Slow Growth Equals Strong Roots by Mary MarantzSample

The Most Put-Together Woman in the Room

Whether she’s leading or speaking, making people feel welcome and seen, being the social butterfly, the capable one, the one people turn to for answers, or the best-dressed one there—the point is, you would never know by looking at her the hard things she has had to overcome in her life. That’s because she has spent a lifetime running away from her muddy story.

Make no mistake. The Most Put-Together Woman in the Room fears that any moment she will be found out. A fraud. An imposter.

She doesn’t do it to make anyone else feel small. She walks in without a hair out of place, always delivering an A-plus performance at whatever she does, because she has convinced herself that this is the bare minimum she has to hit just to be welcome.

Still she feels like she will never be enough. She could swear that the smell of mildew and dollar-store vanilla perfume still precedes her wherever she goes. She feels like every one of her scars is still burning on display, despite her best designer attempts to cover them up. And so she succeeds almost compulsively in this urgent attempt to outrun failure. She believes all this achieving is the penance she has to pay for taking up space, the price of admission to be in the room.

Day by day she builds empires out of the rubble and the ruins. She succeeds despite (and to spite) her own story. But what she doesn’t realize is that those scars she bears are actually her superpower. They have made her stronger, kinder, more empathetic, more resilient than she’ll ever know. And if she thinks that up until this point she’s had an impact, just wait until she finds a way to own her own story.

God, thank you for the way you see us: face-to-face and fully known. I praise you for the freedom that is already available to us, the permission to lay down these versions of ourselves we once thought we had to become in order to belong. Give us the courage to show up in vulnerability, God. Help us to stop white-knuckling perfection and to lead from a place of love and authenticity. Remind us that when we show up just as we are, just as you created us, it gives others the courage and permission to do the same. Amen.