I don’t think people realize how much resentment can hide behind being a good person.
And I don’t mean the kind of resentment where you walk around angry at everybody. I mean the quiet kind. The kind where you say, “It’s okay,” knowing good and well it is not okay. The kind where you tell somebody, “Don’t worry about it,” while internally wondering why nobody ever worries about you.
The kind where you’re helping somebody through their fifth crisis of the month, and somewhere in the middle of encouraging them, you catch yourself thinking, “Who in the world is going to help me?”
And then you feel guilty for even thinking it.
Because what kind of Christian gets frustrated with helping people?
Apparently, this one.
Good morning.
I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life being upset with people for accepting things I willingly offered them.
There. I said it.
And before I start building my defense case, because I do have a law degree and can absolutely argue both sides of my own foolishness, I need to be honest about something.
Sometimes I wasn’t willing.
Sometimes I was afraid.
Afraid to say no. Afraid to disappoint somebody. Afraid they would think I was selfish. Afraid they would stop including me, stop calling me, stop loving me, or worse, start telling people I wasn’t the person I claimed to be.
And somehow, I convinced myself that fear was obedience.
I really did.
I thought being a woman after God’s heart meant I should always be available. Always understanding. Always forgiving. Always willing to extend myself just a little further.
And if I was tired? Pray about it.
If I was overwhelmed? Trust God.
If I was hurt? Forgive.
If I was being taken advantage of? Well, Jesus turned the other cheek, didn’t He?
Girl.
The way I have taken Scripture, removed it from its context, and used it to emotionally waterboard myself needs to be studied.
Because I wasn’t just allowing other people to place unreasonable expectations on me.
I was helping them do it.
And what really bothers me is how uneven those expectations were.
I was expected to understand why somebody couldn’t show up for me, but somehow my inability to show up for them required an explanation.
Their bad days deserved grace. Mine required better emotional regulation.
Their circumstances were complicated. Mine were excuses.
Their boundaries were necessary. Mine were personal attacks.
And I kept swallowing it.
Not because it didn’t hurt.
But because somewhere deep inside me, I believed that if I stopped being the understanding one, the dependable one, the forgiving one, the one who could take a hit and keep smiling, people would discover that I wasn’t worth loving without all the extras.
Whew.
I wish I could tell you I learned that as an adult.
But I didn’t.
I learned early that people could leave. That people could die. That the people who were supposed to protect you could become the very people you needed protection from.
And when you grow up with enough loss, sometimes you develop this ridiculous belief that if you can just be good enough, helpful enough, easy enough, and necessary enough, maybe you can prevent yourself from experiencing that kind of pain again.
So I became useful.
Very useful.
I learned how to anticipate needs before they were spoken. How to read a room before I entered it. How to make myself smaller when somebody else’s emotions needed more space.
And eventually, I became a grown woman who could manage everybody else’s feelings while barely knowing what to do with her own.
The irony is almost comical.
I can coach somebody through an entire crisis, identify their patterns, offer solutions, encourage accountability, and help them develop a plan.
But ask me why I’m sitting in my own house upset because somebody didn’t reciprocate something I never communicated I needed?
Suddenly, I have no idea how we got here.
And God has been dealing with me about that.
Because the truth is, I haven’t always been helping people from a healthy place.
Sometimes I was helping because I genuinely loved them.
Sometimes I was helping because God was leading me to.
And sometimes?
Sometimes I was helping because I wanted to be needed.
Because being needed felt safe.
Being needed felt like belonging.
Being needed made me feel like I had a place in somebody’s life that couldn’t easily be replaced.
And when people didn’t return that same level of care, I felt betrayed.
Not just disappointed.
Betrayed.
Because somewhere in my mind, I had created an agreement they never actually signed.
I would give you everything I had, and in exchange, you would never make me feel unimportant.
And when they failed to uphold their end of my imaginary contract, I was furious.
With them.
With myself.
