One ordinary Saturday morning, my husband said three words that should have been entirely harmless.
“We need to…”
Whatever came after them hardly mattered. Before he finished, I was already preparing to do what needed doing.
There was no conversation with myself about whether I wanted to help, no pause to consider what I had planned for the morning. I heard a need, and years of practice took over. I had become remarkably skilled at setting aside my own plans to do what needed doing, especially when no one else stepped forward. Sometimes I volunteered before anyone even asked.
It was only afterward, as I turned toward what I had wanted to do, that the frustration hit.
Why do I keep doing this? I was just tired of it, tired of watching myself respond before I’d even considered what I wanted, and not yet sure why I kept doing it or how to stop.
Not tired of helping my husband. That wasn’t the issue. I was tired of how quickly I could abandon my own intentions without even noticing I had made a choice.
And what made it worse was that I thought I had learned something about this already.
Not long before, I had stood in my mother’s kitchen during a family gathering and done what once seemed nearly impossible. When an expectation arose that would ordinarily have sent me into action, I had said no.
Nothing terrible happened. My mother simply asked someone else to help.
I could hardly believe it.
For years, I had lived as though disappointing someone might threaten the relationship itself. Yet there I stood, having expressed what I wanted, and the people I loved were still there. The discovery had been wonderfully freeing.
I had begun to believe I could remain connected without automatically becoming whatever someone else needed.
The experience reminded me of driving along a road with deep ruts worn into its surface. You can steer onto the smoother pavement, but if your tires have spent enough time in those grooves, slipping back into them seems almost effortless.
That’s how these familiar responses felt. I could recognize them, sometimes even choose differently, and still find myself back in the same old place before I knew what had happened.
Worse, I had become very good at shaming myself for it.
There was an almost immediate internal conversation whenever I recognized that I’d fallen back into an old pattern. You know better than this. You’ve already dealt with this. Why can’t you just get it right?
Then came the familiar determination to try harder.
The irony wasn’t lost on me, at least not for long. I was attempting to free myself from years of striving by becoming even more determined to succeed.
I was frustrated, disappointed, and beginning to wonder whether anything had really changed. Those earlier experiences with Jesus had felt so significant. I’d begun discovering that my heart mattered, that I could make choices without securing everyone’s approval, and that there might be a different way of living.
Ugh. I missed it.
Then, somewhere in the quiet that followed, I became aware of something I hadn’t expected.
Jesus was in the rut with me.
I had been thoroughly disappointed in myself. Surely He must be too.
But as I turned my attention toward Him, I didn’t sense the correction I had been bracing for. There was no stern reminder that I should have known better by now. He didn’t seem particularly alarmed that I had returned to a familiar response.
Instead, I sensed Him inviting me out again.
The things we’d been discovering together were still true. My heart mattered. I could allow someone else to take responsibility for a need. Disappointing another person didn’t necessarily mean losing their affection.
I found His gentleness almost more difficult to understand than the pattern itself.
There was something terribly unfamiliar about being met with kindness in a place where I was accustomed to finding disappointment.
For years, I had assumed that once I recognized a problem, the responsible thing was to correct it. Preferably quickly. If the problem returned, I needed to work harder, pay closer attention, or become more disciplined. Repeating a mistake meant I hadn’t done enough to change.
But Jesus wasn’t standing above the rut, waiting for me to climb out before we could continue our relationship.
He was already there.
As I sat with the experience, a verse I’d known for most of my Christian life came to mind.
“If you love Me, keep My commandments.” John 14:15
I knew those words. I’d heard them preached, read them in my Bible, and accepted their importance. Obedience mattered. Loving Jesus meant taking seriously what He said.
Yet as the verse surfaced, I began to notice how I had been hearing it.
If you obey Me, then I’ll love you. That wasn’t what Jesus had said.
One began with love and moved toward obedience. The other made obedience the condition for receiving love.
And if I’m candid, the second version sounded remarkably familiar.
I understood that arrangement. Do what is expected, and things will be okay. Be responsible, helpful, agreeable, and dependable. Learn what matters to the people around you and make sure they aren’t disappointed.
Somewhere along the way, being loved had become tangled up with getting things right.
It wasn’t that I believed people only loved me when I performed perfectly. I knew better than that, at least in principle. But the prospect of disappointing someone could still awaken a fear that felt much larger than the situation warranted.
My response was usually to work harder at keeping the relationship secure.
Apparently, I had brought that same instinct into my relationship with God.
I believed He loved me. I could have quoted Scriptures about His faithfulness, mercy, and grace. I had spent years telling other people about His goodness.
Yet when I disappointed myself, I instinctively imagined that He must be disappointed too.
When I failed, I expected distance.
And when an old pattern resurfaced, I hurried to correct myself, almost as though I needed to get back onto the road before Jesus noticed that I had slipped into the ditch.
Except He was already there!
I had been so preoccupied with whether I was making progress that I hadn’t considered what His presence in the middle of my struggle might reveal about Him.
The invitation to change was real, but it wasn’t being delivered from a distance. I was encountering it within a relationship that hadn’t disappeared when I failed.
I could recognize an old behavior without immediately turning it into a verdict about myself. Instead of rushing to fix it, I was beginning to wonder what might happen if I stayed with Jesus long enough to listen.
The more I considered the emphasis and placement of the word love in John 14:15, the more I wondered how many other familiar words I had been hearing through the assumptions I’d carried into my relationship with God.
What was changing was my understanding of the relationship in which His words had been spoken. ‘If you love Me…’
I had never noticed that love was already part of the conversation.
That discovery unsettled me. I didn’t doubt that God loved me, but I was beginning to see how distorted my understanding of love had become through the lens I’d grown up with. What would it be like to actually live as though His love was already mine?
I could believe in unconditional love while responding to my own shortcomings as though love were always in danger of being withdrawn. That contradiction was becoming difficult to ignore.
I wondered how often I’d interpreted God’s silence as disappointment or assumed that my failures had created a distance He was waiting for me to close. Had I been approaching Him as Someone whose affection needed to be secured, even while professing that His love was a gift?
But that Saturday I had encountered Jesus in the very place where I expected to find His disapproval. I hadn’t suddenly become a woman who could recognize every old pattern before stepping into it. There would be other mornings when a need was mentioned and I automatically assumed responsibility for meeting it.
The difference was that I had begun to recognize another possibility: I could notice where I’d landed without making shame my first companion there. Jesus had not withdrawn His presence while I struggled to change.
What if, instead of immediately asking, ‘How do I fix this?’ I began by noticing Jesus with me and listening for what He wanted me to know?
That possibility raised questions of its own. If I stopped driving myself toward improvement, would I become complacent? Wasn’t the pressure I placed on myself part of what made me responsible and faithful? His gentleness didn’t instantly settle those fears.
Yet the One I had spent years trying to please seemed far more interested in being with me than in standing over me while I tried to get everything right. I was only beginning to wonder what obedience might look like if it grew out of that friendship instead of my fear of losing it.
The next time I found myself in those familiar grooves, I suspected my instinct would still be to scramble out as quickly as possible. But there was a question I hadn’t known to ask before: What if I didn’t have to get myself back onto the road before turning toward Jesus?
He had already met me in the rut. And I was beginning to wonder how much of my life I’d spent trying to earn the love that had met me there.