Nahomi Allen Writes

There is a quiet, exhausting lie that many of us believe: before God can use you, you have to be finished.

We convince ourselves that ministry, testimony, and vulnerability are privileges reserved only for those who have reached the other side of the battle. We treat our lives like construction zones that need high fences and warning tape until the grand opening, hiding every pile of rubble, every cracked foundation, and every tool scattered on the ground.

We assume God only invites guests who arrive in clean clothes.

In Luke 14, Jesus tells a story that completely dismantles that prideful assumption. A man prepares a magnificent feast and sends his servant to tell the invited guests that the table is set. But one by one, the “respectable” crowd offers polite, well-mannered excuses. They have land to inspect, oxen to test, domestic routines to maintain. They are too invested in managing their own curated lives to sit down at the master’s table.

The master’s response was not to cancel the banquet:

“Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame… Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full.” (Luke 14:21, 23)

He did not dispatch servants to fetch kings, scholars, or people with spotless track records. He sent them into dark alleys to drag in people whose need was undeniable.

The people who filled that banquet hall had dust on their faces, worn-out sandals, and nothing of value to offer the host. They didn’t earn their seats; they were simply starving enough to take the invitation seriously.

The Roots in the Unspoken Ground

Before there were ever coping mechanisms, there was pain that had nowhere to go.

Aside from sharing my testimony once in front of about eighty people—with my mom sitting right there in the room supporting me—these are chapters of my story I’ve never opened up about publicly. I don’t share them to point fingers, stir up the past, or place blame on anyone. People are human, life gets messy, and the broken things in our history are often the very soil God uses to grow deep empathy in us. I share this strictly to say: no matter how broken, silenced, or buried in anxiety you feel right now, there is another side, and there is a better way to live.

For years, I lived under a heavy cloud of anxiety, shame, guilt, and fear. I spent so much time second-guessing my own mind that I didn’t know how to think for myself. I became my own worst critic, petrified of being wrong, terrified of getting in trouble, and constantly scared that if I spoke up, I would say too much or look stupid. My natural reaction was to shut my own voice down before anyone else could.

Anyone who knows me knows I have an extremely goofy, silly, bubbly, and outgoing personality. But in those years, fear taught me to build walls. I learned to hide that light depending on the room I was in. Even to this day, a quiet truth lives in my head: If you’ve never met the silly version of me, I’ve never met the safe version of you.

Over time, I let words get into my head that made me feel small—believing lies like “You’re too goofy for anyone to take you seriously” or “You’re too ditzy to ever be seen as more than what you are.” Even when I was 100% sure of something, my mind would spiral into defense mode, imagining a red ink pen ready to grade my words, argue, and prove me wrong.

The toll wasn’t just mental—it completely wore down my body. I dealt with persistent insomnia, lying awake staring at the dark. Stress- and anxiety-induced rashes and hives broke out across my skin what felt like every other week. I went through seasons where the anxiety was so overwhelming that I was throwing up daily, watching my weight drop and fluctuate back on, living in a constant state of internal panic.

When I was 17, I packed up and left home thinking a change of scenery would fix the ache. It didn’t. For years, running on pure adrenaline, physical sickness, and fear was simply how I survived.

Then, when I was 26, life hit a storm that involves details I will always keep private to protect those involved. That marked the beginning of the hardest, darkest two years of my entire life. What I was facing mirrored the very hurt and chaos I thought I had outrun. The past completely flooded back into the present. I didn’t just slip—I truly spiraled. My coping mechanisms stopped being casual crutches and became desperate, frantic attempts to survive the storm inside my mind.

Right in the middle of that spiral, an 11-year chapter of survival finally came to a head. Just a few months into being 28 years old, I found myself walking into a counselor’s office.

I was so physically sick with nerves that I threw up before the appointment. When I finally sat down in that chair, I was shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t even look her in the eyes. Every alarm in my body and every nerve in my brain was screaming at me to stand up and sprint out the door.

But I didn’t run.

I stayed in that chair. I started going once a week. I had never sat down one-on-one with anyone before to unpack my past like that, and I laid it all out—including the bad things I had done, the mistakes I had made, and the words I had said. Healing is never a one-way street; it requires looking at your own wreckage with complete honesty. Slowly, week by week, the shaking stopped, and a quiet calm began to settle in.

Around that same time, after running completely out of options and human backup plans, I took another terrifying step: for the first time since I was 19 years old, I walked back through the doors of a church.

The moment I stepped inside, two men greeted me with huge, genuine smiles. They welcomed me warmly and helped me find a seat. When the worship team started playing and the room stood up, I felt the music blast from the top of my head straight down to the bottom of my feet. I love worship—it speaks directly to my soul. In that atmosphere, I realized I could finally take a deep breath, shut off the noise of the world, and just rest in the presence of God.

Then the pastor began to preach, and it felt as though he were speaking directly into my life.

Toward the end of those brutal two years, I didn’t just find church—I found God. That messy, agonizing chapter is the very soil where my spiritual walk was born. It is what rooted me into being saved, surrendering my life, and stepping into the waters of baptism.

I grew up with a deep love to write, sing, and take pictures. Just a few months after being baptized, God put it heavily on my heart to start this blog. At first, I honestly thought: “God, You are crazy wanting me to write a blog and be this vulnerable.” But I took the step anyway.