And sometimes, if I’m being completely transparent, with God.
Because Lord, I was doing what I thought You wanted me to do.
I was loving people.
I was extending grace.
I was being patient.
I was showing up.
So why did I feel so empty?
Why was I becoming increasingly frustrated with the very people I was supposed to love?
And why did the thought of telling somebody no make me feel like I was about to get a disciplinary write-up from Heaven?
Then, for reasons I can only attribute to God having a sense of humor, I started thinking about Deliver Us from Eva.
Now, if you’ve seen that movie, you already know Eva Dandridge was a whole situation.
Gabrielle Union played that role like somebody had personally appointed her the CEO, president, and chief operating officer of everybody else’s business.
Eva had opinions. Eva had instructions. Eva had expectations. And if you were going to do something, you were probably going to do it the way Eva thought it needed to be done.
I used to watch that movie thinking, girl, these are grown people. Let them LIVE.
And then God showed me something I did not appreciate.
Jazmin, you have been Eva with a prayer journal.
Excuse me?
Because as much as I would like to believe that everything I do for people comes from a completely selfless place, sometimes my desire to help has been tangled up with my need to control.
Not control in the obvious, aggressive, everybody-needs-to-listen-to-me kind of way.
But the quieter kind.
The kind where I anticipate everybody’s needs because I don’t trust them to handle things without me.
The kind where I intervene before somebody experiences the consequences of their own decisions.
The kind where I become frustrated when people don’t take advice they never asked me for.
The kind where I exhaust myself trying to prevent problems that haven’t even happened.
And then I have the nerve to feel unappreciated because nobody recognizes how much work I’ve been doing behind the scenes.
Ma’am.
Nobody hired you for that position.
Nobody asked you to become the emotional project manager of their entire existence.
And yet here I am, running a department God never assigned me, with no salary, no PTO, and an absolutely disrespectful benefits package.
But underneath all that humor is something that genuinely hurts to acknowledge.
Eva’s sense of responsibility for her sisters had become deeply connected to her identity.
And I recognize that.
Because when you’ve spent enough of your life feeling like people can disappear, you start believing that being indispensable might make you harder to abandon.
So you become the fixer.
The dependable one.
The one who knows what to do.
The one who can be counted on even when nobody thinks to ask how she’s doing.
And eventually, you stop knowing where love ends and responsibility begins.
You start confusing being needed with being valued.
You start confusing being relied upon with being loved.
And you start confusing somebody’s inability to function without your assistance with evidence that you matter.
But here’s the part that really made me uncomfortable.
Sometimes I wasn’t just afraid people would leave if I stopped helping.
I was afraid they would discover they didn’t actually need me.
And if they didn’t need me anymore, who would I be to them?
That is an ugly thing to admit.
Because it means that sometimes I have been more attached to my role in people’s lives than I have been willing to acknowledge.
And maybe that’s why I have struggled so much with boundaries.
Because a boundary doesn’t just require me to tell somebody else what I will or won’t do.
Sometimes it requires me to confront why I needed to be the person doing it in the first place.
I can say that people expect too much from me, and sometimes that’s absolutely true.
But I also have to acknowledge that I have spent years volunteering for responsibilities that weren’t mine, then becoming resentful when people expected me to continue carrying them.
I have complained about being exhausted while refusing to put anything down.
I have asked God for peace while continuing to manage situations He never instructed me to manage.
And I have called it obedience because admitting it was fear would require me to confront some wounds I have spent a lifetime trying to outrun.
That’s what made this morning’s reading so uncomfortable.
Because I came to 2 Kings 4:1–7 expecting to learn how God provides for people who are overwhelmed.
And instead, I found myself staring at a woman who did something I have struggled to do for most of my life.
She was honest about what she couldn’t handle.
The passage opens with a widow crying out to Elisha. Her husband had been among the sons of the prophets, a community associated with prophetic ministry under Elisha. He had feared the Lord. He was now dead, creditors were coming, and her two sons were at risk of being taken into debt servitude.
