I’ve said for years that sometimes I have to wait for my heart to catch up with what my brain already knows is true.
My brain knows:
I am chosen.
I am loved.
God is faithful.
God has not abandoned me.
And yet sometimes one small thing happens and everything inside me immediately responds with:
🚨 EVERYBODY TO YOUR STATIONS. WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY. 🚨
Meanwhile, Jesus is probably looking at me like:
Jenni. It was a normal Tuesday. 😂
The older I get—and the longer I walk with Jesus—the better I become at recognizing that my feelings are not always telling me the truth.
The feelings are real.
The fear is real.
The anxiety is real.
But the conclusion attached to those feelings may not be true at all.
Silence can feel like rejection.
Distance can feel like abandonment.
Uncertainty can make me believe something bad is about to happen.
A change in someone’s behavior can send my brain searching through every conversation, facial expression, punctuation mark, and possible interpretation for evidence of what I did wrong.
Y’all. 🤦♀️
I can build an entire court case out of a three-word text message.
There will be exhibits.
There will be witnesses.
There will probably be color-coded categories.
And there will absolutely be tears because I cry over every stinking emotion.
Happy? I cry.
Sad? I cry.
Angry? Definitely crying.
Someone says something mildly touching on a random Tuesday?
Here come the tears.
It’s a gift. 🤷♀️
But lately, I’ve found myself asking a deeper question.
Not simply:
Is this feeling true?
But:
Why can something I know isn’t true still feel so true?
Sometimes a season ends long before we stop carrying what it taught us to believe.
I think I am beginning to understand some of what I have been carrying.
What Did My Heart Learn?
I don’t think our deepest beliefs are always formed in one dramatic moment.
Sometimes they develop slowly.
A little here.
A little there.
A painful experience.
A misunderstood moment.
A season that reinforces something our hearts had already begun to believe.
Eventually, those beliefs settle so deeply inside us that we stop recognizing them as beliefs. They simply become the way we interpret the world.
Somewhere along the way, I learned that love and acceptance were connected to doing.
Be helpful.
Be dependable.
Remember the birthdays.
Check on everyone.
Keep people connected.
Plan ahead.
Anticipate what might go wrong.
Become someone people can count on.
Those are not bad things. I genuinely love people deeply. I enjoy encouraging others, remembering the little things, and showing up when someone needs me.
But sometimes a beautiful quality can carry an old fear underneath it.
Sometimes being dependable quietly becomes:
If I am useful enough, maybe I will remain important.
Sometimes maintaining connection becomes:
If something changes, I need to figure out what I did wrong and fix it.
Sometimes planning becomes:
If I can control enough of the details, maybe nothing will catch me off guard.
For years, I lived anxiously without realizing I was anxious.
I planned every minute.
There were calendars.
There was color coding.
There was a plan for the plan.
There was absolutely no room for spontaneous fun because, hello, we already had a schedule. Why are we suddenly changing it? 🤦♀️
Planning gave me a sense of control.
Control felt like peace.
But it wasn’t really peace because it depended upon life cooperating with the plan.
Then life went off the plan.
Completely. 😭
And when the plan could no longer hold everything together, the anxiety it had been hiding became impossible to ignore.
Knowing About God
I have always believed God is who He says He is.
I have always believed the Bible is His Word.
I have always believed Jesus is the Son of God who died for my sins.
But believing in someone and having an intimate relationship with them are two very different things.
In January 2012, I started my first blog, Journey to Ordinary. In one of my earliest posts, I called myself a “sketchy Christian.”
I wrote:
“I know the gist of God, I believe in God… However, I am learning that I do not KNOW God.”
I knew about Him.
I believed in Him.
I knew enough to run to Him when life became hard.
But I had not spent enough time with Him to know Him as the foundation of my everyday life.
I had expected people—and especially my marriage—to carry weight that only God was ever meant to carry.
No human being could live up to that expectation.
When my life fell apart, I began to realize that I didn’t merely need God to fix my circumstances.
I needed to know Him.
So I began spending time with Him.
I opened my Bible.
I prayed.
I asked questions.
A million questions, because apparently that is simply who I am.
I argued.
I learned.
I watched Him provide.
I watched Him remain faithful when absolutely nothing went according to my plan.
And little by little, knowing about God became knowing God.
