I asked God for more. Then He taught me how to carry it.

A while back, I did John Bevere’s study The Awe of God, and honestly, that study came for my whole life.

I would sit there with my Bible open, pen in my hand, fully prepared to take notes like a normal person, and then God would put His finger on something and I would just freeze.

Like, “Oh. Okay. So we are exposing things today. Got it.”

It was intense. Deeply uncomfortable and incredibly awesome.

I could feel the weight of what God was showing me, but I did not fully understand why it was landing so hard. I just knew He was digging somewhere deep. Somewhere past the surface-level Christian answers. Somewhere past the stuff we say because it sounds right.

This was getting under my skin.

I knew it mattered. I knew God was saying, “Pay attention.” I just did not know what He was preparing me for yet.

Now I can look back and see it.

Our magnificent God was building something in me long before I knew I would need it.

God was preparing me.

He was teaching me the fear of the Lord before I fully understood why I was going to need it.

He was giving me language for something I could feel but could not explain. He was building conviction in me before the next season demanded it. Because eventually, I would reach a place where I could not keep asking God for more while being casual with what He has already placed in my hands.

His presence.
His instruction.
His correction.
My assignment.
My body.
My marriage.
My children.
My motives.
My yes.

All of it matters.

I cannot keep building with God while handling Kingdom things recklessly. I could not keep putting His name on what I was building while ignoring what He is correcting. At some point, obedience has to move beyond what is convenient. Reverence has to touch the parts of my life that I am trying to manage myself and I had to take a honest look at this. I am different than the world – in it but not of it.

That is what He was preparing me for.

At the time, the study felt so intense. Now I see it was God having my back – per usual.

God loved me enough to start teaching me the way to go before I walked into the next season full of zeal, carrying too much pressure, managing a packed calendar, and calling the chaos obedience.

He was giving me guardrails.

And honestly, thank God—because left to myself, I can turn stewardship into stress at an impressive speed, build a whole system around it, and buy a matching notebook like that somehow makes it holy.

Now, as God has been dealing with me through Moses, I can see the thread so clearly.

The awe of God.
The fear of the Lord.
The holiness of His presence.
The weight of obedience.
The danger of building without reverence.
The mercy of correction before collapse.

And I need to say this with my most serious Megan face: I need the fear of the Lord if I am going to keep building and remain whole.

Because I know how I am wired. I can move fast, carry a lot, solve problems, organize chaos, and keep going long after my body and soul have started waving red flags. I can look productive, sound responsible, and still be one minor inconvenience away from a full crash out in the church parking lot.

The fear of the Lord keeps me from making an idol out of productivity. It keeps me tender when pressure is trying to make me hard. It keeps my health, my marriage, my children, my motives, and my obedience in the conversation.

I need reverence to govern the pace. I need obedience to interrupt my plan. I need the presence of God to matter more than how much I can get done.

Fear

I have been thinking a lot about the future—stewardship, motherhood, marriage, ministry, work, health, calling, time—all the regular, seemingly casual things that make your nervous system whisper, “What if we just disappear into a cabin with no Wi‑Fi and become mysterious?” My brain has been running like it has 47 tabs open: three are playing worship music, one is a calendar reminder from 2022 that refuses to die, and another keeps asking, “What if you forget something important and ruin everything?”

That is where God met me. Right there. In the chaos. Not impressed. Not intimidated. Just… present.

I have been praying through this underlying fear that I might miss something—whether it’s a detail, a moment, or something God entrusted to me. Beneath that concern is a deeper question: Lord, am I carrying this season well, or am I just aggressively surviving it with a planner and vibes?

Moses

Then God started showing me Moses.

Moses was not some polished Bible man floating through the wilderness with perfect emotional regulation and a color-coded quiet-time routine.

That man was called, scared, irritated, corrected, stretched thin, and carrying people who complained every five minutes.

He had an assignment way bigger than his wiring. Bigger than his confidence. Bigger than what he thought he could handle.

Painfully relatable.

Then God meets him at the burning bush and tells him to take off his sandals because the ground is holy.

And whew. I felt that in my spirit, my schedule, and every part of me that likes to move fast and figure it out as I go.

Because when God steps into something, the ground changes.

The conversation changes.
The moment carries weight.
The assignment stops being casual.
The atmosphere shifts and I REFUSE to miss it.

You do not rush holy ground.

You do not half-listen while checking your phone, answering a text, mentally planning dinner, and calling it multitasking for the Kingdom.

You stop.

You pay attention.

You recognize that God is here, and this moment belongs to Him.

That hit me hard because I can take something sacred and turn it into a task before I even realize I have done it. Prayer that was fiery shifts into something to finish. The assignment becomes another project to manage. Obedience gets squeezed between meetings, errands, and whatever crisis decided to introduce itself that day.

