When Fear Feels Holy

I am so grateful for this conversation with my niece, Kailey Scott. What she shared was honest, vulnerable, and deeply relatable — and I know it is going to land in the hearts of so many women who have been quietly carrying the same weight. If anxiety has ever felt like a spiritual problem rather than a mental one, this episode is for you.

In this episode:

• How Kailey learned to tell the difference between the Spirit and her anxiety

• Why the God she believed in wasn't the God she thought she knew

• What decision paralysis taught her about agency and trust

• The truth about medication, therapy, and what God actually thinks about getting help

• Three simple things to start doing today if you're living with chronic anxiety

Kailey grew up in Washington state, attended BYU, served a mission in Minnesota, and graduated with a degree in public relations. She is a writer at heart — passionate about words, reading, and anything creative. She recently moved back home with her husband to save money, and she describes this season of life as a launching pad — a temporary pause before the next chapter begins.

She is also someone who has lived with anxiety for most of her life. And for years, she didn't fully understand that that's what it was.

I opened our conversation with a story from Elder David A. Bednar's talk "Bear Up Their Burdens With Ease" — about a man who got his truck stuck in the snow and, rather than waiting for help, started cutting and loading firewood into the bed of the truck. When he finally tried to drive out again, the weight of the load gave his tires the traction they needed to move forward.

Elder Bednar asks two questions worth sitting with: Is the load I am carrying producing the spiritual traction that will enable me to press forward with faith in Christ? And is it creating sufficient traction so I can ultimately return home to Heavenly Father?

Kailey's load has been anxiety. And as hard as it has been, it has also become one of the greatest sources of traction in her walk with God.

Kailey remembers being eight years old and lying awake all night, praying that her house wouldn't burn down — not because anything was wrong, but because the thought had entered her mind and she couldn't let it go. That is the nature of anxiety. A normal fear gets picked up, amplified, and turned into a certainty.

What makes Kailey's story particularly interesting is that her anxiety and her faith became deeply intertwined from a very young age. Because she always turned to God with her fears, her brain began to associate fear with the Spirit. If a nervous feeling arose, she assumed it must be a warning from God. If a stray thought entered her mind during prayer, she took it as a sign.

This meant that for years, she was making decisions — or avoiding them entirely — based on fear she genuinely believed was divine guidance.

The turning point came when Kailey finally sat down with a therapist and laid out the full picture — the compulsive driving routes, the prayer rituals, the decision paralysis, the years of interpreting anxiety as revelation. The therapist looked at her and said something that stopped her cold:

"Kailey, you and I believe in different gods. You believe in a God who is easily disappointed in you — one who will remove himself from your life if you don't do the exact right things. I believe in a God who is very kind, who gives grace and space to make mistakes and try again, and who gave you your own agency to choose for yourself."

Kailey pushed back at first. She had served a mission. She had kept her covenants. She had always tried to do the right things. How could her relationship with God be off?

But it was. And the willingness to sit with that truth and begin reconstructing her understanding of who God actually is — that changed everything.

One of the most powerful things Kailey shared is something I think we all need to hear plainly: God does not work through fear. Ever.

Scripture is clear on this. Second Timothy 1:7 tells us that God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind. And in Doctrine and Covenants, the language God uses to communicate is peace, clarity, and a stupor of thought — not panic, not dread, not obsessive worst-case thinking.

This distinction has become one of Kailey's most practical tools. When anxiety rises up, she can now say with confidence: this is not God. It may be her own mind, or it may be the adversary preying on a known weakness. But it is not Heavenly Father. And that separation — simple as it sounds — has given her so much freedom.

She also shared a beautiful quote from Elder Bednar: "Unlike worldly fear that creates alarm and anxiety, godly fear is a source of peace, assurance, and confidence." Godly fear draws us upward. Worldly fear pins us down.

Another thing Kailey has had to relearn is what agency actually means. For a long time, she believed there was one specific path for her life — and that any deviation from it would cause her carefully arranged future to collapse. Every decision felt like a trap.

What helped her was making a decision for herself first and then taking it to God — which, as she noted, is exactly what we are taught to do. When she finally decided she wanted to marry her husband John and brought that decision to the Lord, she received a clear, peaceful yes. God's response felt like: you had to make that choice for yourself. I'm not going to force you.

President Uchtdorf said it beautifully: there are times when a question has multiple right answers and you can find joy in any of them as long as you live by God's eternal truths. The dots will connect. God never abandons us even when He lets us choose.

I love how candidly Kailey spoke about this, because I think it needs to be said loudly and clearly in faith communities: getting help is not a sign of weak faith. It is wisdom.

Kailey was afraid that medication would dull her ability to feel the Spirit. What she discovered instead was that her anxiety was the thing standing between her and the Spirit. Depression and chronic anxiety, left untreated, make it nearly impossible to feel spiritual impressions — and when we can't feel the Spirit, everything gets harder.

Kailey paired medication with therapy, put in serious work to retrain her thought patterns, and after about a year was able to come off medication entirely. That is her story. For others, long-term medication is the right answer — and there is absolutely no shame in that.

As she said so well: you break your arm, you get a cast. Your brain needs help, you get help. God is a God of science. He gave us these tools because He wants us to have joy — now, not just in the next life.

I shared my own experience too. I am on a low dose of medication every morning and I have made peace with that choice. It makes me a better mother, a better wife, and a better servant of God. Our paths look different, and that is okay.

Kailey closed with three practical steps for anyone living with chronic anxiety:

• Find someone you trust. A patient, loving person who will listen, reassure you, and gently keep you accountable on the harder days. You don't have to carry this alone.

• Start journaling. Getting your fears out of your head and onto paper changes everything. What feels overwhelming and rational in your mind often looks very different written down.

• Turn to Heavenly Father even more. More prayer, more scripture, more temple attendance — not as a cure, but as a constant source of peace that crowds out fear. Anxiety is fear of things that haven't happened yet. Peace is the antidote.

Elder Bednar's closing words from his talk say it all: "The Savior will help us to bear up our burdens with ease as we are yoked with Him through sacred covenants and receiving the enabling power of His Atonement in our lives."

We all have firewood in the back of our trucks. Sometimes the load needs to get heavier before we find traction. But every single time we include our Savior and His atoning power, we move forward. We don't get stuck.

If this episode spoke to you, please share it with someone who needs it. And if you would like to be a guest on Becoming the Oak Rooted in Christ, I would love to hear from you at kendra@becomingtheoak.com.

Until next time — be still, believe, become.