When Shrinking Looks Like Faith

There’s a version of “faith” many of us were quietly taught.

Be smaller.
 Be quieter.
 Be easier to love.
 Call it humility.

But what if some of what we’ve labeled obedience… is actually shrinking?

In this episode, we explore the subtle but powerful difference between true obedience and self-erasure. Because they feel similar on the surface — both can look gentle, compliant, even spiritual.

But they produce very different fruit.

Obedience — the kind rooted in alignment — produces clarity, groundedness, and peace.

Shrinking to meet external expectations produces anxiety, resentment, and a slow fading of your voice.

We’ll look at:

• Why shrinking can masquerade as maturity
• The nervous system cost of editing yourself to belong
• Esther’s story — and the difference between courage and compliance
• How joy might be more spiritual than you were taught

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re being faithful… or just afraid — this episode is for you.

Because obedience should bring you home to yourself.
 Not disappear you.

Resources:
20 Soul Sparks To Feel Like You Again - a simple list of tiny, doable moments designed to help you reconnect with joy, curiosity, peace, and play
https://rachel-harris-online.kit.com/cd8d06c001

Hidden Stories Inventory- a guide to help you notice the stories that have been shaping you https://rachel-harris-online.kit.com/hiddeninventory

My Substack Page, The Petal and The Plot: https://restorystudiorachel.substack.com/

Are YOU A Joyful Rebel? https://rachelharrisonline.com/joyful-rebel

Transcript

Obedience aligns you. Shrinking disconnects you. Obedience produces clarity, groundedness, peace, trust. Shrinking produces anxiety, self-doubt, If your yes cost you your aliveness, We need to look closer at that....

Hey friends, welcome back to the Joyful Rebel podcast. Today, talking about something personal. And if I'm honest, a little confronting because a lot of the women that I work with, they're not afraid of God, but they are afraid of disappointing Him. And somewhere along the way, shrinking got baptized as faithfulness.

Have you ever noticed how playing small can feel safe, even when it doesn't feel true? How obedience sometimes starts to look suspiciously like silence. There were seasons in my life where I told myself a very convincing story. I said I was being humble. practicing selflessness, cultivating a gentle quiet spirit, you know, like good Christian women are supposed to have. Do you hear all the pressure packed into that sentence?

I told myself all of it. But if I'm honest, nitty gritty real talk honest, I wasn't practicing holiness. I was managing my visibility. I was afraid of shining too brightly and then being judged as either prideful or vain. Afraid that being fully myself, that my joy, my curiosity, my voice, even my faith might be too much.

And if I'm being really, really honest, I feared that my natural God-given childlike joy would be seen as childish. So I learned to soften, to edit, to wait for a personality transplant that never came. After years of wishing and editing, and waiting, and I mean an embarrassing amount of years waiting, like 20 plus, something unexpected happened. Permission came, not from a mentor, not from a small group, permission from God. Here's the distinction I want to name clearly:

Obedience aligns you. Shrinking disconnects you. Obedience produces clarity, groundedness, peace, trust. Shrinking produces anxiety, self-doubt, resentment, even sometimes resentment towards God. If your yes cost you your aliveness, we need to look closer at that.

Let's talk about my girl Esther for a second. Before she ever stood before the king, she had to decide something privately. Will I stay hidden or will I risk being seen? And notice, God didn't force her. In fact, God's not mentioned at all in that book. And scripture doesn't say that Esther was some fearless warrior woman with boldness on lock. 

She was a woman, doing her best to stay faithful in a life that had gone nothing like the plan I'm sure she had imagined. She found herself in a terrifying situation that she didn't feel prepared for, but she chose agency. agency gave birth to audacity. The courage came after the clarity. Faith wasn't pretending that she wasn't afraid.

Faith was choosing alignment with the fear. Now my clarity didn't come all at once. It came in moments. One of the first moments happened while I was practicing silence, stillness, and solitude, I was doing my best to be present. When out of nowhere, a verse from Zephaniah came to mind:

He will delight over you with joy. He will quiet you with his love. He will dance for joy over you with singing. 

Now, somehow I totally skipped right over the joy in that verse. Luckily, God circles back to that later. But the word dance is what grabbed my attention.

Most translations use the word rejoice here, but the Hebrew word literally means to dance, skip, leap, and spin in joy. Now I grew up in New Orleans. Music and dancing is in my blood. My family will shut down a dance floor at a wedding reception and at galas—more on that in an upcoming episode. But when I really started getting back into church in my twenties, for some reason, I started wondering if my love of dance was okay. 

Now I'm not talking ballet dancing or two-stepping. I'm talking booty shaking dancing. I mean…not really, but (insert silly dance here), you know what I mean. Groove, right?

Was that wrong? Would it disappoint God? I swear a part of my brain kind of morphed into the pastor from Footloose somehow. Even though in the movie, Kevin Bacon literally quotes scripture and our man David, proving that there is in fact a time to dance. Luckily, back then a spiritual sister did pull me aside and gave me some clarity on most of that. But fear still had its talons in me for years after until that moment in the closet. 

And when I laughed and whispered aloud, you dance? I promise you, I sensed God respond so kindly and so unmistakingly: ‘Yeah, maybe not like you dance, but I dance.’ 

And I felt this playful, delighted joy and personality, like God was smiling over me. Not judging me, not disappointed, just connecting like I do with my children.

It left me in grateful awe. My next aha moment came a few months later. I was on a spiritual retreat where I was introduced to the Enneagram. When the spiritual director named my type, Enneagram seven, she used one word, joy. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had spent over 20 years wishing away, praying away, a God-given spiritual gift. 

I mean, duh, Rachel, it's literally right there in that adorable preschool Christian song that I've sung more times than I can count. The fruit of the spirit's not a coconut. If you don't know what I'm talking about, do yourself a favor and go look it up on YouTube. But love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, it's right there.

And somehow, despite all the singing I had done of that song, I kept blanking on that word. Note what is not in that list or the verse--Quiet, shrinking, fear. And while gentleness is mentioned, that just isn't my spiritual gift. My spiritual superpower is joy. 

And my fear of disappointing God had led me to dim the very light that He'd given me. When I finally began letting it out again, I felt His presence more than ever. I felt like me again. My family noticed and they benefited. Just like Ted Lasso's joy isn't immaturity, it's his strength. When I stopped editing myself in the name of holiness, everything changed.

In the re-story arc that I teach, this is what I call a story shift. It's the moment where you realize the story that you've been living doesn't match the truth that you've been given. One reframe entire story changed. So here's the question I want you to sit with. Where in your life are you calling fear wisdom?

Where are you calling shrinking obedience? Where might you be dimming a God-given gift out of misplaced holiness?

Okay, here's your permission slips for this week. 

You're allowed to trust the way God wired you. 

You're allowed to take up space. 

You're allowed to live aligned, not edited. 

Faith was never meant to make you disappear.

Next week, we're talking about what happens when courage shows up as curiosity, not certainty. Until then, stay honest, stay rooted, and don't shrink. I'll meet you back here.