Are You Strong Enough to Ask for Help?

We’re talking about strength today, but from a very different angle. And I’m going to out myself a little.

Lately I’ve noticed that my best relationships with other women are the ones where, if I didn’t shower for a month and showed up at their house, they’d love me anyway. I hope everyone reading this has somebody like that. I’ve been so blessed by women who love me regardless of the state of my hair or the messiness of my life. It has made a huge difference in my healing, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And we get to have fun.

This week I’m borrowing from an amazing sermon by Kyle Idleman (@KyleIdleman) at Southeast Christian Church (@se.church) in Louisville. (We go to a Southeast church here in Franklin, Tennessee.) If you’re not a Christian, hang in there with me.

Pastor Kyle was teaching on the Beatitudes, and he used an illustration that has been stuck in my head ever since. He compared the way many of us live (yours truly included, for a long time) to a perfectly staged house.

If you’ve never sold a house, staging is when your realtor takes out your furniture and brings in perfect Better Homes and Gardens or Southern Living style pieces. The walls get painted a neutral color so anyone who walks in can picture themselves living there. Decorative pillows nobody’s allowed to touch. A bowl of apples on the counter. (I’d go with lemons or oranges, because those are my colors.) Everything looks wonderful. But it’s staged. And if you look a little closer, there’s not much life happening there.

Anybody is welcome to come over, but I don’t live like that. My house is definitely not a can’t-wait-for-the-photographer kind of house.

So where else do we stage our lives? I know I want to be seen as a capable, successful woman who has everything under control. (Picture me doing air quotes.)

Christian women can be exceptionally good at this. We show up at church and tell everybody how great and how blessed we are. Yet church is supposed to be a hospital, a place where broken people go to get help and are surrounded by other imperfect people. Maybe we do it at work too. Meanwhile we’re barely holding it together, and we go home wondering why we’re even more exhausted after something that was supposed to be good for us.

I’m not suggesting everybody announce their problems to the world. Please don’t. That could be oversharing, and it isn’t always safe. But I wonder how often we’re so committed to looking strong that we’ve made it almost impossible for anybody to help us. I’m guilty.

One of the greatest expressions of strength is being willing to acknowledge that you need help. Think about how blessed you feel when you help someone from your heart. When we won’t let anyone help us, we’re denying them that blessing.

The first Beatitude flips everything around, which is exactly how God rolls. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with people who recognize their spiritual need. Not people who think they have it figured out. Not people who have achieved enough, or who are so spiritually accomplished that they no longer need anything. People who are hurting inside and know they have no choice but to depend on God.

Pastor Kyle put it this way: our empty place can be God’s entryway.

I love that, because our instinct is to hide the empty places. We cover them up. We work harder. We put on another layer of lipstick. We become more productive and try to make ourselves indispensable. Sometimes we even turn our faith into another performance. I can only say that because I recognize it. I should be stronger. I should have more faith. I should be handling this better. I should be able to do this by myself. That’s very American. But Jesus isn’t asking us to pretend we don’t need Him. Recognizing that need is fundamental to our relationship with Him.

You’ve heard the phrase “God helps those who help themselves.” That verse isn’t even in the Bible. It may be a popular saying about initiative and responsibility, and there’s nothing wrong with either of those. But it isn’t the message of Matthew 5:3. God’s grace is not a reward for people who have managed to become completely self-sufficient.

That one feels like daggers at myself. And it matters for women who have spent decades being the person everybody else depends on. We’re so used to being the helper that we’ve forgotten how to let others help us.

When did we decide we had to figure everything out ourselves?

I’ve spent so much of my life figuring things out, and that has taken me a long way. I’m curious. I love to learn. I’m in seminary at 62. I love solving problems, and I’ve built a career around helping women figure out what’s happening in their bodies. I’m also pretty independent, which, depending on whom you ask, may or may not be one of my most endearing qualities.

Being a capable woman can make asking for help really difficult. It isn’t always pride, although sometimes it is for me. Sometimes it’s habit. You’ve spent so many years being the one who knows what to do that it doesn’t occur to you that you might not have to know. Sometimes you don’t even recognize you’re struggling. Hello, perimenopause. You just keep doing what you’ve always done.

I can be remarkably willing to spend time and energy figuring something out on my own when somebody else could probably help me do it in 20 minutes. And when I hear myself saying, “I’ve got to figure this out,” over and over, I’m not depending on Jesus at all. So I have to ask myself, what am I trying to prove? There’s a difference between being capable and insisting on doing everything alone.

That’s part of why I created the Living F.R.E.S.H. Collective. For decades I’ve worked with women who are incredibly capable. They manage families, businesses, careers, households, aging parents, church, all the things. Then somewhere along the way their bodies start to change. Sometimes it’s subtle enough that you don’t even recognize what’s happening, but the things you’ve always done to take care of yourself don’t seem to work the same way anymore. And somewhere along the way we assume we should already know what to do about it.

