Introduction: The Formation of a Performer

My parents buried a son before I was born. Rory died as a baby, and his death knocked my mother and father sideways. They never spoke about it. They did what grieving parents did back then: worked. Stayed busy. Buried the pain along with the boy.

I showed up when they were 42 and 43, a surprise they'd stopped believing was possible. Two daughters already, and my father wanted a boy to carry the family name. He got me instead. So he raised me as the son he didn’t have. He taught me to hunt, to fish, to saw logs, to live off the land and fight my own battles. Little girls were to be seen and not heard. Crying was not permitted. The world was hard, he said, and I'd better be harder.

It took me fifty years to see this, but I think I was trying to give him back the son he buried. By becoming him. My job in the family was to stand in the gap a death had left and make it stop hurting. No little girl should have that job. This one didn't even know she'd taken it.

I had a unique upbringing in the mountains of Rathdrum, Idaho. My parents worked. Jobs, side businesses, the land itself. We ate what Dad shot, mostly elk and deer, and we sold milk and eggs. If I wanted time with my parents, their attention, their affirmation, any of it, I worked beside them or proved I could. So I worked. I loved it. I loved making money even when it was Monopoly money and lemonade sold to my dogs, who were my only friends for miles. My parents had eighth-grade educations and wanted more for me, and every scrap of affirmation I got came stapled to an achievement. Straight A's. First chair in band. Drama and debate trophies, FFA leadership and public speaking awards. Dad said I was smart, tough, witty, full of wildfire, and I spent my childhood making sure he stayed right about that.

Work equals worth. Achievement equals affection. Be strong and nobody can hurt you. I was bigger and stronger than every kid at school and made sure they knew it. I'd have friends, boys mostly, right up until I beat them up. I bonded hard with two or three people at a time and gave them everything; everyone else got nothing. All-in or nothing at all. Decades later, in my marriage, that turned out to be my greatest gift. Everywhere else it meant I had no boundaries, and that bill always comes due. Usually at work.

My teen years were turbulent, to say the least. Honors English, honors math, winning writing contests, all while ditching school, sneaking out at night, and lying my way out of most of the consequences, because I was smart enough to weasel my way out of trouble. The start of addictive behaviors. People think rebellion and performance are opposites. They're twins. Both say the same thing: I'll live on my terms, and I'll be enough on my own.

Then life did what life does. Mom died when I was 12. Dad when I was 18. An abusive relationship. A stretch of homelessness. In my early twenties I came right up to the edge of ending my life, and God rescued me: an atheist at the time, arms crossed in defiance.

You'd think being rescued by grace would end the performing. It didn't. It redirected it. I became a Christian who worked for Jesus exactly the way I'd worked for my father's approval. I knew salvation was free. I knew that. But I was going to show my Heavenly Father I'd give my life for Him the way He gave His for me. Sacrifice. Mission fields in Romania and Mexico. Degrees, jobs, side businesses, marathons, overcoming chronic Lyme disease. Work, press harder, be the best. It wasn't what I did. It was who I was. Now it just wore a cross.

If you lead anything, a company, a church, a classroom, a household, sit with that for a minute. The performance trap doesn't die at conversion. It gets baptized. It learns the language of calling and stewardship and sacrifice, and then it's nearly impossible to spot, because everyone's applauding. The church loves an exhausted volunteer. The marketplace promotes whoever leaves the office last. And the whole time, striving is doing the only thing striving knows how to do: keeping you from abiding.

November 2017. Everything I'd built converged. I stepped into my dream job, at a company that helped people with their health, working for a man whose drive matched mine and then some. For the first time in my life, somebody could outwork me. And I understood my boss at a depth that honestly startled me, because he was me, the male version. Same kind of North Idaho upbringing, same hobbies, same devotion to his spouse and kids. Overachiever. He had my dad's hands. Big, bulky, calloused. Hands made from hard work. He was, I can see now, exactly the son my dad would have wanted. Smart, funny, whimsical, a worker. A familiar soul. I believed God had assigned me to serve him and his family; I still believe that, actually. And I gave the assignment everything I had. Devoted doesn't cover it. I rose to COO of his company, and my devotion deepened into something I couldn't explain. Its roots ran further back than the company, further back than him. Not until later would I see how far.

I made it my mission to protect him and his family. To absorb his problems before they ever reached him. To build the life I thought he wanted for his family, whatever it required, whatever it cost me. All in Jesus' name. That was the story I told myself, anyway. Before you shake your head at me, look around your own life for a minute. Is there a person, a boss, a mentor, a ministry, a mission, that holds more of your identity than any person or work was ever meant to hold? You'd call it loyalty. You'd call it calling. I did too. The tell isn't how it feels when you're serving. The tell is what happens inside you at the thought of losing it.

And hear me: there was real purpose in my work. Real friendship with a family I deeply loved. Real Kingdom fruit. Lessons that changed the fabric of who I am. This is not a story about a bad leader or a bad company. It's a story about a heart that never learned the difference between serving a person and finding your identity in a person. Between an assignment from God and a life fused to somebody else's life. The golden child had found a new field. Only now, instead of earning my earthly father's affirmation, I was performing for my Heavenly Father, certain that perfect devotion would be rewarded with love. Performing for the One who never asked me to.