Not perfectly. Not without questions. But personally. ❤️
The Old Alarm ⏰
Fourteen years of walking with Jesus have changed the foundation of my life.
But changing the foundation didn’t automatically erase every belief formed before it.
My brain knows I am safe with God.
My brain knows another person’s silence does not determine my worth.
My brain knows someone needing space does not automatically mean I am being punished.
My brain knows I do not have to change who I am to earn love.
My brain knows people are human, relationships are complicated, and every uncomfortable moment is not an emergency.
But sometimes my heart still hears an old alarm. ⏰
Something has changed.
You must have done something wrong.
You need to figure it out.
You need to fix it.
The shoe is about to drop.
And for approximately two days, the Hot Mess Express leaves the station.
I overthink.
I replay everything about a million times.
I try to solve the problem.
I present God with several possible solutions He may not have considered.
I argue with Him.
I throw a tantrum.
I cry.
I become frustrated because He is not following the perfectly reasonable plan I created for Him.
But I do not leave God. ❤️
Even my tantrums happen in His presence now.
That may be one of the greatest differences between the woman I was in 2012 and the woman I am today.
Back then, I mostly reached for God when everything collapsed.
Today, I take the entire collapse directly to Him—even when I am still stubbornly trying to supervise what He does with it.
Eventually, I get tired.
Not because I suddenly receive a dramatic answer.
Not because every question is resolved.
Not because a worship song begins playing at the perfect moment and everything instantly makes sense.
I simply get tired of not being at peace.
Anxiety feels horrible.
I have lived that way before, and I have zero desire to live there again.
So eventually, I stop trying to solve what I cannot control.
I stop arguing.
I loosen my grip.
And I return to what I already know:
God’s got this. ❤️
I may visit anxiety occasionally, but I don’t live there anymore.
Fully Known
Underneath all the planning, overthinking, and fear is a question I am still learning to answer:
What if being fully myself eventually becomes too much?
What if I ask one question too many?
What if I feel too deeply?
What if my optimism is annoying?
What if my emotions are exhausting?
What if someone sees the whole Hot Mess Express and decides they no longer want a ticket?
After the panic settles and my heart begins catching up with what my brain already knows, I always land in the same place:
God knows exactly who I am. 🌸
Hot Mess Express.
Asker of a million questions.
Annoyingly optimistic.
Overly emotional.
Stubborn.
Soooooo STUBBORN! 🤦♀️
A woman who can surrender something to God and then return fourteen seconds later with categories and follow-up questions.
He knows all of me.
And because of Jesus, I am still chosen.
Still loved.
Still wanted.
Not simply tolerated.
Not reluctantly retained.
Not placed on divine probation until I become less Jenni.
Fully known and completely loved. ❤️
I have not always known how to receive love. If I’m honest, I’m still not very good at it. But God has never stopped finding tangible ways to show it to me.
When I look back across my life, I can see evidence of His love everywhere.
Even before I knew how to have a relationship with Him, He was already loving me.
He was already providing.
He was already placing people in my life who showed me tenderness, safety, and acceptance.
The painful things were real.
But they were never the whole story.
Search Me
Psalm 139:23–24 (NIV) says:
“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
God does not need to search me because He lacks information.
He already knows every broken place.
He knows where every belief began.
He knows why certain situations still make my heart panic, even when my brain knows better.
I need Him to search me because I need Him to reveal what He already sees.
Maybe I cannot see what I have spent years carefully stepping around until I am finally willing to let God show me where the root is. 🤔
And maybe healing does not mean I will never hear the old alarm again.
Maybe healing looks like recognizing it sooner.
Maybe it means allowing the feeling to be real without allowing it to become the truth.
Maybe it means carrying the fear into the presence of Jesus—even if I arrive with an attitude, a tantrum, and several proposed solutions.
Maybe it means remembering that I do not have to earn love by being useful, dependable, agreeable, or easy.
Maybe it means learning that I can simply be loved.
I don’t have all of this resolved.
My heart still needs time to catch up sometimes.
Sigh…
But I know where I eventually land.
I am fully known.
I am chosen.
I am loved.
I am wanted by God.
And when the old fear tells me otherwise, I can carry it back to Jesus and let Him remind me:
I don’t live there anymore. ❤️
I’m glad you’re here.
— Jenni 🌸
Known – Tauren Wells
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