Stepping into that obedience has brought so much healing. In the beginning, hitting “publish” terrified me—the raw, deeply personal style of writing I do used to make me physically sick with anxiety. But slowly, God made it easier to press that button and walk in confidence, trusting what He called me to put out into the world. Now, a year and a half down the road, I am still here writing. God has walked alongside me every single step, and none of this would exist without Him in the middle of it. Looking back, I am forever grateful for that dark chapter, because God used every broken piece of it to bring me home.

The Tyranny of the Self-Made Cure

For a very long time, I operated as though my primary job in life was self-preservation.

When fear, anxiety, and internal chaos threatened to pull me under, my natural instinct was never surrender—it was control. I spent years frantically running around the perimeter of my heart trying to fortify walls, manage how others perceived me, and patch together a sense of security out of anything I could lay hands on.

When you don’t trust God with your pain, you will inevitably crown whatever numbs that pain as your savior.

That is how coping mechanisms become idols. Whether it was the bottle, the dispensary, or the vape glued to my fingers, every single one began as an attempt to self-medicate a deep, hollow ache that only God was equipped to heal. I told myself I was just “getting by.” But in reality, I was a starving beggar rummaging through garbage bins behind a palace while the banquet doors stood wide open.

The most dangerous part of a counterfeit comfort is not that it hurts you immediately—it’s that it works just enough to keep you from running to God. It gives you thirty seconds of shallow relief, just enough to convince you that you don’t need to fall to your knees.

The Breaking of the Self-Sufficient Heart

God rarely breaks an idol by giving you more willpower. Willpower is still human pride disguised as discipline. It still keeps the glory centered on your own backbone.

Instead, God often allows us to reach the absolute end of our own strength until the weight of carrying our own universe crushes our hands.

My turning point arrived when the crutches stopped delivering on their promises. The shallow relief faded, the panic remained, and the exhausting charade of pretending I had everything under control fell apart. There is an agonizing terror that comes when the things you relied on to keep you stable suddenly lose their grip, leaving you naked in front of your own brokenness.

It was in that exact state of spiritual bankruptcy that Jesus met me.

He did not scold me for running to counterfeit wells. He did not hand me a checklist of spiritual chores to complete before I could earn His audience. He met me with the quiet, overwhelming authority of grace that whispered: You were never built to carry this.

Surrender wasn’t an act of bravery on my part. It was simply the realization that I had run out of moves. It was throwing my hands up and finally acknowledging that a created being cannot out-manage the Creator.

Sanctification is Not an Overnight Flight

When God swept into my life, He pulled heavy chains apart with an ease that took my breath away. He broke the numbing grip of alcohol and weed overnight, and over time—under proper medical care and prayer—He healed the debilitating panic and depression that once required daily medication to survive. Battles that once felt like permanent life sentences were met with His restoring mercy.

Yet, sanctification is rarely an uninterrupted series of instantaneous miracles.

Sometimes God takes a chain off with one strike of His hammer. Other times, He hands you a shovel and teaches you how to dig through the dirt day after day.

For years, I viewed my remaining struggles as evidence that I was failing God. When old habits—like that persistent nicotine crutch—lingered long after other vices had been conquered, shame tried to build a home in my mind. I thought: If I were truly spiritual, this would have vanished by now.

What God had to teach me was that deliverance is about trust, not speed.

He didn’t just want me free from a habit; He wanted me stripped of self-reliance. He allowed the battle to require daily, quiet, unglamorous obedience because He was after my heart, not a quick, polished success story to impress people on social media. He was teaching me that taking one quiet lap around the wall of Jericho every single morning—praying through the craving, admitting weakness, asking for help—builds spiritual muscle that an overnight miracle never produces.

Slow obedience is still obedience. A wall dismantled brick by brick by the hand of God leaves you with zero room to boast in your own grit.

You Are Qualified by Your Scars, Not Your Spotlessness

This past Sunday in church, a single sentence cut straight through the noise in my heart and changed the way I look at my entire story:

“You’re the most qualified person to reach the person you used to be!”

If God only used people who had never fallen, the Bible would be an empty book.

Moses had a failure and a body he tried to bury in the desert sand. Peter denied the very name of Christ to save his own neck around a campfire. Paul held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen. God has never been in the business of recruiting the self-righteous; He fills His table with people who know the stench of the alleys they were pulled from.

Your scars do not disqualify you from the Kingdom of God. Your scars are the map that shows someone else the way out of the ditch.

If you are reading this while sitting on a secret struggle—if you are hiding a habit, drowning in anxiety, or terrified that someone might discover you haven’t figured life out yet—stop performing.

The Father does not need you to wash your face and put on your Sunday best before you crawl to His feet. The table is spread. The seat is pulled out. The only requirement to feast on His mercy is admitting that you are starving.

Questions for Your Heart Today

• What counterfeit comfort have you been treating as your refuge, simply because you are terrified to feel the pain underneath it?
• Where in your life are you still exhausting yourself trying to produce spiritual fruit through human willpower instead of quiet surrender?
• If you truly believed that God’s grace was bigger than your secret struggle, what hidden battle would you finally bring into the light today?

Drop a comment below, send a private message, or take a quiet minute right now to breathe and lay the weight at His feet. You don’t have to fight for a seat that has already been bought for you. 🤍

Want to read more about what the “messy middle” actually looked like for me?

If you are wrestling with a stubborn habit, an emotional crutch, or the exhausting cycle of trying to fix yourself with sheer willpower, I shared the raw story behind dismantling my ten-year crutch in last week’s post:

👉 Read: Circling the Wall: What Breaking Free Actually Looks Like in the Messy Middle