I'm a Brainy Girl

🕯️

There are words that land differently.

Not all words wound the same way. Some bruise on impact and fade by morning. Others — the quiet ones, the ones that arrive wrapped in ordinary conversation — find a crack you didn't know was there and settle in like they belong. Like they've been waiting for an address to move into.

"You've got some very big shoes to fill."

That's all it was. A board member, kind enough, simply making conversation. He didn't know he'd walked into a room that was already full of something older than this moment. He didn't know that those words — entirely without malice — would fall into a well I thought I'd sealed long ago.

Then came the others, offered just as warmly: "Have you heard her laugh?" And: "She always answers the phone when I call."

Each one a kindness. Each one, without knowing it, another inch of ground beneath my feet quietly disappearing. I shrunk. That's the only honest word for it. I didn't argue or deflect or hold my ground. I didn't tell him that my phone goes unanswered when I'm in my ministry groups. Something in me simply made itself smaller. And sitting at my desk in that shared workspace where he sat behind me, holding the quiet weight of a new beginning, I felt it — the familiar pull of a very old story.

Not good enough.
Not equipped.
Behind, before you've even begun.

✍️

I've been sitting with this all day. Not in the anxious, spinning way I used to — where the thought would chase me from room to room and I'd have to fill every silence just to drown it out. No, today it was quieter than that. More like tracing the outline of something I thought I'd put down, only to find it had been walking alongside me all this time, keeping pace.

Because somewhere between the mail merge mistake and the board member's well-meaning observation, a voice spoke up inside that I recognise now as neither new nor true. It was old. It was familiar. It was the voice of a maths classroom decades ago, where my brother — who is fourteen months older than me — and I sat side by side, and somehow being near to his strength only made my lack feel louder.

🪨

The wound wasn't the maths. It was the comparison. It was being measured against someone else's standard — and finding, again and again, that I came up short and being punished for it.

That belief — so deeply embedded by the time I was seven years old that it became the lens through which everything else was filtered — had been shaping my story far longer than I realised. You're behind. You're not quite enough. Look at what you're working with, compared to what was here before.

It spoke from every place I learned that comparison, failure and punishment arrive holding hands.

I thought I'd forgiven my teacher. I said the words years ago. But today, when it mattered, when the question was pressed gently and honestly into the tender place — have you really?🤔 — my honest answer was: I had forgiven, but I hadn't dealt with my judgments, expectations, inner vows and the lies I had come to believe about life, God, myself and others.

How many of us live in that gap?🤔 The space between what we've declared and what's still quietly shaping us. The forgiveness we announced without dealing with the ways we responded to the wound and the habitual ways of self-protection.

🕊️

Today, in the middle of a training room, with people around me I'm still getting to know, the Holy Spirit moved in the most unhurried, unforced way. There was no drama in it. There was simply — presence. The kind that doesn't startle you but settles you, the way warmth does when you've been cold without noticing.

The lady beside me led me through it gently: forgiveness for the teacher, for the words that made me small, for the pattern of comparison I'd carried as though it were identity. Repentance for the agreeing — for all the times I'd nodded along with the lie, said yes to it without meaning to, let it set up residence in the way I measured myself. Renouncing it. Breaking up with it. Not just the teacher, not just the board member, but the whole long story that said I would always be the one falling short, that I would never measure up to my brother or anyone else for that matter, that I would never be good enough, that making mistakes added to me being a mistake.

And then — the exchange.

📖 "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." — Romans 12:2 (NKJV)

In the quiet, as she prayed, something shifted. A word arrived — not loudly, not in any spectacular way. Just clearly. Gently. With the quality of something true.

I'm a brainy girl.

🌱

I want to tell you that I received it perfectly, that I opened my hands without hesitation and let it all the way in. I didn't, entirely. There was still something in me that wanted to check it against the old standard, wanted to earn it first. But there was also — and this is what I'm holding tonight — a place in me that recognised it. Like a note being struck that the body already knows, even when the mind hasn't caught up yet.

She declared it boldly over me. A Daniel anointing, she said. Always having the answer in every circumstance. A solutions girl. The brightest light in the room.

I cried — the quiet kind. The releasing kind. The kind that doesn't embarrass you, it just empties something that needed to be emptied.

🕯️

Tonight, I'm not entirely a different person from this morning. That's not how healing works — not usually. It's rarely a single, total transformation. It's more like a door being unlocked that you'd forgotten had a key. You still have to choose to walk through it, still have to practise standing in the light.

But I know something tonight that I didn't let myself fully know this morning: the shoes aren't too big. They were always made for feet like mine. God didn't bring me to this new beginning to humiliate me with the comparison — He brought me here because He knows exactly what I carry. Exactly what I can see. Exactly what's in me that this moment needs.

I'm a brainy girl. He made me that way. On purpose.