Meanwhile, God is saying, “Take your shoes off.”

Slow down.

Look at Me.

This ground is holy.

Hebrews 12:28–29 — Serve God acceptably “with reverence and godly fear,” because “our God is a consuming fire.”

That means my life cannot be treated like a random pile of responsibilities I’m trying to juggle without dropping anything.

My marriage is holy ground.
My motherhood is holy ground.
My health is holy ground.
My calendar is holy ground.
My yes and my no are holy ground.
My home is holy ground.
My calling is holy ground.

Even the places where I feel behind are still places where God can speak—and He does not sound stressed when He does it.

That alone corrects me.

Because when I am anxious, I start treating life like a fire drill. Everything feels urgent and fragile, like it all depends on me remembering, managing, fixing, planning, and preventing every possible mistake. Very peaceful. Very Proverbs 31. Very “someone please take my phone away before I reorganize my entire life at 11:47 PM.”

But Moses shows me something different. He feared the Lord enough to stop, listen, remove his sandals, and let God define the moment instead of his emotions narrating it like a dramatic documentary.

That is what I am learning: the fear of the Lord begins when I stop making my emotions the loudest authority in the room. They can have a seat. Not the throne.

Moses had real concerns. “Who am I?” “What if they do not believe me?” “What if they do not listen?” “I am not eloquent.” He stood before God with a full list of reasons why the assignment had the wrong address, and still, God kept calling him like, “Yes, I heard you. Now go.”

That gives me language for my own prayers. Lord, I am concerned about time, about my emotional capacity, about whether I am present enough with my kids. I am concerned about carrying responsibility without becoming hard, about my health, about stewardship, about the future, and about how easily my desire to do things well can turn into pressure to make everything perfect and slightly unbearable.

God can handle that kind of honesty. He is not fragile. He is not pacing heaven like, “Wow, I didn’t know she felt that way.”

He did not say, “Check yourself, clean yourself up, and then come.”

He just said, Come.

I keep thinking about David—a man Scripture calls a man after God’s own heart. And the more I sit with his story, the more convinced I am that David’s honesty was part of what kept pulling him back to God.

He brought God the ugly.

The fear.
The failure.
The guilt.
The mess.

And then he allowed God to be God.

He did not pretend he was clean. He asked God to clean him.

Psalm 51:10–12

God, create a clean heart in me.
Make my spirit steady again.
Keep me close to Your presence.
Restore the joy I have lost.
Give me a willing spirit that will keep saying yes.

That prayer gets me every time.

David was not defending himself. He was not explaining why he did what he did. He was not trying to make the mess sound prettier.

He was saying, “God, I need You to do in me what I cannot do for myself.”

But Moses also teaches me that honesty is not the final destination. At some point, fear has to bow to obedience. At some point, “Lord, I am scared” has to become “Lord, I will go if You are with me—even if I’m still slightly nervous and overthinking it.”

That is the part that keeps punching me in the face.

Moses did not want to move without the presence of God. In Exodus 33:15, he says, “If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here.” That scripture has been on repeat in my Spirit. Moses was not just asking for success; he was asking for God. He was not trying to get ahead of life so he could feel productive—he wanted the presence of God to lead the way, not follow his plans like a polite assistant.

Correction

That is where God is correcting my idea of taking dominion.

I want order. I want discipline. I want to steward well. I want to move in fast forward with conviction instead of constantly running to catch up like I’m late to my own life. Those desires are good. But reflecting on how Moses operated reminds me that dominion without dependence is striving, planning without God’s opinion on the matter because me sitting in the driver’s seat, and building without reverence is dangerous—even if it looks impressive on the outside.

I do not want to build fast and miss God. I do not want to be productive and spiritually dull. I do not want to be organized while my soul is running on fumes like a car that refuses to admit it needs gas. I do not want to have a clean calendar and a crusty heart. Efficient and bitter is still bitter. Color‑coded and exhausted is still exhausted. Let’s not romanticize it.

The fear of the Lord brings me back to the right order: God first, His presence first, His instruction first—then the plan. Not the other way around with a quick prayer sprinkled on top like seasoning.

1 Peter 1:17 — Pass the time of your earthly life in reverent fear.

Practical Application

God also showed me that Moses wrote things down. And I know that sounds basic, but it is deeply offensive to my tendency to over-spiritualize everything. Moses carried one of the heaviest assignments in Scripture, and he did not rely on memory alone like, “I’ll just trust the Lord to remind me.” No. He wrote the words of the Lord, recorded the stages of the journey, and preserved instruction for the people coming after him.

That tells me something very practical: writing things down can be obedience. Not just productivity. Obedience.

