The Contemplative Woman

She Couldn’t Pick Up the Phone


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I asked the women in my group to write down three things they were resisting. Things they knew were God, and they still weren’t moving on them.

One of them didn’t hesitate. She wrote down: make the calls.

So I asked her why she wasn’t making them.

And she said, “Because every morning I remind myself that God has not given me a spirit of fear, but of love and power and a sound mind. And every morning I put the phone back down.”

Then she said the thing that cracked the room open.

“I can feel my whole nervous system inside of me saying, I don’t want to hear this.”

There it is.

Not rebellion. Not a weak prayer life. Not a woman who needs to believe harder. A body doing exactly what it was trained to do, protecting her from a threat that stopped existing decades ago.

I can’t tell you the rest of what came out that night, because that room is a sealed room. But I can tell you the shape of it.

One woman shared a deep mother wound.

Another was raised on the rule that a good woman stays useful and stays quiet.

A third was handed her younger siblings to raise, and somehow ended up the reason her parents fought.

Three different houses. Three different childhoods. One wiring.

The first one over-delivers and calls it generosity. The second can’t make a phone call and calls it procrastination. The third gets within arm’s reach of the thing she prayed for and quietly wrecks it, and she doesn’t even have a name for that. She just knows she does it.

None of that is a character flaw.

All of it is a pathway.

This is the whole reason I wrote The Rhythm She Was Given. Because pathways can be rebuilt, and almost nobody is telling women how.

[→ Get the book]

What the church left out

Romans 12:2 says do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The Greek word is metamorphoo. Same root that gives us metamorphosis. The caterpillar and the butterfly. Inside out, never outside in.

That word sat in Scripture for two thousand years before the science caught up to it.

Dr. Caroline Leaf tells the story of reading that verse as a young researcher and being bothered by it, because the science of her day insisted the brain was fixed. One pathway. No revisions. But she believed the Word was true before she could prove it, so she went looking. And she found neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to build new pathways for as long as you are breathing. (Dr. Caroline Leaf, “Switch On Your Brain.”)

The renewal of your mind is not a metaphor. It is a biological event. God is not asking you to defy your design. He is asking you to use it.

But nobody warns you about the wall.

You start the new thing. It works. Two weeks in, you feel like a different woman. And then something in you slams the brakes and says wait, wait, hold up, I have to protect you, this is not safe.

That is not the enemy. That is your nervous system doing its job with outdated information. Expansion registers as danger. So it drags you back to the pattern it knows, and you land in a puddle of shame at the same altar, asking God for the same thing you asked Him for last year.

And then, on top of all of it, there is your body.

The part almost nobody teaches

You can be rebuilding beautifully and still get ambushed by a Thursday.

Follicular week, you are on fire. New role, new people, no problem. God is good and so are you. Then progesterone climbs and drops, and the same woman who was building an empire on the fourteenth is crying on the twenty-fourth over a text message, absolutely certain the whole thing is collapsing and she was a fool to try.

Same woman. Same calling. Same faith.

Different hormonal terrain.

I have watched women walk away from the assignment God gave them because they made a permanent decision in a temporary week. And then they called it discernment.

It wasn’t. It was a luteal phase with no map.

The map exists. Four phases. What you were built to do inside each one. Which week to launch, which week to decide, which week to rest without apologizing for it. It’s all in The Rhythm She Was Given.

[→ Read it before your next hard decision]

Why I finally wrote it all down

I had an income cap for years and I could not figure out why. I would climb into multiple six figures and then watch it slide. Climb. Slide. Climb. Slide.

A mentor pushed me deeper and I found it.

My mother earned well over three hundred thousand a year. Multiple degrees. Brilliant. And her marriage ended. So somewhere in me, a young girl signed a contract that said you can have money or you can have love, and reaching for one means burying the other.

I was confessing abundance out loud and voting against it in my body.

That is cognitive dissonance. And no amount of quoting the verse louder was ever going to fix it, because the verse was never the problem. The pathway was.

So I put all of it in one place. The four hormonal phases and what you were built to do inside each one. The nervous system re-regulation that makes the new thing hold instead of snapping back. The science of how a pathway actually gets built, and the Scripture that told us it could be, centuries before anyone had a microscope.

Because I refuse to hand you a verse and then let you feel like a failure when it doesn’t take. That is not teaching. That is abandonment with a Bible verse stapled to it.

You are not undisciplined. You are not faithless. You are not behind.

You are a woman with a body God built on purpose, running old wiring she never chose, carrying a calling she cannot put down.

So here is my question for you this week.

That thing you keep starting over.

Are you sure it is your obedience that is broken?

Or has nobody ever shown you how you were made?

The Rhythm She Was Given

He did not hand you a body you were supposed to fight. He handed you a rhythm.

Nobody taught you to read it, so you have been calling it a weakness for twenty years.

This is the book that teaches you.

[→ Yours here]



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The Contemplative WomanBy Tanya Tenica