then watch what happens when your plans meet her pain head-on.

It...was not pretty.

I want to give a very large, very public muffin basket to my therapist Dana, who sat with me through every frantic spiral session and helped me untangle what was mine and what wasn't. And I want to pray an even larger prayer of gratitude to Jesus, who never once left my side — who, if I'm being fully honest, knew exactly what He was doing when He called me into this. He called me to this crazy, long, drawn-out, painful journey knowing full well He was going to have to teach me an exceptional amount through suffering. Because if you haven't picked it up yet — and maybe you're just meeting me, so welcome — it took me thirty-two years to figure out that I cannot be faithful under pressure without my Savior.

Buckle in, because there's a second spoiler coming.

Neither can you.

You. My beautiful, exhausted reader who might be up at 11pm reading this because you don't know what else to do. The foster mom whose teenager snuck out again last night. Whose kid didn't go to class today. Who stole a car, or got caught stealing from Walmart, or is currently sitting in police custody — and you are sitting somewhere trying to hold it together while the world pulls at you from every direction.

You've been trying so hard. And I'm not saying that to be nice. I'm saying it because I know exactly what it looks like to white-knuckle your way through a crisis, to grip your own plan so tight your hands go numb, to Google the right thing to say and read every book and take every training and still lie awake at 3am wondering if you are actively making it worse. All those examples above, HI, I lived through each and every one of those. Good times.

You can try that. I did. For 1,642 days, in fact, I tried some version of that — white-knuckling the chaos, managing the spiral, strategizing my way out of situations that had no strategy. Some of those days I got it right. Most of them I got it partially right, partially wrong, and completely exhausted.

But here is what I know — the one thing I kept coming back to every single time I ran out of plan, every time the six-steps-ahead thinking crashed into a wall, every time I landed on my face in a situation I couldn't fix: The only cycle breaker I know for sure — the only one who can restore, redeem, and rectify His children — is our Savior.

Not the trauma-informed framework.

Not the right consequence delivered with the right tone.

Not the therapist (though, Dana, your muffin basket is still enormous and you are a gift).

Not me with a better plan and a tighter grip.

Him.

Fall. I mean it — fall to your knees. Not with a speech. Not with a twelve-point prayer and a highlighted journal and a plan for how the conversation goes afterward. Fall with nothing in your voice but a whisper. A whimper. No plan at all. Just the bare, unpolished, completely-undone-in-front-of-God reality of where you actually are.

He'll meet you there.

I know that because He met me there. Every single time. In the car after a court hearing that went sideways. In the kitchen after a blowup I didn't see coming. In the dark at 4am when my brain was already six steps into the spiral and my chest felt like it was made of concrete. He met me there, and He met me there, and He met me there — 1,642 days worth of there — until I finally, finally recognized it.

I'm nothing without my Savior.

And you know what? That feels so good to say.

Not because being nothing is the goal. But because when you're nothing, He gets to be everything. When I stopped trying to white-knuckle the outcome and started falling — just falling, with no agenda and no plan — something shifted. I wasn't less capable. I wasn't less present. I was actually more. Because I stopped trying to be the source of something I was never designed to produce alone.

So wherever you are tonight — in the middle, in the aftermath, in the eye of a storm that hasn't broken yet — you don't have to have a plan. You don't have to fix it tonight. You don't have to know the right next step or the right next word or the right way to hold this.

You just have to fall. He'll be there when you do. He always is.

1,642 days of proof says so.