Pull It Off

Strings of Pearls

I remember those long drives down Highway 1.

There was a slight breeze from the cracked window on this midsummer Sunday afternoon. My hands gripped tight on the oversized steering wheel of my father’s cherry-red 1969 Chevy truck. The black leather bucket seat sat up high and would bounce slightly as we drove over the small potholes in the road.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

The sound of my dad’s fingers on his laptop as he manually programmed the engine of his truck. My dad is a genius and I always grew up knowing so. This ’69 Chevy had the gas mileage of a modern-day hybrid because my dad programmed it that way—adjusting horsepower and torque to maximize fuel economy in the engine by manually programming the laptop he had hooked to the truck’s inner workings while I drove. Ya know, simple stuff.

These are some of my most-loved memories with my dad. Those drives were filled with mostly silence and the tap, tap, tap of the laptop, but every now and then, my dad would hand me a string of pearls—a figurative string of invaluable pearls of wisdom.

“Hey, sugar, don’t do anything to please other people, but do only what God wants of you. Protect your heart.”

“Okay, Dad,” I would reply as I waited for the rest of what he had to say.

“I will always be here, not to tell you what to do, but to support and help you.”

“Thanks,” I would say politely, my sixteen-year-old self wondering what all this implied.

“You can be whoever it is God wants you to be, because God loves you. God is not impotent; God is not out of control. He is present and all knowing. So, don’t ever let fear stop you. The work of our human nature is fear, but the work of God is courage. When you’re filled with joy and hope and peace, you can be courageous. If there’s no peace, you can’t be courageous. If there’s no hope, we won’t be courageous. But there is joy and hope and peace—because that is God.”

Pearls.

And I wore that string of pearls wherever I went. That’s not to say I was always courageous. And it’s definitely not to say that I never did things just to please other people. But I never believed fear was something to avoid. I grew up believing that there would always be fear along the way and that fear was intended to be a motivator and could always be overcome with courage.

Years later, I was newly engaged to my fiancé and on tour with a rock artist when I received a call from my soon-to-be husband. He had just found out he had been drafted into the Minor Leagues by the Houston Astros. I’ll never forget that call: “If we’re going to do this, Jules, this has to be a ‘we’ thing and not just a ‘me’ thing.”

I know that we didn’t understand completely the implications of baseball life and how much it would change. But we did know that the travel would be intense and that this was going to be a huge difference from what we had visualized for our lives. We had always assumed Ben would become a youth pastor and I would continue being a writer and musician. For two pastors’ kids raised in the rural Midwest, the baseball life was uncharted territory.

As weird as it may sound, signing that first professional baseball contract was an act of courage. We had visualized a simple life but signed up for exhilarating chaos instead. I never thought my life would include living between three homes, weekly plane rides, and teaching my children their numbers using hotel elevator buttons. We were fearful of the extremely high divorce rate within professional sports. We were fearful of being apart regularly. We were fearful of being away from family and friends and the very real possibility of isolation. We were fearful of never knowing where we would live, and we knew that a team could trade us and move us without warning.

What is it about fear that can keep us all from living full and courageous lives? Maybe we’ve lived in fear of putting ourselves out there. Maybe we’ve lived to just fit in, so that we won’t ever have to stand out. Maybe we’ve allowed fear to keep us from trying new things because, well, if you never try, you’ll never fail. Maybe we let fear keep us from being who we are, and we live a life of constant adaptation and pretty pretend.

Most important, what keeps us from fastening that string of pearls around our necks and stepping out in courage, confidence, and brilliance?

Toy Bears and Corn Snakes

The Ancient Greeks and Romans believed courage to be the essential quality in a person. Aristotle wrote, “Courage is the first of human virtues because it makes all others possible.”1 The Roman philosopher Seneca considered all humans slaves to fear.2 Yet given the right circumstances, ordinary people can set themselves free of this bondage and act courageously. How is this achieved? And what is it that happens to allow a person to willingly choose to engage in an activity that frightens them?

Well, turns out that neuroscientists recently determined how courage works in the brain. There is a little region in the brain called the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), the driving force behind courageous acts.

How did they arrive at this exciting discovery, you ask?

Teddy bears and corn snakes.

Volunteers were divided into those who had a fear of snakes and those who did not, before undergoing tests with either a stuffed teddy bear or a live corn snake, a nonvenomous species often kept as a pet.

Participants could choose whether to have the toy bear or snake moved closer or farther away from them while a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan was done on their brain.

The scans showed different patterns of brain activity when volunteers succumbed to fear versus when they showed courage by deliberately overcoming it.

Activity in the sgACC increased along with the degree of fear felt by those who had the corn snake brought closer to them despite their fear of snakes. But this was not the case with the folks who succumbed to fear by increasing their distance from the snake.

In addition, activity in a series of temporal lobe brain structures was reduced when fear increased but was overcome.

Lead researcher Dr. Yadin Dudai, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, said: “Our findings delineate the importance of maintaining high sgACC activity in successful efforts to overcome ongoing fear and point to the possibility of manipulating sgACC activity in therapeutic intervention in disorders involving a failure to overcome fear.”3

And what does this scientific mumbo jumbo mean exactly?

That we have to exercise this part of the brain in order to overcome our fears. It means that fear will always be present, but there is a definite importance in keeping that little part of the brain active in order to not be bound to our fears. That we have to push ourselves to overcome the things we are afraid of.

