What Happens When You Are the System?

What started as a text from the back of an Uber on my way to the airport has now turned into a blog post somewhere mid-flight to New York.

Which, honestly, is probably the perfect setting for this particular realization.

I’m unexpectedly flying to NYC today for a one-day meeting. Next month, it’ll be London and Milan. And before that starts sounding like a complaint disguised as a humblebrag, let me be very clear: I know how blessed I am. Sometimes I look at my life and genuinely cannot believe I get to live it. I have a career I love that has taken me places I never imagined I’d go, and it enables this big, crazy, beautiful life our family gets to live. I am incredibly grateful for it.

But somewhere between school drop-off and the airport this morning, I realized something: almost everything in my life asks something of me.

My career asks a lot of me. Motherhood asks a lot of me. Marriage requires intention. Our home requires management. Church, even in all the ways I love serving there, requires something from me. There are calendars to coordinate, people to lead, problems to solve, decisions to make, things to remember. None of that means I don’t love the life I’ve built. I do. But loving something doesn’t mean it doesn’t require energy to sustain it.

And I am tired.

This realization actually started at church on Sunday. The sermon was about community, about how we were created to need one another and what it looks like to actually live that out. And it hit a really raw spot for me because I’ve been struggling lately. I’m finding it difficult to be fully present in my own life, and underneath a lot of that is something I haven’t particularly wanted to admit: I’m lonely.

Not lonely in the sense that I don’t know people. I know plenty of people. I work with people all day. I serve alongside people. I have family around me. This is a different kind of lonely. It’s the loneliness of missing the person who already knows the story before you start talking.

I lost one of my closest friends earlier this year. She was my person. She knew the cast of characters. She knew the backstory. I didn’t need to spend twenty minutes explaining the first six episodes before I could tell her what happened in episode seven. I could just show up exactly where I was.

I miss her all the time, but I’ve been feeling that absence especially acutely lately. Our family has been walking through infertility and trying to discern what growing our family might look like from here. Work has been demanding. Motherhood continues being motherhood. Life keeps asking for dinner and clean clothes and school drop-offs regardless of whether you happen to be having an existential crisis that day.

So after church, I texted my pastor and told him the truth.

He’s not simply someone I see on Sundays. He baptized me. He married my husband and me. He stood with us when we dedicated our daughter. He has shepherded our family through some of the most significant moments of our lives. So when I realized how much Sunday’s sermon had exposed in me, he was the person I reached for.

I told him I was struggling. I told him I felt alone. And I told him something that is particularly difficult for someone like me to admit: I don’t have it in me right now to be the person who creates the solution.

Because normally, that’s exactly what I would do.

I’m a systems person. Give me a complicated problem with seventeen moving pieces and I am genuinely delighted. I will build the spreadsheet. Create the process. Find the inefficiency. Assign ownership. Automate whatever can be automated. I see gaps and instinctively want to close them.

Earlier this year, I saw one at work. I work in an otherwise secular environment, and while our company had employee communities built around all kinds of shared experiences, there wasn’t really a place for Christians to find one another. I waited for someone else to take ownership of it for a while, and then eventually did what I tend to do when I get tired of waiting.

I built it.

I created Faith at Flywheel, a Christian community within our organization similar to our other employee resource groups, and I’ve been leading it ever since. The interesting thing is that while Faith at Flywheel requires something from me, it has also given something back. It has created Christian fellowship inside a part of my life where that didn’t previously exist. It has opened relationships and conversations I probably never would have had otherwise. I may have built the container, but other people started filling it.

I think that’s connected to another pull I’ve been feeling lately: wanting to share more of my story and testimony. It’s part of why I write this blog. (Shoutout to my 12 subscribers; we’re basically a media empire.)

I would genuinely love the opportunity to share my story on a larger platform someday, even to share a sermon. There’s something about being vulnerable about what God has done in my life, what He is doing now, and the places where I’m still waiting on Him that creates connection. It’s still pouring out, but somehow that kind of pouring out also pours something back in.

Which brings me to coffee.

Our church has a women’s coffee on the first Friday of every month at 8 a.m., and not being able to attend has been bothering me far more than an inconveniently scheduled cup of coffee has any business bothering a grown woman.