Sometimes I make everything so spiritual that I skip the obvious answer. I am praying, “Lord, help me not forget,” and He is saying, “Daughter, write it down.” Revolutionary. Slightly humbling. Extremely effective.

When I really sit with this, I realize structure is part of how God keeps me from carrying everything in my head like it all depends on me.

Systems can be spiritual. Reminders can be mercy. A calendar can protect what God told me to prioritize. Documentation can create peace instead of pressure when I stop using it to control outcomes and start using it to steward what He gave me.

Because my brain is not a filing cabinet.

It is not supposed to hold every deadline, conversation, idea, responsibility, prayer request, family need, church detail, work task, and random thing I remembered at 2:13 in the morning.

That is too much weight for one mind to carry.

Structure gives the weight somewhere to go.

It lets me breathe. It gives my thoughts a place to land. It helps me stop living like forgetting one thing means the whole world is about to fall apart.

My mind is alive. It gets tired. It gets overloaded. It deserves mercy.

And sometimes mercy looks like pausing to just writing it down.

Moses also had to learn to delegate. In Exodus 18, Jethro basically looked at Moses and said, “This is not good. You are going to wear yourself out.” Which, translated into modern language, is: sir, this system is chaotic and unsustainable.

Moses was helping people. He was judging matters. He was needed. He was doing important work. And still, the structure was unhealthy. Being needed is not the same as being wise.

That part is personal.

Because sometimes being needed can feel like confirmation that I have to keep carrying everything. Like if I stop, everything will collapse and I will be personally responsible for the downfall of civilization. Dramatic, but convincing in the moment.

But Moses shows me that a real assignment still requires wise structure. Kingdom work can still become heavy when it is carried the wrong way. This is where satan loves to corner the believe. Because Jesus said my yoke is easy. That should be my SCREAMING red flag that this is somehow out of alignment. The answer was not for Moses to care less; it was for him to lead with wisdom, appoint capable people, and stop trying to be the entire system by himself like a one-man infrastructure.

That hits my pride and my fear at the same time. A very cute and humbling combo.

The fear of the Lord teaches me to ask better questions:

What has God actually assigned to me?
What am I carrying because I am afraid it will fall apart?
What needs to be written down? What needs to be delegated?
What needs a rhythm?
What needs to be released?
What requires obedience today?
What am I trying to control because I do not trust God with tomorrow?

Correction (Continued)

Then there is Meribah.

That story sobers me in a way that makes me sit up straight and reconsider my tone. God told Moses to speak to the rock, and Moses struck it. He was frustrated. The people had worn him down. The pressure was real. But God held Moses accountable because he misrepresented Him in front of the people.

That part makes me pause.

Because when I am depleted, I am more likely to strike what God told me to speak to—whether through my tone, my urgency, my control, my withdrawal, or even silent resentment disguised as “processing.” Sometimes I say far more than is necessary when a simple response would have been enough. Sometimes I do the most when God asked for the least. Lord, help me.

This is why my health matters. My rest matters. My nourishment matters. My emotional capacity matters. These are not side quests; they directly affect my obedience. If I keep pouring out from depletion, eventually something Kingdom will get hit with the overflow of my exhaustion—and I refuse to be that dramatic.

I want the fear of the Lord to make me careful in the right way—careful with God’s presence, with my words, with my body, with my marriage, with my children, with what I build, and with the assignments God has placed in my hands.

That kind of carefulness is different from perfectionism. Perfectionism makes me tense; the fear of the Lord makes me attentive. Perfectionism obsesses over outcomes; the fear of the Lord focuses on obedience. Perfectionism asks, “What if I fail?” while the fear of the Lord asks, “What has God said?”—and then actually listens for the answer.

That question is becoming an anchor for me.

What has God said?

When I am overwhelmed, when I feel behind, when I am grieving time, when I am afraid I will forget, when I want everything perfect, when I feel the weight of being needed—I come back to that question like it’s oxygen.

Moses wrote Psalm 90, and that prayer has been ministering to me: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” He did not ask God to make time less intense; he asked for wisdom. That is what I need—wisdom for my days, my yes, my limits, my body, my home, and for what to build and what to stop carrying before I accidentally adopt responsibilities God never assigned.

Proverbs 9:10 — “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.”

Gratitude and Perspective

And honestly, I am grateful.

I am grateful that God loves me enough to interrupt me before I stumble. I am grateful He is showing me the way to go while I still have time to adjust. He is not waiting for me to burn out and then saying, “See?” He is fathering me in advance, putting His finger on the pressure points—the fear, the over-functioning, the perfectionism, the places where I am trying to be faithful but accidentally becoming frantic.

That is love. Not soft love. Strategic love.

