Meet Me at the Well

Why this is personal

It started before I can remember.

I was hospitalized as an infant. My parents slept on the floor beside my crib, which had to be elevated so I could breathe, taking turns staying awake to make sure I kept breathing through the night. There was testing. There were experimental medications. I spent a good portion of my childhood watching from the sidelines, carrying an inhaler that stood between me and an asthma attack, knowing what could happen if I did not have it.

Thirty years of that lived in my nervous system before anyone ever used those words about me.

Then I had a daughter.

She was two months old when her skin erupted, head to toe. We saw doctor after doctor.Dermatologists. Specialists. The ointments hurt her, and the answer we kept getting was that this was something she would live with.

I did not accept that.

I had lived that. I went looking, at her symptoms, at my own history, at anything I could find, and I landed on food sensitivities she may have been reacting to through my milk. We cut the biggest culprits. Within a week, she was clear.

I did not have a single certification at that point. I was a mother who would not stop asking. And it taught me something I have never been able to unlearn: her body was sending us signals the whole time, and nobody was listening to them.

Meanwhile my own list kept growing.

Asthma. Allergies. Fibromyalgia. Celiac. MTHFR. Chronic fatigue. Mold toxicity. Deficiencies. Toxicities. Hormones that made no sense.

Thirty years of collecting diagnoses and never once getting one that connected the dots. Every answer arrived as a prescription, and every prescription came with a life spent inside the healthcare system.

Underneath all of it was a life. Divorce. Single parenting. Remarriage. Becoming a stepmother and learning what a blended family asks of a woman. Leaving a six-figure corporate job to come home for my family.

Here's what I did not notice at the time. I left the corporate ladder and then built one inside my own house.

I anticipated everyone's needs before they had them. I managed everyone's health. I kept the peace between every party involved at my own expense, because keeping the peace was the job and I was very good at the job. Same performance, new building. Nobody warns you that you can quit the career and keep the operating system.

My body had been in survival mode since the night my parents slept on that floor, and I kept asking it for more.

Eventually it stopped negotiating.

I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs. I couldn't lift my toddler or get on the floor and play with her the way a mother wants to. Most days started in tears, and I stayed on the edge of them, going through the motions so my children would have something that looked like normal.

I did not give up. But I quit what was killing me. I had no energy left for the striving, or the controlling, or the reading of everyone's mind to figure out what they needed before they asked. I stopped keeping up with rules I had never actually agreed to. Not because I got wise. Because I could not do the mental gymnastics anymore.

It was a pruning. A stripping of everything my body and my mind knew how to do, until there was nothing left to bring to His feet but surrender.

And that is where it turned.

What changed

It was not a perfect protocol.

I was a believer. I was not a surrendered one. I called myself a Christian and still ran my whole life as though my way was better than His, as though control were something I was handling on His behalf.

What changed was learning to stop treating my body as a problem to solve and start receiving it as a messenger worth listening to. It had been talking to me the whole time, trying to keep me alive, and I had spent years telling it to be quiet.

It was learning that rest is not a reward for finally doing enough. It is part of stewardship.
And it was learning who Jesus actually is, apart from everything I had absorbed about what a woman, a wife, and a mother was supposed to be.

I still believe the practical tools matter. Food, sleep, stress, movement, labs, environment, and partnership with your doctor all matter, and they are most of what I do. But none of them were ever meant to become one more place for a woman to strive, control, or prove herself.

The work is not becoming a better-performing version of yourself. The work is coming back to the woman God made you to be.

Why the well

In John 4, a woman comes to a well in the middle of the day, when she expects nobody else to be there. Jesus is already waiting.

He knows her story. He does not minimize it, rush her, shame her, or hand her a checklist. He sees her.

She does not leave with a program. She leaves seen. And she goes back to the town she had been avoiding and tells everyone, and they believe her.

That is the heart of this work. Being seen is what changes a woman, and a woman who has been seen changes a town.