When I was growing up, way back in the dark ages before cell phones, my father had short-wave radios in the vehicles of his employees. We also had two units in our house: one in the living room, and one in my parents’ room. They looked a little like telephones (not a telephone that any of my children would recognize, but like telephones of that era). Talking on them required the use of all sorts of fancy code-talk like “Car One to Base Two.”

They were kind of scary.

Then one day my cousins were playing at my house. One of them decided it would be quite hilarious if I would get on the radio and call for my daddy. I wasn’t convinced it would be that hilarious, and I thought it might get me in trouble, but he was very encouraging.

I was gullible. I was the youngest. It was part of my job to be gullible.

I was probably four. I remember being concerned about the whether I needed to say “Base Two to Car One” first, but he assured me that if I got on there and said, “Daddy! Hi Daddy!” (over and over) it would be just great.

So I did it. It didn’t take long before my dad responded with, “Somebody get her off of that thing.” It might as well have been the voice of God.

It’s ironic to think that this particular cousin is now an airline pilot, because I have a feeling that messing around with the communication devices is frowned upon in his line of work. But I digress.

That was probably the most embarrassed I had ever been. I’ve been much more embarrassed since then, mind you, but at the time it was bad. Now, I don’t want you to read too much into this. I recovered quickly. I played with my cousins for the rest of the afternoon, and I’m sure when my dad got home from work I ran up and hugged him just like always. I don’t want to paint this as a traumatic incident from my past, because it’s not.

I didn’t even think about it much until I got a job with The Drugstore Chain That Shall Not Be Named. On my first day, a coworker asked me to page someone over the store intercom, and I was terrified. Page someone? Over the store intercom? Can’t I do something less scary, like stand in the parking lot and sing a solo?

For the first couple of days I went to ridiculous lengths to avoid using the intercom. Finally I just couldn’t avoid it, so I bucked up and did it. No one was particularly impressed at the sacrifice this required, but I was pleased with myself. By the time I left the company, I could announce prescriptions and call for change with the best of them.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve taken a break (mostly) from reading my beloved dead Puritans to read a couple of the Christian “self-help” books. Both of them contain some insight into why we do what we do, and both of them spend an inordinate amount of time discussing how childhood traumas and disappointments can shape us. It seems that all of us were paying attention in Psych 101.

But I wonder at the format. The authors seem to say: It’s all their fault that you are the way you are (“they” being your parents or the men in your life, usually). The implication is that if you can dredge up all the causes, you’ll be cured.

I’m not trying to minimize the impact of family dysfunction and childhood traumas, nor am I suggesting that the victim is to blame. I do think, however, these books skip a step. My opening example is overly simplistic and a little silly, and purposely so. But even if I take one of my bigger issues and substitute it, I’m still back at the beginning. You see, just as I knew why I didn’t like intercoms, I know why I have a fear of people dying in car wrecks and children being snatched from their homes. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime. But none of those things created the problem, they just uprooted something that was already there.

I didn’t like intercoms because I don’t like looking foolish, and once an intercom had made me feel that way. I was eventually able to see that people shopping in your local chain drugstore have better things to do than mock the person on the intercom, so I moved on. The bigger problems may be harder to get past, but the roots are the same as any other problem we’ve had from the beginning: fear, pride, unbelief, distrust, covetousness.

At best, discovering the role the mistakes or sins of others played in your current problems will offer some insight, but they won’t give you the solution. At worst you will go on blaming that person, growing in bitterness, and never get around to dealing with your own stuff. Scripture does contain stern warnings for those who cause others to sin (Matthew 18:6, Romans 14:20-22), but whenever it speaks directly to a person about their own sin, it doesn’t allow any wiggle room. The direct advice is always the same: repent and stop. Trust God and follow him.

Are you fearful? That’s unbelief and lack of trust in God. Fear of failure? That’s pride. We can’t change our past, but with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can put off the old self and put on the new (Ephesians 4:22-24). And that requires more than looking for someone else to blame.