And what absolutely arrested me was how she approached Elisha.
She didn’t pretend.
She didn’t open with how blessed and highly favored she was.
She didn’t try to make her situation sound more spiritual than it was.
She didn’t pretend that being connected to a man who feared God somehow exempted her from experiencing hardship.
She was a widow connected to the prophetic community, and she was in trouble.
Both things were true.
And that right there called me all the way out.
Because how many times have I allowed my position, my responsibilities, my faith, and other people’s perception of me to dictate how honestly I could acknowledge what I was experiencing?
How many times have I been struggling and still responded, “I’m good”?
How many times have I been emotionally bankrupt while encouraging everybody else to keep trusting God?
How many times have I been drowning and felt guilty for admitting I needed somebody to throw me a life jacket?
I have become so accustomed to being the strong one that sometimes I don’t even know how to be honest about being tired without immediately explaining why I’m still capable of handling everything.
And God confronted me with something I wasn’t prepared to hear.
Jazmin, you cannot keep asking Me to heal a condition you’re committed to concealing.
Now, that’s my personal conviction from this passage, not a direct quotation from Scripture. But it hit me like somebody had opened every locked room in my heart.
Because the widow didn’t receive instructions until after she acknowledged the problem.
And I wonder how many times I’ve been so busy protecting the appearance of my strength that I’ve refused to acknowledge the areas where I desperately need help.
Elisha asks her in 2 Kings 4:2 what she has in her house.
Her answer?
Nothing but a jar of oil.
And I almost laughed because isn’t that just like me?
I can tell you everything I’ve lost. Everything I’ve given. Everything that’s been taken. Every opportunity I’ve missed. Every relationship that has drained me. Every situation where I feel like I’ve poured out more than I’ve received.
Ask me what I have left?
Nothing.
Well, except this little thing.
Except this ability. Except this gift. Except this relationship with God. Except this wisdom I’ve gained. Except this discipline I keep postponing. Except this little bit of strength I haven’t completely exhausted.
And suddenly, the very thing I’ve been dismissing becomes the thing God draws my attention toward.
But here’s where I had to be careful.
Because I have spent years allowing people to convince me that having oil meant I was obligated to pour it into every container they placed in front of me.
If I had the ability, I should help.
If I had the money, I should give.
If I had the time, I should make it available.
If I knew how to solve the problem, I should fix it.
And if I didn’t?
Disobedient.
Selfish.
Unloving.
Not displaying the heart of Christ.
Do you understand how spiritually exhausting it is to believe that every need you encounter is an assignment God has personally given you?
I do.
And I am finally beginning to understand that having the capacity to do something does not automatically mean I have the responsibility to do it.
In the actual passage, the widow is instructed to borrow empty vessels, shut the door with her sons, and pour the oil. She follows those instructions, the vessels are filled, and the provision allows her to repay her debt and live with her children on what remains.
The oil was multiplied through God’s provision, not through her ability to manufacture more of it.
And while that passage is not a direct lesson about modern boundaries, it challenged the way I’ve been handling what God has entrusted to me.
Because I have been pouring without discernment.
I have been giving without considering whether I was actually being led to give.
And I have been so concerned with proving that I was trustworthy enough to carry the oil that I neglected the discipline required to steward it.
Everybody could access me.
Everybody could interrupt me.
Everybody could place their expectations on me.
And I called that availability ministry.
Meanwhile, I was slowly becoming angry at the very people I claimed to be serving.
And God had to show me that resentment was exposing something I needed to address.
Not because every person I helped was wrong.
Not because generosity is foolish.
But because I had been saying yes with my mouth while screaming no in my heart.
Then Galatians 6:1–5 came and finished whatever little bit of composure I had left.
Paul tells believers to restore someone caught in wrongdoing gently, to watch themselves, and to carry one another’s burdens. But in the same passage, he also says each person should carry their own load.
