Problems Are Not Meant to Be Prevented
Problems are not meant to be prevented.
To fail to plan is to plan to fail. An ounce of prevention. Put on the armor of God to withstand the fiery darts of the adversary. You didn’t just plan a talk. You rehearsed it until it was memorized. Plan A, plan B, plan C. Back-up plans.
A few years ago, I was the president of the young women’s organization at our church. We had planning meetings with each of the girls’ class presidencies. Before that, we had planning meetings with the adult organization presidency to plan the planning meetings. Before that, I sat in a ward council meeting where we planned the meeting where we’d plan the meetings.
And it wasn’t just that we were trying to think of everything. Be prepared for every eventuality. It was also that if we were worthy, if we were in tune, the spirit would warn us ahead of time. Would put the things we needed to know into our minds before we needed them. “It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do,” says the Book of Mormon.
The grace comes after your part.
It’s been years since that calling. Since I sat in these lessons. Since I felt responsible for a “stewardship”. But what I didn’t notice is how hard I’m still preventing.
We are still doing this. Not the meetings or the temple recommends. But the architecture. Years out of the church, wearing ourselves down trying to prevent problems. Prevent pain. Ending up wasting precious energy and preventing growth instead. Calling it responsibility. Calling it being a good mother, a good employee, a good person who doesn’t let things fall through the cracks.
Oversights are natural. We aren’t psychic. We were never supposed to predict and prevent every problem that might come near the people we love. We have no practice trusting ourselves to come through in a problem. We’ve been too good at making sure the problem never gets the chance to happen.
So we carry around this constant buzz of anxiety. A hypervigilance without a single cause you can point to. Because it isn’t caused by any one thing. It’s caused by a belief that was systematically installed in you one lesson and one meeting and a time. That your energy is supposed to be everywhere, at all times, preventing everything. And we haven’t stopped to question this until now. But today, I’m presenting an idea that was completely new to me:
Problems are how you find out where your energy actually needs to go.
A kid melts down and you learn something about what he needed that you couldn’t have known in advance. A project falls apart in a way you didn’t foresee, and that’s how you discover where the weak point was. Something no amount of pre-meetings would have surfaced.
Attention was never supposed to be a floodlight running at all hours over every square inch of your life. It was supposed to work like a hand near a stove. You don’t hover your hand over every burner in the house all day, just in case one turns on. You go about your life, and when something gets hot, you feel it, and you move your hand.
We didn’t learn it that way. We were taught the opposite. The hand hovering over every burner, all day, every day. That was what love looked like. What worthiness looked like. What being a good steward of your one wild and precious calling looked like.
I still catch myself working out problems that haven’t happened yet. Running all possible eventualities in my head. Rehearsing talks nobody asked me to give. When I catch it now, I try to ask a different question than the one I was trained to ask.
Not what could go wrong.
When it does, do I trust myself to handle it?
I don’t know yet. I’m finding out one problem at a time.
If you already know what you need to do, and you’re still not doing it, this isn’t about trying harder.
I’m running a live workshop this week on the space between insight and action after leaving obedience-based systems on July 7th @ 7 MT (Arizona).
Free for CNRS members here. And my paid subscribers here.
You can also book a 15-minute clarity call to talk through one stuck point here.