What I Would Tell Her

If I could go back and speak to my fourteen-year-old self, I wouldn’t tell her about everything we would go on to accomplish. No stages, no rooms, no open doors. Not because those things don’t matter, but because they were never really the point.

All I would tell her is this: the God you already believe in is worth trusting. He is good. And He cares about your dreams. She wouldn’t need a preview of the future. She wouldn’t need to know what was coming. She would just need to hold onto that truth, really hold onto it, and then stand back and watch what God does with a life that’s fully handed over to Him. The amazement was always going to come. She just needed to trust first.

I came to this realisation yesterday, of all places, in prayer.

I had just come off the back of presenting my research at a public conversation with Professor Jeffrey Sachs at UCD, MC-ing the event in front of around 300 people and sharing the Gratitude-Based Sustainability framework I have spent the last few years building.

It was one of those moments where you can feel the distance between where you started and where you are.

And I was in prayer, just thanking God for it, when something shifted in how I was thinking about it.

I started to imagine going back to tell my fourteen-year-old self what was coming. The UNICEF board. The TED talk. The MSc. The Jeffrey Sachs event. I wanted to see her face light up. And then I stopped myself. Because I realised that telling her the outcomes was actually the least important thing I could do. The outcomes were never the source. They were just what came from the source.

The only thing she needed to know was already available to her at fourteen. That God is worth trusting. That He is good. That He sees her dreams and doesn’t dismiss them. If she could hold onto those three things, everything else would follow. Not because of her talent or her effort, though those matter too, but because of whose hands the whole thing was in.

I think we live in a world that is obsessed with outcomes. With metrics, milestones, and visible proof that we are on the right track. And I understand that impulse. I feel it myself. But what I keep coming back to is that the most foundational thing in my life is not any achievement. It is a trust that was built quietly, over years, in the ordinary moments of prayer and surrender and choosing to believe that God is who He says He is.

That trust is what made everything else possible. Not the other way around.

So if you are reading this and you are in a season where the outcomes aren’t visible yet, where you are doing the work and holding the faith and wondering if any of it is going somewhere, I want to say this directly: hold onto the truth.

Not the results.

Not the timeline.

The truth that God is good, that He is present, and that He cares about what you are carrying.

Until next time,

Elizabeth