For the longest time, I treated those instructions like they contradicted each other.
They don’t.
The passage calls us to help one another with burdens while still recognizing personal accountability.
And I had been using the first instruction to avoid confronting the second.
I had become so invested in carrying what belonged to other people that I was neglecting what God had actually entrusted to me.
Their decisions became my emergencies.
Their lack of planning became my responsibility.
Their discomfort became my guilt.
Their disappointment became my evidence that I had failed.
And the expectations?
They were never equally distributed.
I was expected to exercise patience with people who didn’t extend patience to me.
I was expected to understand circumstances nobody bothered to understand when they were mine.
I was expected to forgive without acknowledgment, serve without consideration, and remain accessible without regard for what it was costing me.
But here’s the part where I have to stop pointing fingers.
Some of those expectations were placed on me.
And some of them I taught people to have.
Ouch.
Because every time I said yes when I meant no, I helped establish an expectation.
Every time I rescued somebody from a consequence they needed to confront, I reinforced a pattern.
Every time I abandoned my own needs to avoid somebody else’s disappointment, I participated in the very cycle I was complaining about.
That doesn’t excuse anyone who took advantage of me.
But it does mean I have some responsibility for what I continue allowing.
And I hate that revelation because it’s so much easier to be the exhausted victim of everybody else’s demands than to admit I have been afraid to disappoint people.
Afraid of being misunderstood.
Afraid of being called selfish.
Afraid somebody would decide I was no longer worth keeping around if I stopped being convenient.
And isn’t that something?
I have survived things that should have made me understand how valuable my life is, yet I have still spent so much of it trying to earn a place in rooms where my humanity was treated like an inconvenience.
I can forgive someone and still decline access.
I can love someone and still acknowledge that their expectations are unreasonable.
I can have compassion for someone’s circumstances without assuming responsibility for changing them.
And I can be obedient to God without volunteering to be emotionally crucified every Tuesday.
Because Jesus already handled the cross, and I am not accepting applications for a replacement.
Now, Philippians 4:6–7.
This one got personal.
Paul writes about bringing our concerns to God through prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, and about God’s peace guarding our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
What stood out to me was the thanksgiving.
Because I have prayed some prayers that were really just anxiety with a Bible verse attached.
I have asked God to handle situations while simultaneously developing seventeen contingency plans, rehearsing hypothetical conversations, and preparing emotionally for outcomes that haven’t even happened.
I have prayed and then immediately picked the worry back up like I left my purse at the restaurant.
Girl.
Did you surrender it or did you just give God a presentation?
And I realized how often I have mistaken my inability to control something for an obligation to worry about it.
The American Psychological Association’s 2025 Stress in America survey found that 69% of employed adults identified work as a significant personal stressor.
Sixty-nine percent.
And I wonder how many of us are carrying stress not only from the responsibilities we actually have, but from the expectations we’ve accepted, the conversations we’re avoiding, and the consequences we’re trying to prevent for everybody else.
I know I have.
Stress has become so familiar to me that peace sometimes feels suspicious.
If everything is calm, I’m waiting for the phone call.
If nobody needs anything, I’m wondering what I’ve forgotten.
If I have an opportunity to rest, I’m thinking about what I should be doing instead.
I have spent so much of my life in survival mode that my body doesn’t always recognize when the emergency is over.
And I have the nerve to ask God for peace while continuing to create obligations He never assigned me.
John 14:27 reminds me that the peace Jesus gives is different from what the world gives.
He spoke those words to His disciples as He prepared them for His departure, not because their circumstances were about to become easy, but because they would need His peace in the middle of what was coming.
And that distinction matters to me.
Because I’ve been treating peace like something I’ll finally experience when everybody is okay.
When the relationship is fixed.
When the finances are better.
When the conflict is resolved.
When nobody is upset with me.
When I have successfully anticipated every possible inconvenience life could introduce.
Which, at this rate, means I’ll experience peace sometime around the second coming.
