MEET

PATRICIAN

My work has never fit neatly into one category.

For more than a decade, I built a private lash practice while doing what comes naturally to me: questioning, investigating, and looking for answers when the industry's standard explanations weren't solving the problems I was seeing in practice.

I was losing clients, and the answers I had been taught weren't creating solutions—they were eroding my confidence and my clients' confidence in me.

That same instinct eventually moved beyond lashes and into my own life—examining the experiences, decisions, beliefs, failures, and unexpected turns that changed its direction.

As an adult, I was surrounded by people beating me with the Bible and telling me how I was supposed to walk with God. But the fruit I saw in their lives repulsed me.

Then God brought Lisa into my life.

Lisa had the fruit of the Spirit. She walked out God’s Word in front of us—even when doing so made absolutely no sense. She modeled how to get my own life back on track, but she refused to become my God by giving me all the answers.

“What does God say?” she would ask.

“I don’t know, Lisa. That’s why I’m asking you.”

Her answer was simple:

“Read His Word. That’s how you get answers.”

So I did—reluctantly.

I needed answers. Lisa had answers. Why read when I could just ask Lisa?

Unfortunately, Lisa wasn't cooperating with my much more efficient plan.

So I started reading.

Turns out, she was right. Within a couple of weeks, the answers started coming.

What she neglected to mention was that they would come at me like an explosion.

And just like that, I managed to piss off another set of Christians. I started hearing daily-devotional jibberish coming out of their mouths instead of what His Word actually said.

You see, I don't follow the sheep.

I missed the first week of kindergarten because I refused to follow my friends onto the school bus.

Everyone else seemed perfectly comfortable getting on. I had questions.
Mainly: How am I getting back home to Grandma?

Nobody gave me an answer I found satisfactory.

So I didn't get on the bus.

Apparently, I've had issues with the wide gate since kindergarten.

Once again, as an adult, I didn't fit neatly into the world around me—not even the church world. At first, that hurt deeply. Eventually, I began to understand that what was coming could never have been built while I stayed comfortably in somebody else's shadow.

And I'd spent a lot of my life there.

Living in someone else's shadow does something to you. After a while, you stop seeing yourself as someone who creates, builds, or leads. Those are things other people do. You become so accustomed to watching from the sidelines that you don't even realize you're waiting for permission to step onto the field.

That's when I discovered something I hadn't understood about myself:

I didn't doubt that I could create. I didn't know it was permissible for me to create.

Creating was something “they” did.

You know them. They. Those people. The mysterious group we somehow believe has been qualified, permitted, or specially appointed to create the things the rest of us consume.

Except when you stop and try to put an actual name or face to “them,” you can't.

And apparently, God wasn't interested in waiting for me to figure this out.

He started putting people in my path who kept shoving me farther down roads He already seemed to be leading me toward.

Meanwhile, there I was—

like a horse at a new gate.

I could see the opening. God seemed perfectly fine with me going through it. The people He'd put in my path were practically standing behind me yelling, “GO.”

And I was looking around thinking:

Are we sure I'm allowed to do this?

Apparently, God was sure.

I was the holdout.

Because somewhere in my head, I was still waiting for human permission.

Permission from whom?

Excellent question.

Apparently, “they.”

Those people again.

And “they” remained remarkably unavailable for comment.

So God kept opening doors, people kept shoving, and I kept going through them—sometimes willingly, sometimes suspiciously, and occasionally with all 4 hooves planted firmly in the ground.

Somewhere in all that reluctant forward motion came:

Lash Intensive™. The Lash Aficionado™. The Bespoke xWife™. JAGGED.

I never saw any of them coming.

But there was another thread running through all of it that took me much longer to recognize:

Fear.

Scripture says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”

So why had I spent so much of my life afraid of everything else?

People. Being wrong. Stepping out. Failure. What might happen next.

And an enemy I had given far more authority in my mind than he actually had.

Fear has probably been my biggest hurdle.

And maybe that's the strange part. I could be terrified and still refuse to get on the bus simply because everybody else was getting on it.

The narrow gate hasn't required me to be fearless.

It's required me to have enough gumption to walk through it while I'm still afraid.

It has repeatedly required me to stop looking sideways, get into His Word, and decide whose voice I was going to obey.

I haven't done that perfectly. Not even close.

But the farther I've gone, the more I've needed God.

And the more I've needed God, the less room I've had for everyone else to play God in my life.

For me, all of this came from essentially the same decision:

Tune out the people. Allow God to be my God.

And hold on. He has a history of not telling me where we're going.

Sometimes I think the Father, Son & Holy Ghost place bets on how I'll react next.

For the record, “calmly” has never paid out.

And as for whether I ever got on that kindergarten bus?

You'll have to read JAGGED.