When I was ten years old, I started having daily headaches. They began mid-morning and grew more intense as the day wore on. By the time I climbed off the school bus in the afternoon I was often ready to throw up from the pounding between my ears.

My parents decided to get it checked out and I was shuttled from doctor to doctor: the pediatrician sent me to the ENT specialist, who took a sinus x-ray, cleared me, and sent me to a neurologist. I endured an EEG and MRI, both of which read normal. Then the neurologist sat me down and asked questions about my life: what I liked to do for fun, what kind of grades I made. He must have been a frustrated psychologist at heart, because his prescription for me was to start making Cs at school. My parents made it clear, upon leaving his office, that this was not a prescription to be followed.

But the message my brain received from all the negative tests and pop psychology was that I was causing the headaches. Without a medical condition to explain them, I must be to blame: by working too hard, or thinking about it too much. And so my Illusion of Ultimate Control was born.

The headaches eventually faded, but I remained strapped into the captain’s chair of my own life, believing that every detail of that life rested in my hands. For a driven, achievement-defined and approval-hungry high schooler facing identity issues and college applications, the inordinate pressure of choreographing every second of my future weighed on me like a ton of bricks. Anything less than an A on a paper and I was devastated. Choosing a college felt like Russian roulette: one wrong move and I’d end up scooping fries at McDonald’s. And if my crush didn’t ask me to prom? Doesn’t he know HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE MY HUSBAND??!!

I had deluded myself into thinking not only that life was a chessboard and I held all the pieces; I bought the even bigger lie that I knew where all the pieces should go.

Cut forward twelve years. I’m leaving a friend’s apartment in New York City. What starts as a stroll to the subway becomes an above-ground, foot-propelled journey from 55th and 9th to 29th and 3rd–it’s one of those perfect-temperature city nights that’s made for walking. I pop in my earbuds and flip to my Favorites playlist and soak in the independence that comes with knowing your way home in Manhattan. I pass Rockefeller Center and take in the lights of Fifth Avenue’s storefronts; I gaze up at Grand Central and the Chrysler Building; I sneak glances into the windows of the townhouses lining the upper 30’s between Park and Lexington Avenues. All the while, I’m dividing my attention between my music, a halfhearted conversation with God, and the absence of anyone walking beside me. I’m wondering how long I’ll have to keep walking home alone, when I will stop being the third/fifth/seventh wheel.

I’m pretending to pray, but what I’m really doing is worrying. I’m standing in front of the one who made me, the one who set me free from the plan I had written and brought me to New York to show me a better one, and I’m clinging to the one piece that I feel is missing from this new plan and refusing to let go. I’m afraid, after all this, that he’s going to get it wrong.

I still don’t really believe.

I walk further and arrive a block from my apartment, on 3rd Avenue between 29th and 30th, and I look up. Five feet from my face is that damn Tiffany engagement ring ad, the one I pass almost daily, and tonight it just breaks me and I feel myself becoming the victim again. The table-for-one, the always-a-bridesmaid, the why-does-God-have-it-in-for-me victim of a timeline and plan not her own. And I know that tonight will be the night I become one of those crazy people on the street, crying and alone.

And I turn out to be–imagine it–wrong. Because I realize that I am not alone, have never been, but I may be crazy because here it comes–not tears, but laughter. I am standing on the street, Southern single thirty-year-old banished to the Northeast and laughing on the street as I realize that after all I’ve been through to get to this exact spot, do I really think I have to worry about a ring? I am Eve in the garden judging trees. Shiny platinum on a bed of robin’s egg blue, and I forget about nails and wood.

Ring on my hand, husband by my side, and I still forget. I have a bottomless capacity to forget. There will always be a tree that seems bigger than the others, more forbidden to me right now. Yet the tree that matters most, matters all, I stand before and with my worries I am saying, “Yes…but.” I am a Yes But Believer when I do anything but fully trust, when I choose to worry instead of rest. When I let anything be bigger than the shadow of the cross.

I’ve written about my love of unsolicited advice, and one of my favorite admonitions? Being told to just relax. I’ve learned how hollow this prescription is unless it’s written by the hand scarred on my behalf. My own palms bear only the metaphorical marks of clawing at what I claim to be mine; his were gouged with the nails that secure my future. Not to mention my past and present. A couple of months after my worried walk into a Tiffany ad, he brought The Husband into my life. While I worried about hurricanes on my wedding day, he calmed a storm and brought a rainbow. He knows what I should do about my job and when my child’s birthday should be. All that’s left for me to do is hold the scarred hand…and relax.

***Check out She Speaks–a conference devoted to connecting women to their divinely-designed calling–an idea of which I am particularly fond since I am all about sharing his claim on my heart through the terrifying, vulnerable, and thrilling act of writing. I found out about them in this holy corner of the internet.