And even then, I’d probably be asking Jesus if He needed help organizing the arrival.
I wish I were kidding.
But I am beginning to understand that I cannot make everybody’s circumstances the prerequisite for my peace.
And that doesn’t mean I stop caring.
It means I stop confusing caring with controlling.
I can pray without panicking.
I can help without assuming ownership.
I can be present without being consumed.
And I can trust God with the people I love without behaving as though He needs me to supervise Him.
Which brings me to Jonah.
Because while Jonah was inside the great fish, he prayed to God, and God commanded the fish to release him onto dry land in Jonah 2:10.
The text doesn’t say God held a conversation with the fish because Jonah had everything figured out. Jonah had been running from his assignment, and God’s mercy was still at work.
And something about that reminded me that God has authority in circumstances where I have absolutely none.
He doesn’t need me to manipulate every outcome.
He doesn’t need me to manufacture every solution.
He doesn’t need me to stay awake worrying about how He’s going to accomplish what only He can do.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable revelation is that sometimes my frantic attempts to help are really my inability to trust.
I don’t always know how to leave something alone.
I don’t always know how to watch somebody make a decision I disagree with.
I don’t always know how to let a consequence happen without inserting myself into the middle of it.
Because I know what pain feels like.
I know what abandonment feels like.
I know what it feels like when nobody comes.
And somewhere along the way, I decided that if I could prevent somebody else from experiencing those feelings, I should.
But I am not God.
And I cannot heal every wound by reopening my own.
That brings me to the part of my notes that may have hurt the most.
Seek the Savior for sanity.
Before God fixes it, I need Him to settle me.
Because I have been so focused on getting God to change the situation that I haven’t always allowed Him to confront what the situation is revealing about me.
My impatience.
My fear.
My need for control.
My desperate desire to be understood.
My tendency to confuse rejection with disagreement.
My habit of making decisions while emotionally overwhelmed and then asking God to bless the aftermath.
Genesis 16 reminds me of Sarai, Abram, and Hagar.
God had made a promise concerning Abram’s descendants, but Sarai, unable to conceive at that point, proposed that Abram have a child through Hagar.
I have to be careful not to flatten that story into a cute little lesson about impatience because Hagar was an enslaved woman whose life was profoundly affected by decisions made by people with power over her.
But the account still confronts me with the danger of trying to manufacture an outcome when waiting feels unbearable.
How many times have I created an Ishmael because I couldn’t tolerate uncertainty?
How many times have I made a permanent decision to relieve a temporary feeling?
How many times have I tried to force a resolution because I wanted the discomfort to stop more than I wanted to exercise discernment?
And how many times have I called my urgency wisdom?
God, help me.
Because I don’t just need You to change what is happening around me.
I need You to change what is happening inside me.
I need to stop treating every uncomfortable feeling like an emergency that requires immediate action.
I need to stop assuming that being misunderstood means I need to explain myself until somebody agrees.
I need to stop confusing guilt with conviction.
Because guilt can come from disappointing someone’s expectations.
Conviction calls me to examine whether I’ve actually disobeyed God.
And those are not automatically the same thing.
I think that’s what I’ve been struggling to admit.
Sometimes the discomfort I feel after establishing a boundary isn’t the Holy Spirit telling me I’ve done something wrong.
Sometimes it’s simply the unfamiliar feeling of no longer abandoning myself.
And I need discernment to know the difference.
I also need to acknowledge that boundaries can become another place to hide if I’m not careful. I don’t want to use my healing as an excuse to become hardhearted, unaccountable, or unwilling to serve.
I want to love people well.
I want to be generous.
I want to be compassionate.
I want to have a heart that is moved by what moves God.
But I don’t want my obedience to be driven by terror anymore.
I don’t want to give because I’m afraid someone will leave.
I don’t want to serve because I’m afraid someone will question my character.
I don’t want to say yes because I don’t know how to survive somebody else’s no.