Why? Why would a woman who has never been taught how hormonal changes affect her metabolism, sleep, recovery, digestion, and emotional regulation be expected to know how to navigate those changes? We don’t expect someone to know how to drive a car or play the piano without learning. But with our bodies, we think it should be instinctive. And when it isn’t, we blame ourselves. “I know what I should be doing. I just need to do it.”

With so much love and grace: are you sure you know what you should be doing? I had to change so many things this year, including how I was taking in calories, because what I’d been doing for the last ten years wasn’t working anymore.

You might be trying to solve a problem you don’t fully understand. Maybe you don’t need more discipline. Maybe you need different information and someone who can help you figure it out in 20 minutes instead of two years. That’s not weakness. That’s wisdom.

Living F.R.E.S.H. isn’t a new diet or exercise program, and I’m not promising miraculous results. What I do promise is that you’ll see your body from a different perspective and know some different things to do in the situation you’re in. What’s actually happening right now? What does this body need? What would caring for it well look like in the middle of my chaotic, actual life? I don’t think God expects us to know everything, and I certainly don’t think He expects us to pretend we do.

God made us for community. And a staged house isn’t designed for relationships. It’s designed for appearances.

Let that sink in. Nobody cooks dinner in that kitchen. Nobody sits on that couch having a difficult conversation. Nobody’s kids leave their muddy shoes on it or throw a football across the room. Nobody actually lives there.

Sometimes we approach community the same way. We want friendships. We need belonging. But we also want to control how much of our real lives people get to see. We want connection without vulnerability. I understand that. The first time I watched Brené Brown’s video on vulnerability, I cried and watched it about ten times, because I knew she had made it for me. Vulnerability involves risk. Not everybody is safe, and not everybody has earned the right to know what’s happening in our lives.

But when you find people who are safe, like those friends I told you about, it’s the biggest exhale you’ll ever experience. No more performing. No more pretending. We can start helping each other and carrying each other’s burdens, like Galatians 6:2 tells us. We love helping other people, and other people love helping us too. That is good, and that is rich. And if we’re supposed to carry one another’s burdens, at some point I have to be willing to let someone help carry mine.

That doesn’t come naturally to those of us who are used to being the strong one. Sometimes we exhaust ourselves to the point that we can’t even admit we could use a hand.

Needing help doesn’t diminish what you’re capable of. It took me a long time to understand that needing help doesn’t mean I’m incompetent. I can put up a ceiling fan. I’ve done it before. Am I going to do it again? No. I’m asking for help.

It’s a silly example, but think about how that flows through your whole life. We confuse asking for help with not being strong. Why? I’m competent. I’m intelligent. I’m an accomplished woman. I’m a beloved child of the Most High God, fearfully and wonderfully made for such a time as this. I can have strong faith and still have difficult days. I can love God and still need care. I can be disciplined and still need someone to help me understand why my body isn’t responding the way it used to. None of those things contradict each other. They all sit in the same bowl.

This is where Christian community can be something really beautiful. Not a gathering of women who look like they have it all figured out, because we don’t. Not another place where we walk in and compare ourselves to somebody who seems to be doing better. A place where someone can say, “I’m actually struggling with this,” and instead of judgment, she gets understanding. Instead of the flashlight, empathy. Maybe someone says, “Oh my goodness, me too.”

That’s part of what I’m creating in the Living F.R.E.S.H. Collective. I’ve spent almost 35 years helping people understand their health, and one thing I’ve learned is that information is important, but you can get it everywhere. Information doesn’t always translate into transformation. Especially when you’re trying to figure it all out by yourself, reading books, listening to podcasts, following all the experts, and still standing in the kitchen at 6 p.m. wondering what on earth you’re supposed to eat for dinner. Or lying awake at 3 a.m. wondering why your body has suddenly decided sleep is optional.

I want you to have somewhere to bring those questions. Somewhere you can learn about your changing body with a group of women who support you as you support them. We’re going to learn how to live F.R.E.S.H. together. Not perfectly, not all at once, and not pretending everybody’s life looks the same.

So don’t leave with the image of a staged house. A staged house can be absolutely beautiful. But home is where people actually live. Where things get messy. Where people need each other. Where somebody had a bad day and somebody else makes dinner. Where you don’t have to have everything figured out before you walk through the door.

That’s a much better picture of the strength Jesus invites us into. Not pretending we have no needs, but recognizing that we do. Not proving we can do everything, but having the wisdom to receive the help we need.

This week, let your empty place become God’s entryway. Asking for help isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. And that’s strength.

Drop FRESH in a comment or send me a DM on Instagram @drkrissargent, and I’ll share everything about the Living F.R.E.S.H. Collective, now open for Founding Members.