If you never even try to leap over the hurdle between you and living a beautiful, courageous, and brilliant life, you might not ever be able to jump over it at all. That high you get as you are in mid-leap, even if it’s just barely grazing the hurdle, is scary—your fear of tripping and falling on your face is legitimate, but it is thrilling. On the other side of that hurdle is courage and confidence and a feeling of complete worthiness. It’s a feeling of autonomy that no one but you can give yourself.

I think we can all agree that there is nothing more terrifying than being totally and unapologetically honest—be it when telling the truth or authentically living the life we were made to live. Both Ben and I (here comes the honest part) entered the traveling baseball player/traveling musician lifestyle with a degree of ignorance. We knew the figures, we thought we understood the risks, but we were unprepared. Kind of like running to jump a hurdle that you know is thirty-three inches instead of the normal thirty that you trained with, but you try to make the leap even though you don’t know how you will do. Well, Ben and I jumped that thirty-three-inch hurdle and we fell flat on our figurative arses. The travel was a difficult adjustment and the harsh actuality of dealing with public scrutiny was more painful than we wanted to admit. I was traveling every week back and forth between Phoenix and Nashville to try to finish my senior year of college and found myself in the ER with heart arrhythmia due to stress. We were making $200 every two weeks in Minor League Baseball, which was financially strenuous, to say the least. We were in our first couple years of marriage, which is supposed to be so happy and romantic and sexy, right?! But our marriage was on the rocks, and we were both beat down by the difficulty of our uncharted venture. So, we did what so many do when faced with failure and struggle and the fear of others finding out our pain…

We hid.

We hid from honesty. We hid from vulnerability. We hid from any open and honest conversation with family and friends. We thought we were being courageous by staying in the baseball lifestyle—and that was the reality when Ben first signed on that dotted line—but when the struggle, isolation, and fear of not being strong enough to endure all the pressure set in, we realized that what was motivating us was no longer courage but fear. We had let fear become the authority of our hearts. Because we were afraid of failing. We were afraid of being looked at as quitters should we not be able to handle it all. We were afraid of what our families would think—that we would be seen as “weak” or “ungrateful for the opportunity” if we were honest about how it was actually really hard. We were afraid that even God Himself would look down on us in disappointment that we couldn’t handle the blessings He’d given us. Our fear kept us bound to performance and bound to striving to keep up a perfect appearance. Our fear of others knowing that we weren’t flying high but were actually sinking kept us obsessed with keeping up appearances.

This fear of others’ disapproval of us and fear of God’s disapproval of us had to come face-to-face with the one thing that would begin to set us free: courage. This time, the courage to be honest and vulnerable. It took the most courage to admit our weakness and come to grips with our humanity and limitations.

Slowly, we began to inch closer and closer to that corn snake of honesty, and when we began to be vulnerable, we began to heal. As our courage grew, it became easier and easier to be honest and vulnerable with ourselves, with God, and with others. We became less and less afraid of being known, and slowly became more and more confident.

Courage is recognizing our weaknesses and simultaneously recognizing that God approves of us amidst these weaknesses. Even though the circumstances didn’t change—the travel schedule was still intense, public scrutiny was still a reality, and we weren’t making any more money—we began to relish our true heart’s authority and live more confident lives.

So how can you train your mind to act more courageously and live a life of authenticity in everyday life?

First, you’ve got to identify the armor you have against being courageous and honest with yourself. You’ve got to ask yourself, Why am I afraid, and how am I protecting myself from vulnerability? Are you masking yourself with perfectionism? Pessimism? Have your feelings of being unworthy led you to always project a feeling of composure? Of having it all together? Or do you emit cynicism? Is sarcasm your chosen tone that best masks vulnerability? (Been there, done it all, folks.)

We must first acknowledge that, yes, fear is a part of life, and, yes, failure is going to reveal that we are not perfect and might even reveal that we feel we are not worthy. Then we’ve got to expose ourselves to what we are afraid of. We inch ever closer to the corn snake and exercise that little part of the brain so it can grow stronger and stronger, and we will eventually leap over those thirty-three-inch hurdles without a second thought.

I’m sure there are a lot of people who (God bless ’em) have thought I have it all together. The good news is that now you have this book, so you can kiss that perception goodbye! I want people to know that I, too, deal with debilitating insecurities that have taken years and years of exercising that darn subgenual anterior cingulate cortex in order to be a girl who is honest with both herself and with God and a woman who is not shocked by her limitations but embraces them. It took many snakes and hurdles to become a wife who is secure in her marriage and a person who feels her best in clothes that have been compared to the colorful garb of Rainbow Brite (rest assured, you’ll hear lots about those growing pains in the coming chapters).

Grace Under Pressure

Speaking of ensembles reminiscent to Rainbow Brite and the Color Kids, I hear one thing a lot (in both complimentary and not-so-complimentary tones): “I could never pull that off.” Sure, sometimes it’s backhanded and sometimes it’s genuine vibe appreciation. Either way, I always do my best to hold my head high, even if that head is on top of a crazy, wacky outfit. Much like our decision to take on the baseball/musician lifestyle, I wear kooky clothes simply because I want to. The fun I get from getting dressed outweighs the opinions of others and the desire to please other people (it took me a lot of time to realize that too). Because, truthfully, facing your fear is only half the battle. The other half is having to cope with the risk and uncertainty of the reactions before, during, and after you’ve faced your fear. Welcoming such critiques takes courage. As Ernest Hemingway so beautifully put it, “Courage is grace under pressure.”4