The Tenpenny Files with Nicole Suvar

What if holding it all together is the opposite of what God asked you to do?

Are you the person everyone depends on? You handle the family, the work, the schedule, the problems, and whatever else lands in your lap. Even when you’re exhausted, your mind keeps going because you feel responsible for making sure everything and everyone is okay.

Where does responsibility end and control begin?

Nichole Suvar, author of I Don’t Have to Hold It All Together, knows this struggle personally. A self-described recovering perfectionist who has lived with anxiety since childhood, she spent years wondering why prayer, Scripture, and genuinely trusting God didn’t make those anxious feelings disappear.

If I really trust God, why am I still anxious?

That’s a question Christians don’t always feel comfortable asking.

Nichole and I talk openly about anxiety, faith, counseling, medication, and the guilt that can come when you’ve been told to cast your cares on God but you still feel anxious. She learned that experiencing anxiety did not automatically mean she wasn’t praying enough or trusting God enough.

Then we get into control.

When life feels uncertain, we often try to manage more of it. We take on another problem. We worry about what someone else is doing. We replay conversations. We plan for outcomes we can’t guarantee. We tell ourselves we’re simply being responsible.

Nichole challenges that thinking with one sentence:

“Just because I see a need does not mean it’s my job to fill it.”

How many things are you carrying simply because you noticed they needed to be done?

This is where her Garden of Eden framework becomes so interesting.

If you plant a garden, you have work to do. You prepare the soil, plant the seeds, water and pull weeds. But you don’t create the sunshine. You don’t create the rain. And you cannot force the seed to grow.

Nichole says we’ve forgotten that distinction in our own lives.

God asks us to steward what He has given us. We keep trying to guarantee the outcome.

That can show up in our families, relationships, work, plans, and even our prayers.

We give something to God, but when He doesn’t answer quickly enough or the way we expected, we pick it back up and start trying to control it again.

So what does surrender actually look like when the problem hasn’t gone away?

We talk about that, along with healthy boundaries, perfectionism, God’s timing, and the difference Nichole sees between praying to God and living in communion with Him throughout the day.

Her book, I Don’t Have to Hold It All Together, takes readers deeper into the Eden framework and what she calls cultivating peace rather than simply managing overwhelm. Our conversation brings those ideas into the situations where surrender gets hard.

If you’re exhausted from being the one who handles everything, if your mind never shuts off, or if you’ve wondered why you still feel anxious when you genuinely trust God, listen to this conversation.

You may discover that holding everything together was never your assignment.

Meet our Guest

Nichole Suvar is a writer, speaker, intentional living coach, and author of I Don’t Have to Hold It All Together.

A self-described recovering perfectionist, Nichole has lived with anxiety since childhood. Her own experience led her to question why someone can genuinely trust God and still struggle with anxious thoughts, overwhelm, and the need to control what happens next.

Today, she helps overwhelmed women embrace God’s design for mental wellness. Her work returns to the Garden of Eden to examine what God’s original design can teach us about peace, provision, responsibility, and surrender.

Nichole partners with nonprofit organizations locally and nationwide to promote mental wellness and faith through meaningful conversations and speaks at conferences, retreats, and small groups about what she calls the “Eden Way.”

She lives in Indiana with her husband, Paul, and their three teenage children.

Website

https://livewithintent.org

Book: https://amzn.to/4vB4QWv