Chelsey Rodgers | October 8, 2026
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from measuring yourself by things you don’t fully control.
– Your child’s meltdown in the grocery store.
– Whether your quiet time happened today.
– Whether you responded to the tantrum with a calm voice or a cracked one.
– Whether the version of you that shows up on Sunday morning matches the version God actually sees.
I lived there for years — worth on loan, due back the moment my kid dysregulated in public or my prayer life went dry.
Two scoreboards, same trap
The regulation scoreboard. If my kid is calm, I’m doing motherhood right. If my kid is melting down — especially in public, especially with an autism diagnosis that already invites stares — I must be failing.
Except regulation isn’t something I install in another human being. It’s a nervous system skill, still developing, still learning, sometimes overwhelmed by a world that’s too loud, too bright, too much. My worth was never supposed to be a referendum on someone else’s dysregulated Tuesday.
The spiritual-performance scoreboard. If I look put-together in front of my church, my faith must be strong. If I’m raw, tired, angry at God, behind on Scripture reading — I must be spiritually failing. Except looking spiritual and being close to God were never the same metric. Some of the most spiritually honest seasons of my life looked the least impressive from the outside.
Both scoreboards have the same fatal flaw: they let something outside of you decide whether you get to feel worthy today.
What Scripture actually says about your worth
Psalm 139:14 doesn’t say “I am wonderfully made when my kids are regulated.”
It says, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.“
Full stop. No conditions. No performance clause.
Romans 8:1 doesn’t say “there is no condemnation for those who look spiritually composed.”
It says “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Condemnation was already dealt with before your quiet time streak broke, before your kid had a meltdown in the cereal aisle, before you snapped at bedtime for the third night in a row.
You were never meant to carry a scoreboard God already tore up.
What it looks like to step off the scoreboards
It looks like sitting with your child through a public meltdown without narrating your own shame to yourself the whole time — “they’re all staring, I look like I can’t control my own kid.”
You’re not failing. You’re parenting a real nervous system in real time, and it isn’t a performance for anyone watching.
It looks like showing up to church, or to prayer, or to this blog, exactly as scattered and unimpressive as you actually feel — and letting that count as faith, not as a failure of it.
It looks like separating “my child is struggling right now from I am a bad mother” — two completely different sentences that your brain has been fusing into one for far too long.
You are not a report card
Your worth was decided before your child’s diagnosis, before their hardest days, before your own hardest days. It was decided before you ever tried to look composed for people who were never actually counting.
You get to stop performing regulation you can’t force onto another human being. You get to stop performing spirituality for an audience that was never the point.
What’s left, underneath both scoreboards, is just you — tired, faithful in the ways that actually count, and worthy of the exact love you keep trying to earn.
You already have it. You always did.
Xx, Chelsey
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