My body kept sending invoices. Gut problems. Migraines. Insomnia bad enough for addictive sleep meds. A nervous system so wrecked that doctors said I'd need a year or more just to start healing. Blackouts. Memory loss. My mind was on my work and the calling I served from sunup to sundown and into my dreams, fixing things behind the scenes so problems never touched my boss and his family. Friends and coworkers told me to rest. My sweet husband asked me to take care of myself. I heard them the way every driven leader hears that, which is to say, not at all. I was holding on, waiting for things to get better, covering it all up to keep the machine running.

On May 2, 2023, the machine stopped. The reckoning began.

I call it the “crash” because that's what it was. An abrupt resignation. Heart symptoms that put me in the ER more than once. Vertigo. Waves of dissociative amnesia and “dissociation”, which was the medical diagnosis I received. Grief so violent my body would shut down for stretches while my husband and family held our household together. It felt like a death, and in a way it was: the death of my purpose as I understood it, of an assignment from God, of every plan we'd made, the future I counted on, and the loss of one of the main support systems that had been holding me together for years. And underneath all of it, fifty years of embargoed grief finally getting its turn. All at once.

Months later my doctor put words to what I couldn't. "This man wasn't just your boss," she said, "and not just a close family friend. He's your catalyst. A mirror. He represents someone deeply connected to your identity, and the grief response you're having is what we see when someone loses a close family member. To heal your body and recover your memory, you'll have to get to the root of that attachment. It's in the foundations of your life. Look there."

So I looked. It was the deepest excavation of my life, and what I found at the bottom wasn't really about him at all. My boss represented to me the absent father and my lost brother all wrapped up in one person. If I devoted myself enough, loved enough, served enough, was good enough, maybe I could resurrect a family I no longer had. That was the deep familial wound. And under that, deeper still, a little girl on a farm in North Idaho who learned that love is earned by work, that worth is proven by performance, that being needed is the same thing as being loved. Every layer had a layer under it. Healing is almost never one-and-done; it happens in spirit and soul and body, and I had fifty years of layers. Day by day, through counseling, through brain therapy to get my memory back, through long walks and longer talks with God, He pulled them up. The approval addiction. The fix-it identity. Calling confused with attachment. The belief that my devotion could add one ounce to a love that was already mine in Christ. And the pride, that stubborn backwoods Idaho pride, that kept insisting I could do it all myself, well that came crashing down, too.

Here's the mercy I didn't see coming: God used the very thing that broke me to remake me. The friendship, the loss, the grief, the waiting: all of it was the Potter's wheel. It didn't just change my habits. It changed who I am. And it became this book.

Because through all those months, crying on the bathroom floor, sitting in the ER, walking the trails of North Idaho, one passage kept rising: "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me" (John 15:4, NKJV). I had spent my whole life bearing. Bearing losses, bearing responsibility, bearing other people's burdens, bearing fruit by sheer force of will. I had never once abided. And a branch that won't abide doesn't just burn out. It breaks off.

This book is the map God drew for me on the way back, and I've organized it around one word: ABIDE. Align with God's Word. Be Transformed. Identity in Christ. Develop Others. Eternal Significance. It's not a system for doing more; God knows I don't need another one of those, and neither do you. It's an invitation to lead from a different place entirely. From rootedness instead of striving. From belovedness instead of performance. From the Vine instead of the grind. From an identity built on the love of Christ, instead of a world that keeps telling you to do more and be more before you count as somebody worth loving.

I'm writing from the other side of the crash, still on the Potter's wheel, and I expect to stay there until I see Him face to face. But these days, I abide in the One who abides in me. I'm present with myself, my husband, and my soul. For the first time in my life I am content all the way through, loving the person God made, standing in no gaps. I could never have filled them anyway. I've come home: to myself, to my husband, to my God. God is more than a Savior to me now. He’s a real and present Heavenly Father. My brother. He’s my All in All. I tried finding my lost family in a surrogate, when all along, it was God, showing up and saying “I am right here. It was Me you were searching for the entire time, daughter.” He was always abiding in me. I just didn’t understand what it meant to abide in Him. The One who never leaves us in this world or the next.

"He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6, NKJV).

It took a 25+ year professional career for me to see what was under the radar my entire life. My wounds never stayed in my childhood. They ran my leadership. The little girl who learned that love is earned by work grew up and ran a company on that same math. I didn't set boundaries because all-in was the only way I knew how to love. I absorbed problems that weren't mine because being needed was the closest thing I knew to being loved. I couldn't rest, so nobody around me felt permission to rest either. I called it devotion, work ethic, servant leadership, and everyone applauded, and the whole time I was leading people out of a wound and teaching them my math without saying a word. That's the part nobody tells you in the working world: you don't just carry your wounds. You lead from them. You hire from them, you delegate from them (or refuse to), you build cultures from them, and the people God gave you to develop end up living inside the unhealed places of your story. Your leadership philosophy was formed the same place mine was, long before anyone handed you a title, and it is running your company, your church, your classroom, your home right now, whether you've ever looked at it or not.

You picked up this book because something in your leadership feels off, and you suspect it isn't your strategy. You're right. Come inward with me before we go outward. That's where you'll discover what took me a crash to learn: Abiding Leadership is how you lead your own life, and then lead others, from a healed heart, the kind that transforms everything and everyone from the inside out.