I’m a working mom. School drop-off is between 8:15 and 8:30. My husband usually needs our only vehicle shortly afterward. There is simply no realistic way for me to make an 8 a.m. Friday coffee work.

And to be clear, this isn’t an indictment of whoever picked the time. Our church is very small, and quite frankly, at 42, I’m on the younger end of the age spectrum. An 8 a.m. Friday coffee probably works beautifully for many of the women in our church, it just doesn’t work for this particular season of my life.

But in talking through all of this, I finally understood why that coffee has been getting to me so much.

All I would have to do is show up and receive.

Someone else planned it. Someone else picked the place. Someone else made the coffee. I don’t have to lead it or host it or organize it. I don’t have to make sure everyone else feels included. I don’t have to remember the details or solve a problem or be responsible for whether the thing succeeds.

I could just walk in, sit down with other women and be.

And ironically, that’s the thing I can’t make work.

When I talked to my pastor about feeling disconnected, he asked me a really fair question: with everything I have going on, what needs to come off my plate so I have more margin for relationships?

I’ve been thinking about that question ever since.

Because maybe something does need to come off my plate. I’m certainly not going to pretend I’ve achieved some perfectly balanced life while writing an essay at 30,000 feet on my way to a meeting in another state.

But I also realized that I’m not sure more margin is actually the thing I’m craving.

The things I’m involved with at church are all places where I’m serving. Kids. Worship. Hosting a dinner group. I love doing those things, but they’re still places where I’m giving something. I could quit all three tomorrow and technically have more free hours in my week.

But would I feel less alone?

I’m not sure I would.

Because an empty hour isn’t the same thing as being loved in one.

That’s where losing my friend comes into this so much. Being her friend wasn’t another commitment I needed to create margin for. She was one of the places I could go when everything else was too much. I didn’t have to lead anything. I didn’t have to organize anything. I didn’t have to accomplish anything or be useful or be “on.” I could just be.

Losing her didn’t simply leave an empty space in my life. It exposed how few spaces in my life exist without me holding them up.

And that realization has made me rethink something about systems.

I spend a lot of time trying to create systems that make life work better. At work. At home. With our finances. With calendars and travel and all the invisible infrastructure required to keep a family moving. Usually the question I’m asking is: How do I make this work better?

But maybe those of us who think this way need to ask another question too:

Does this system actually operate without me, or does it only operate because of me?

Those are not the same thing.

A beautifully organized family calendar that still requires one person to remember everything isn’t really a resilient system. A team that runs smoothly only because one leader is constantly connecting every invisible dot has a dependency. A household where everyone knows what happens next because one person is quietly orchestrating the next five moves has a single point of failure. A friend group that stays connected because one person always sends the text, makes the reservation and gets everyone together may look like community, but what happens when that person stops pushing?

I’ve spent years getting really good at creating what I need when it doesn’t exist. See the gap. Build the thing. Solve the problem. Make it work.

That ability has served me extraordinarily well. I don’t want to lose it.

But I’m beginning to understand the danger of building a life where I am embedded as a dependency in every system I create. Because eventually, if enough things only work because I make them work, I become the single point of failure in the life I worked so hard to make resilient.

Maybe that’s part of what this season is trying to teach me.

The goal isn’t to stop giving. I love giving. I love leading. I love creating things that didn’t exist before and watching people find value in them. I don’t want a smaller life simply because a big one requires something of me.

But maybe, selfishly, I do want one area of my life that gives something back.

Somewhere I can show up as myself and be known. Somewhere I can know other people deeply and let them know me deeply in return. Somewhere I can talk about what God is doing in my life without being responsible for creating the room in which the conversation happens. Somewhere I can arrive depleted and occasionally leave fuller than when I walked in.

So if you’re a systems thinker too, I have a challenge for you. Maybe this week, audit the systems you’re so proud of building. But don’t just ask whether they’re working. Ask what happens if you stop pushing.

Does the thing keep moving without you? Does anyone else know how to carry it? Have you actually created a system, or have you simply made yourself extraordinarily efficient at being indispensable?

And then ask the question I’m realizing I haven’t asked nearly enough:

Where in the systems of my life have I built something that can carry me?

Because maybe the goal of good systems isn’t to make ourselves capable of carrying more and more and more.

Maybe it’s to build a life that can carry us sometimes, too.

And sometimes, I just need someone else to make the coffee.