I want my yes to be honest.
And I want my no to be honest too.
Because the widow in 2 Kings 4 didn’t need to pretend she had more than she did.
She brought her actual circumstances before the prophet.
And God provided for her actual need.
Not the polished version.
Not the socially acceptable version.
Not the version that protected everybody else’s comfort.
The truth.
And maybe that’s where my healing has to begin.
Not with another declaration about how strong I am.
Not with another commitment to push through.
Not with another promise that I’ll be okay.
But with the truth.
I’m tired.
I’m grieving things I haven’t fully processed.
I’m angry about expectations I should have challenged a long time ago.
I’m disappointed by people I kept making excuses for.
I’m embarrassed by how many times I have mistaken being useful for being valued.
And I am exhausted from trying to prove that I deserve the same consideration I’ve so freely extended to everybody else.
I don’t want to be bitter.
But I also don’t want to keep calling bitterness peace just because I’ve learned how to smile through it.
I don’t want to punish people for what happened to me when I was little.
But I also don’t want that little girl making every decision about who gets access to the woman I am today.
I want to be free.
Not free from responsibility.
Not free from loving people.
Not free from the discomfort of growth.
Free from the belief that I have to destroy myself to demonstrate that my heart belongs to God.
And maybe the most humbling part of all of this is realizing that I have spent years asking God to teach people how to treat me while resisting His attempts to teach me how to steward myself.
Whew.
I came looking for strategies to manage stress.
God started exposing the beliefs that have been keeping me stressed.
I came asking Him to change the demands being placed on me.
He started confronting the demands I had agreed to carry.
I came wanting Him to tell everybody else to stop expecting so much.
And He asked me why I had made their expectations the authority over my life.
I don’t have a pretty answer for that.
I have a history.
I have some wounds.
I have some habits that helped me survive but are now interfering with the life I’m trying to live.
And I have a God who is compassionate enough to care about what hurts me and sovereign enough that I don’t have to control everything to be safe in His hands.
So today, I’m not making another dramatic promise about never allowing anybody to drain me again.
I know myself better than that.
There will probably be another situation where my first instinct is to overextend, overexplain, overfunction, or apologize for something that doesn’t require an apology.
But I want to catch myself.
I want to ask whether God actually assigned me the responsibility I’m about to assume.
I want to be honest when I don’t have the capacity.
I want to stop treating somebody else’s disappointment as proof of my disobedience.
And I want to remember that the same God who calls me to carry another person’s burdens also calls me to be responsible for my own.
I still have oil.
But I need wisdom about where I’m pouring it.
I still have a heart for people.
But I need to stop confusing access to my heart with entitlement to my life.
And I still want to be obedient.
Desperately.
I just don’t want to keep offering God the remains of a woman who has already given everybody else the best of her.
Because perhaps the greatest act of obedience available to me right now isn’t doing more.
Perhaps it’s telling the truth.
About what I have.
About what I don’t.
About what hurts.
About what needs to change.
About the responsibilities that belong to me and the ones I’ve been carrying because I was afraid to put them down.
The widow didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t in trouble to prove she trusted God.
And I don’t have to pretend I’m not exhausted to prove I love Him.
I can come to Him with an empty vessel.
I can come to Him with the little oil I have left.
I can come to Him without a strategy, without a solution, and without a performance.
And for once, I want to stop asking how much more of myself I need to give before I’ve given enough.
I want to ask God what He actually requires of me.
Because I’ve spent too many years being everybody’s answer.
And somewhere in the process, I stopped being honest about how desperately I needed Him to be mine.
I don’t want to bleed myself dry trying to prove I have the heart of Christ.
I want Him to heal the parts of my heart that made me believe I had to.
And this time, when He asks me what I have in my house, I’m not going to pretend the vessel is full.
I’m going to tell Him the truth.
Lord, this is what I have left.
And I’m finally ready to stop giving it away just to convince people I’m worth keeping.