Call a Thing a Thing

Part 3 of the Rest Trilogy

Language matters. It always has. The words we use to frame an experience shape what we believe is possible inside it.

So let’s call a thing a thing.

Religion tells women to submit to their husbands. Slaves to their masters. Workers to their supervisors. Same sentence structure. Same logic. Same beneficiary. And for centuries we have been handed that framework as if it were sacred, as if it were the point, as if the whole arc of faith bent toward keeping certain people in their place and calling it holy.

The inconvenient truth is that this is directly contrary to the culture of Jesus. The Jesus who stopped to talk to a Samaritan woman at a well when no respectable man of his time would have acknowledged her existence. The Jesus who said the last shall be first. Who flipped tables in the temple when commerce colonized the sacred. Who showed up first to the women after the resurrection, not the disciples, the women, because apparently they were the ones paying attention.

That Jesus was not building a hierarchy. He was dismantling one.

Our backs bristle at the word submission not because we are spiritually immature but because we have watched that word be used as a weapon. Our resistance is not a flaw. It is memory.

We Have Been Running the Wrong Race

The Biological Imagination gets something right that most of us were never taught: fear is not weakness. Fear is the brain doing its job. It is a systemic signal, ancient and intelligent, designed to keep us alive. When the brain reads danger, it fires. That’s not a character defect. That’s the system working.

But somewhere along the way we decided that feeling fear was the same as being afraid, and being afraid was the same as being weak, and weakness was something to overcome rather than something to read. So instead of stopping long enough to ask what the signal is telling us and strategizing accordingly, we override it. We run on adrenaline. We push through. We perform competence and capability until the body has nothing left and we collapse in exhaustion and call it burnout.

We have been running the wrong race. Sprinting a marathon. Using emergency fuel for the long haul.

The long game requires rotating the bench. Internally and externally. Everybody plays and everybody rests. Not because rest is a reward for the ones who earned it, but because a body that never stops is a body that eventually breaks. The martyr model and the hustle model produce the same outcome: a woman who has given everything to something that was never designed to give anything back.

Surrender is not defeat. It is the strategic decision to stop spending energy fighting the current long enough to figure out where the river is actually going.

This is what the SOS framework is built on. Seasons of Surrender. Not the submission of the powerless. The sovereignty of the woman who knows when to stop, when to read the room, when to let the season do what seasons do, and when to move.

What the Messy Middle Actually Costs

There is a reason people don’t change until they absolutely have to.

People don’t move until the pain of where they are is greater than the fear of where they’re going. That is not a motivational slogan. That is the clinical and spiritual reality of why women stay in what is killing them. Why we negotiate with situations that stopped serving us years ago. Why the leap of faith feels impossible even when standing still is its own kind of slow destruction.

I know this from the inside.

The messy middle has seen me frozen in fear. Hopeless. Helpless. Defeated in ways I did not have language for at the time. I was diagnosed with dysthymia and episodic depression and treated with antidepressants that blunted my sharp edges and kept me compliant in marriages that were failing me. The medication smoothed what needed to stay sharp. It kept the peace at the cost of my clarity. I did not know that then. I know it now.

The last messy middle almost broke me.

It actually did.

I was broken open. I found myself in what I can only describe as God’s waiting room, after I had beaten myself to a bloody pulp of self-flagellation and endless internal critique. Waiting for light. Waiting for strength. Waiting for enough life to get back out into the world. No initiative of my own to make anything happen. No certainty there was light at the end of the tunnel, and if I saw something that looked like light I expected it to be illusory. I was waiting for the oncoming train. Because that had been the pattern.

It looked like rest from the outside.

From the inside it was the most exhausting place I have ever lived.

There is a story behind every face. A lesson in every lived experience. The woman who looks like she has gone quiet may be in the hardest fight of her life, and you would never know it from the outside.

What Gets Women Sick in the Middle

The messy middle is where the old story has lost its hold and the new one hasn’t arrived yet. It is the in-between. The not-yet. The place where everything you built your identity around has stopped working and you don’t know yet who you are without it.

Women get sick there. Not metaphorically. Actually sick. Because the body keeps the score and the body knows when the life you are living is not the life you are built for. Autoimmune conditions. Depression. Chronic exhaustion. Anxiety that won’t resolve no matter how many things you optimize. These are not random. They are the body saying: something has to change and you are not changing it.

The inability to take the leap is not a failure of courage. It is usually a failure of safety. Women don’t leap into the unknown when the known, however painful, at least feels survivable. We have too much evidence that taking risks gets us punished. That visibility invites attack. That being fully alive, fully seen, even revered, comes with a cost that has historically been paid in ways we did not consent to.

So we stay. We manage. We medicate the signal instead of reading it. We call it being responsible and practical and realistic, and underneath all of that is the fear that if we finally become who we actually are, we will lose whatever belonging we managed to build by being someone else.

That fear is not irrational. It is informed. Honoring it is different from obeying it.

The Long Game and the Rotating Bench

What I have learned, slowly and not without cost, is that sovereignty is not about having no fear. It is about developing the capacity to feel the fear, read the signal, and choose your next move anyway. Strategy over adrenaline. Discernment over performance. The long game over the sprint.

The toddler in us fights surrender because the last time we yielded it cost us something real. That toddler is not wrong to remember. She is wrong to think that the only options are total control or total collapse. There is a third way. It is slower and less dramatic and it is the only one that actually works over time.

Rotate the bench. Let other people carry the weight while you recover. Let yourself be carried while someone else leads. Trust that the team can function without your constant presence in the center of it. This is not abandonment. This is what makes the long game possible.

Internally it looks like learning to distinguish fear from intuition. Learning to sit in the waiting room without deciding the train is coming. Learning to trust that broken open is not the same as broken apart.

Externally it looks like building community where the bench actually rotates. Where no single woman holds it all. Where rest is built into the design, not earned at the end of the road.

What The COVE Holds

The COVE is being curated to hold all of it.

The woman in the messy middle who looks fine from the outside and is white-knuckling it from the inside. The one who is just now taking the mask off and has no idea what she looks like underneath it. The one who was broken open and is in God’s waiting room with no initiative and no certainty, just enough willingness to stay one more day.

We hold the story behind the face. The lesson inside the lived experience. The sovereignty that is being rebuilt one honest conversation at a time.

While you heal. While you transform the story of your life. While you rest and regroup, keeping the focus on your bigger why and how to lead with sovereignty and strategy in your next chapter.

This is not a sprint. This is the long game.

Everybody plays. Everybody rests.

And nobody has to run on a broken engine anymore.

— Kim

The COVE (Circle of Voices Evolving) is a screened community for women navigating transformation at the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation. Join us at stan.store/OneVoiceEvolving.

And Kim knows what it costs when the system flattens what needs to stay sharp. She's written about it. Lived it. Built an entire framework around the moment you stop letting the wrong tool — or the wrong structure, or the wrong story — do your thinking for you.

This podcast conversation is important because it's about when AI tries to flatten what you have to say. Listen HERE.

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