God loves me enough to show me that I cannot keep building without the fear of the Lord. I cannot keep building on adrenaline or memory alone like I’m some kind of spiritual superhero. I cannot keep building while neglecting my body or calling pressure stewardship. I cannot keep building while trying to carry tomorrow, next year, my kids’ whole future, my marriage, ministry, work, and every tiny detail in my head like I am the fourth member of the Trinity.

I am not.

Praise God for that, because I was getting tired.

Realistically God knows my heart. I’m not trying to build Megan’s Kingdom – I’m trying to advance the Kingdom of Heaven. So God lovingly reminds me in order to help advance His Kingdom, I must do it His way. That’s the only way that I will actually get to my destination – the desires of my heart.

Acts 9:31 — The church walked “in the fear of the Lord” and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, and multiplied.

Moses is teaching me that the fear of the Lord is what keeps the builder from becoming reckless, the leader from becoming reactive, the mother from becoming consumed, the wife from becoming hardened, and the servant from becoming depleted. It keeps the assignment submitted to the One who gave it—and reminds me that I am not the source, just the steward.

At the end of the day, I have high standards. I do. And I am done apologizing for caring deeply about how I carry what God put in my hands.

Sometimes the enemy will whisper, “Megan, you have done enough. Let it go. Relax. Nobody expects this much.”

And my answer is no.

I will rest when God tells me to rest. I will be still when He tells me to be still. But I will not make peace with sloppy stewardship. I will not call carelessness grace. I will not lower the standard so I can feel better about what I refused to finish well.

God made me a warrior. He made me a weapon in His hands. I am here to plunder hell, populate heaven, and press toward the mark with everything in me.

That means I care about the details.

I care about the spirit behind the work.
I care about the condition of my heart while I am doing it.
I care about whether my hands are clean.
I care about whether my motives are pure.
I care about whether God can breathe on what I built.

Getting it done is not enough for me.

I want it done in a spirit of excellence. I want it done with reverence. I want it done with obedience running through every part of it. I want the presence of God in the process, because the process is preaching too.

Every shift of my eye matters. Every response matters. Every hidden decision matters.

Why?

Because I am an ambassador.

My life is carrying the plea of Jesus into a dying world. People are watching how I move, how I lead, how I handle pressure, how I treat my family, how I correct myself, how I repent, how I recover, and how I obey when it costs me.

They are watching the fruit.

So I have to ask myself the questions that sting.

Is my fruit healthy and full of life, or is it shiny on the outside and rotting underneath?

Am I building with God, or am I sweating over something He never asked me to carry?

Am I producing, or am I bearing fruit?

Am I laboring in vain, or am I becoming the kind of servant who can stand before God and hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant”?

That is what I want.

I want my life to hold up under the weight of His presence.

I want the private parts to match the public parts.

I want the fruit to be good all the way through.

And I refuse to hand God something half-hearted and say, “I did my best,” when the truth is I rushed it, avoided the hard part, ignored His correction, and settled because finishing felt easier than being faithful.

“My best” cannot become spiritual language for poor stewardship.

I want to be able to put my hands on what I built and know I stayed close enough to hear Him, humble enough to change course, disciplined enough to finish well, and honest enough to admit when the work still needed more from me.

God deserves more than whatever I had left over.

He deserves my attention. My obedience. My preparation. My follow-through. My whole yes.

And when I finally place it in His hands, I want to know I did not simply complete the assignment.

I honored the One who gave it to me.

Prayer

So my prayer is simple right now.

Lord, teach me to fear You rightly. Teach me to stop when You speak. Teach me to take off my sandals when the ground is holy. Teach me to write down what needs to be remembered. Teach me to delegate what needs to be shared. Teach me to nourish what needs to remain strong. Teach me to release what You did not assign. Teach me to build with reverence—and maybe a little less drama.

I want to make You proud, but I also know You are teaching me that obedience is not produced by panic—it is formed in your presence. So lead me there. Lead me back to Your presence, to wisdom, to the pace of grace and the discipline of obedience.

I am still building—but I will not build ahead of You. I will build with You, at Your pace, in Your presence. That is the only way this life stays whole, and that is the way I choose.

Revelation 14:7 — “Fear God, and give glory to him.”

So this is where I’m standing: barefoot on holy ground, fire in my bones, ears open, heart bowed, waiting for instructions from the One who called me here.

I am done running ahead just to feel in control. I am done building from panic, pressure, perfectionism, and a crowded mind. I am done carrying what was never mine to carry. If His presence is not leading, I am not moving. If His voice has not spoken, I am not manufacturing a plan just to feel productive.

I will build, but I will build under authority. I will steward, but I will steward with reverence. I will move, but only when He says move. Because this life is not random, this assignment is not casual, and this ground is not ordinary.

I’m looking forward to hearing, “Well done,” because this is Kingdom, baby.

And the best is yet to come.