Faith With One Eye Open
For those of us who hand God the wheel… and a 12-point itinerary.
I tell people I believe in trust.
In surrender.
In divine timing.
But I say it with one eye open.
Just in case the universe needs notes.
Because honestly?
Even something that created galaxies
might drop the ball occasionally.
Hey — no one’s perfect.
And between solar flares and black holes,
maybe the part where I whispered
“please don’t forget about me”
got lost in transit.
So, I hand over the wheel,
then white-knuckle the passenger door
while quietly planning an alternate route.
Because what if grace forgets to stop for gas?
They say to “let go and let God,”
but I prefer
“let go, let God,
and keep a toolkit in the trunk
in case “He” doesn’t know how to fix a carburetor.”
I believe in faith.
I do.
I just also believe in contingency plans.
Because surrender sounds beautiful —
until I actually try to do it.
It makes a great Instagram meme
right up until you check your bank account
and wonder if “let God” knows when the rent is due.
It’s like surrender’s evil twin: stillness.
Oh, I’ve seen the memes —
calm lakes, dewy sunsets, a woman doing yoga on a dock
with the caption “just be.”
But the actual doing of stillness?
Yeah, not so easy.
I tried to sit with it once.
But then I wondered if I should light a candle.
Maybe get a new journal.
Maybe research a better method for sitting.
And before I knew it,
I had a playlist, a podcast queue,
and three books on the neuroscience of rest
stacked beside my bed.
(It’s fine. I’m just optimizing my pause.)
I’ve turned peace into a project.
And surrender into a spreadsheet.
Because control is my mother tongue.
It’s how I’ve survived every chapter
no one warned me how to live through.
But lately, I’ve started to wonder:
What if real faith
is letting the breath go
without knowing what fills it next?
What if safety isn’t in the doing,
but in the not-doing,
and trusting that nothingness
won’t swallow me whole?
What if I stopped managing
and measuring
and proving
for just one moment long enough
to hear the heartbeat underneath it all?
Because the part of me who stays busy—
who packs schedules like parachutes
and builds scaffolding out of backup plans—
she’s not trying to be difficult.
She’s just young.
She learned early
that if you sit still too long,
you can be found.
And when you’re found,
bad things happen.
So, she kept moving.
Fast, clever, invisible if necessary.
Always one step ahead of the ache.
Because that’s the part no one warns you about:
if it gets quiet enough,
the pain you buried just to survive
finally has room to rise.
Like the ocean,
once the waves settle,
you start to see the bubbles
from all the life hidden underneath.
And that’s what’s really terrifying—
not moving to a foreign country,
not starting over,
not even letting go.
No, the real fear is what comes up
when you finally get still enough
to feel what you spent a lifetime outrunning.
That’s the wave we think will take us down.
That’s the silence we fear won’t hold us.
But maybe—just maybe—
it will.
So I’m learning to sit,
just a little longer each time.
To let the waves settle.
To let the bubbles rise.
To listen for the parts of me
I left behind in the rush to be okay.
And when the fear whispers,
“You won’t survive this stillness,”
I whisper back,
“I already did.”
“Just in case the universe needs notes”! 🤣 But also 🥹