*I use 80s song lyrics for my titles a lot. You’ll get used to it.

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Some people are made to be athletes. Some people have an affinity for numbers. Some are natural leaders. I am a natural worrier.

The conditions are perfect, really. I lost a loved one in a terrible accident at the age of seven. I grew up in a small town, where you know everyone’s stories and tragedies. In college, I worked at a top-ranked children’s hospital in a major city. I also have a vivid imagination and a obsessive sensitive nature: I’m aware of every tummy fluttering, head pain, and muscle twitch going on in my body.

In other words, I’ve got a storehouse of possible bad outcomes. Name a disease and I know someone who died from it. Name a household appliance or seemingly harmless activity and I’ve got a fatal, freak accident story to match. Other people hear a sad story about a child’s tragic death and immediately feel sad. I, however, cue up the memory of countless parents, weeping at ICU bedsides, falling apart in ER waiting rooms, covering their ears and screaming because they can’t process the bad news they are being told.

You could say I have some issues.

So when we last left our heroes, they were wondering if perhaps they had made a mistake. The problem was never resolved dramatically. No breakthrough came like a bolt of lightning from the sky, confirming that, yes, this was the right place for us. Instead, we went on living, and things just smoothed out: we bought a house, we had another baby, and basically settled in.

Before I continue, I need to clarify that Todd was never really swept up in all my wondering about God’s will and finding the correct path. He’s always had a better grasp of God’s sovereignty, and I kept a lot of my inner thought processes to myself. I wasn’t hiding these thoughts from him, I just wasn’t analyzing them.

I now see those initial misgivings about the move as a normal bout of homesickness. But I had so readily accepted that God communicates to us through feelings and circumstances that I assumed uneasiness and unpleasant circumstances were signs that I had wandered off course. I would have argued against any sort of prosperity gospel that insisted that God blessed obedience with health and wealth, but I certainly expected him to bless me with pleasant circumstances, which is prosperity in another form.

And the idea that I needed to be listening to the “still, small voice of God” was everywhere. It was in a Bible study that told me that God would speak to me through my circumstances, and that he would provide direction for everything I did if I was attuned to his voice. I read a book on prayer that said any time I had a worrisome thought, that was a sign that I needed to pray, to prevent that thing from happening. The Christian fiction books I was reading were full of characters who perceived “feelings of uneasiness” about a situation. When they acted on these impulses (often at the last minute), they were able to save someone from certain peril. The take-home message was clear: if you ignore these stirrings, bad things can happen. And for me, bad things were never vague ideas, they were real memories, real situations, and real people.

It was the births of my children that really blew the lid off these fears. If I had the fleeting thought that I needed to check on the baby in the middle of the night, was that a sign that something was wrong? If I wondered if Todd had remembered to buckle the kids’ seat belts, was that a sign that I needed to call him and ask? If I didn’t have peace about going to the grocery store, was that a sign that I was supposed to stay home?

For a person who claimed to have put her trust in God, I was pretty worn out. But I wasn’t trusting God at all, I was being extremely superstitious. Rather than carrying a rabbit’s foot or hanging a horseshoe over my door, however, I was attempting to ward off catastrophe by double checking. In some sort of reverse form of “name it, claim it,” I believed that if I considered all the possible bad scenarios and did my best to protect my kids from them, I could somehow prevent them.

I’m not finished talking about this, but I am going to skip to the end for now. God is sovereign. Let me say it again: GOD IS SOVEREIGN. He doesn’t need my help or anyone else’s (Acts 17:25, Romans 11:33-36). Any future tragedies that may occur in my life are already known by the Lord (Psalm 139:16), and he promises — promises — to get me through, to walk with me, and to use those things for my good. (Romans 8:28-29)

And I can rest in that. But I had to unlearn a lot of things before I was able to rest.

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