Really, the last month or so has been constant, constant chaos, quite literally nonstop. My husband is a UK citizen and can’t stay in the U.S. for very long right now, so we’ve been traveling literally all summer. We went to visit him in the UK for a month, came home for a couple of months (but we weren’t really home, because we were traveling for music festivals and ministry), and then went back to the UK for a couple more months.
On top of that, I recently started grad school to get my master’s in biblical studies, and I wanted to do well. I also really wanted to build my sticker business, grow this blog and my Instagram, and learn Japanese. My husband and I are launching a music festival that’s about 200 days away, which is so overwhelming. My son has special needs, and he has not handled the last couple of months well, because they’ve been very, very, very hard. We have a marriage we’re trying to figure out, and we’re in loads of debt.
We got so caught up in everything there is to do that we took our eyes off of Jesus. That can sound so cheesy sometimes, but that’s the reality of it.
It started to go sideways when I felt like I had clarity on what God wanted me to do. I was like, “Okay cool, got the brief, got it, God,” and I just took off running without actually letting Him lead, while He’s standing there like, “Excuse me, I’m not done yet.” It was so overwhelming and so exhausting.
It was only about a week ago that I realized it. We were about to leave and go back to the U.S., things were so insane and so wild, and I had been doing all of this not without God, but really without God’s guidance. I didn’t want to keep doing that.
So if you’re right there with me, these are the signs I missed, and girl, I missed a LOT of them.
Managing Chaos vs. Stewarding Your Life
For me, managing chaos is when I’m constantly stressed, constantly reacting, and constantly beating myself up. I’m not actually doing anything to fix anything. I’m literally just whining about it.
Biblical stewardship is taking care of everything God has given you, on purpose and with Him at the center. And here’s the thing I had to relearn the hard way: stewardship is not a one-and-done. You have to recenter on it again and again and again.
That’s why I teach stewardship in eight pillars. At any given time, you should be tending to at least one of them, because if you stop tending all of them, the whole thing collapses. They all need care, and none of them stay upright on their own.
9 Signs You’re Managing Chaos Instead of Stewarding Your Life
1. Your Body Is Paying for It
I have chronic illness, and I have a very physical reaction every single time I’m stressed. I break out in thick hives all over my body, and it is awful. Over these last couple of months in the UK, it got so much worse.
Then my immune system goes down the toilet and I get very, very sick. My hormones get out of whack, my rest is terrible, and I’m tired all the time. That’s how I know. When my health tanks and I’ve stopped taking care of it, I’m managing chaos.
2. You’re Constantly Beating Yourself Up
When I’m stewarding well and keeping God at the center, I give myself so much more grace. When I’m managing chaos, I’m my own worst critic, and nothing I do is ever enough.
3. You’re Snapping at the People You Love
The very first sign I noticed this time was that I snapped at my son and I snapped at my husband. I’m a short-fuse person as it is, and a lot of that comes from trauma I’m still healing from. I haven’t mastered it by any stretch of the imagination.
But when I start getting irritated at things that don’t deserve the reaction they’re getting, I know something is off.
4. Everything Lives in Your Head
The mental load has honestly cost me thousands of dollars. When I was a social media manager, I was such a flake because I was so overwhelmed. My brain wasn’t functioning, and I was dropping the ball all the time.
My clients got results when I showed up, but I wasn’t giving them the attention they needed, and that’s something I’m really coming to terms with. I was trying to hold everything in my head by myself, and I never put in the effort to learn a system that could hold it for me.
5. You Have Zero Margin
This one catches so many of us off guard. Most of us have a perfect plan in our heads, and I do too. We’re going to do it this perfect way every single day for the rest of eternity.
But that’s a best-day-ever plan. It doesn’t account for when your kid gets sick, when the schedule changes, or when life just happens. So you’re constantly reacting, and then you’re behind.
Margin is simply creating space for life to happen. Say Wednesday afternoon is pretty open. Instead of filling it with something else, I leave it open, and SO many times life ends up happening right then. If I hadn’t left that space, it would have been really bad.
Normally, I live out of my Google Calendar. Google Calendar is the boss of me. Everything is in there, and when a notification pops up, I immediately start preparing for the next thing.
For the last couple of months in England, we didn’t do that. I was about to give you excuses, but the reality is that those two months would not have been nearly as crazy if we’d had that calendar set up. The number of things we missed and balls we dropped because we didn’t create margin is wild, and I can see all the time I wasted that should have gone toward building it.
I constantly have to remind myself that if God can take care of the flowers, He can take care of me, too. This is especially true when it comes to taking care of my body. He made the lilies beautiful and they don’t even have to try. That’s why I made the Lilies of the Field sticker, so you could have a reminder on your water bottle, computer or even your Bible that God’s always got you. Check it out on the sticker shop here!
6. You’re Bouncing Between Tasks All Day
When I’m jumping between brands, school, homeschool, and home in the same hour, I go to bed feeling like nothing got done. I feel like I’m neglecting everything important and life is falling apart. I hate it, hate it, hate it.
Here’s what it usually looks like. I’m struggling with Greek in school right now, and one night I really didn’t want to do my Greek assignment. All of a sudden, I found myself getting homeschool stuff ready that I’d been putting off for literally two years.
Wait a minute. I’d been avoiding that for two years, but suddenly it was more important than an assignment due that night? That’s when I know I’m jumping from thing to thing as an act of avoidance and not actually getting anything done.
7. You Never Have a Day That’s Protected
I know the Sabbath is controversial, and I’m not going to get into whether it’s required after Jesus. What I will say is that God made us to need rest.
God rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2), not because He was tired, but because He was modeling what we were supposed to do. And when He brought the Israelites out of Egypt, He didn’t give them rest just for funsies. They had been slaves working 24/7, and He tied the command to rest directly to that: “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:15, ESV).
They physically needed that rest, and they still struggled to take it. That wasn’t because they loved work. It was because they didn’t know how to stop, and I can relate to that.
I’m the first to tell you I am not good at resting or taking days off. It’s something I’m constantly working on. Right now, Friday is our Sabbath, and I know people have opinions about it not being Saturday. It’s simply the day we take off to focus on God and family, and we still have plenty to do better. But it is absolutely, 100% necessary.
If you don’t have a day you’re taking off to focus on God and your family, you are not following what God has for your life. This isn’t about whether it’s required for salvation. It’s about the fact that God created us to need rest, and when you don’t rest, you burn out. As someone who has literally been taken out for weeks at a time because I didn’t rest, please rest.
8. You’ve Stopped Spending Time With God
This is the spiritual sign, and it’s the simplest one. When I’m in chaos mode, I don’t spend time with Him. I don’t pray, I don’t get in the Bible, and I avoid it.
9. You’re Stuck in Victim Mode
This is the big one, and I see it in myself and in so many women I talk to. “Oh my gosh, this is just so hard, and nothing’s ever going to change.” When I catch myself saying that, I know I’m managing chaos, because I’m not actually doing anything to fix it. I’m just whining.
When we wake up and decide we’re overwhelmed, our whole day circles around that decision. If we decide life sucks today, life is going to suck today.
Nothing that happened to you is your fault, but healing and stewarding what’s in front of you is your responsibility. I really believe the enemy uses the victim mindset in such a deep, disgusting way to keep us believing we just can’t, when so much of our lives could be different if we chose to get out of that box.
The Lies That Keep You Managing Chaos
When I’m just managing chaos, the lie I’m believing is that I just need to try harder. I need to do better. If I was just more organized, then I could do this, and once life slows down, I’ll do that. But life is never going to slow down, and I’m never going to magically get more organized. The only way things are going to change is if I just start right now.
And here’s the other lie so many of us believe: “Nothing works for me.” Most of the time, the truth is that we never gave it a real chance. You have to do something consistently for probably at least 30 days to know whether it works for you. That means setting reminders on your phone, asking for accountability, and putting in real effort, because it isn’t going to get easy overnight.
If you bought a new planner that was going to fix your life and you haven’t opened it in a week, that doesn’t mean the planner didn’t work. It means you didn’t set yourself up to keep using it. And I’m saying that as someone with raging ADHD, OCD, autism, and all the things.
What Changes When You Start Stewarding Instead
It’s only been about the last week or so that I really started focusing on stewardship again, and it has been wild how different it feels. It’s not any easier necessarily, but it’s like I finally understand what the priorities actually are.
I’m not doing it perfectly, and I’m going to get off track again. That’s exactly why stewardship is something you come back to again and again, and every time I do, it’s so much better than trying to do all of this without God’s guidance.
Where to Start: Stewarding the Chaos
I created Stewarding the Chaos for the woman who’s dealing with exactly what I’ve described here. She’s so tired of complaining, but she doesn’t know where to start, and she feels like she can’t climb out of the hole she’s in.
I made it because other women kept asking me, “Wait, how are you managing to do all of these things?” They felt like they weren’t doing enough, and I realized I’m only able to do what I do because of the systems God has shown me. So I put them in one place for you.
The guide walks you through a simple 4 step framework to finally start getting a handle on the chaos in your life.
It also includes a simple morning and evening journal to help you recenter every day.
If you saw yourself in every single one of these signs, I want you to hear this. It’s possible. God is not mad at you, but it is your responsibility to change, and change is possible. You can build the life God is calling you to, and you can become the woman you’ve convinced yourself you could never be.
Get Stewarding the Chaos for $7 here and start today.
