Let the Earth Spin

By Caity Neub

Are you weary of posturing, pretending, and performing for yourself and others – and even God? Are you confused about what He wants from you, and why He hasn't given you what you want in life?

 

Me, too.

 

We are all waiting for our lives to get magically better, while at the same time spinning at break-neck speed in order to arrive precisely where we want to be. These two opposing forces—the idea that "I am not there yet" combined with the fear that "I will never get there"—collide with such force that we experience things like chronic stress. Anxiety. Depression. Discontentment. Exhaustion.

 

But what if we could rest? What if we could let the Earth spin as God intended it to, and fall into our own peaceful roles in it? What if we could silence the noises in our heads long enough to hear His voice again?

 

Let the Earth Spin is the story of Caity Neub's early motherhood, fraught as it was with depression and overwhelm and diapers and uncertainty, and how God took her back to the core of her identity -- the real role He had planned for her in the midst of all the spinning. Caity Neub has been featured in Bella Grace, Calla Press, and several other online publications.

 

 

"Real and relatable, Caity Neuberger is someone you'll come to love through her strong yet vulnerable story (or words - I'm having trouble choosing between the two!)."

- Jean Ruark, Director of Paul Sawyier Public Library


"Caity uses her own relatable stories to help you believe that your own voice, your own gifts, your own beautiful, ordinary life is everything you need...everything you've been called to do by our loving God who is ever-near. We can slow down and just be here, while the Earth spins."

- Mikala Albertson, MD; author of Ordinary On Purpose: Surrendering PERFECT and Discovering Beauty Amid the Rubble


"Caity writes in a conversational style that is so easy to read. Frankly, though her style is her own, Caity rivals Ann Voskamp in writing contemplative, poetic, raw, honest, insightful, and inspiring words that speak truth from vulnerable places. Caity's stories, familiar as they are to moms everywhere, become meditations on love, forgiveness, and mercy."

- Beth Feia, English Teacher at Mansfield Christian School & Editor of 11 Years

"What Caity Neub accomplishes in Let the Earth Spin is astonishing. A clear-eyed and emotionally honest depiction of a young mother's struggles, successes, and salvation, her book will engage, challenge, comfort and question its readers at every turn. . .I'm neither young nor a mother, but I know a gripping, yet uplifting, tale when I see one."

- Steve Edgehouse, Associate Professor of English and Modern Languages,
Stark State College, North Canton, Ohio

"You will not be able to put Caity's book down! It is filled with so many practical, helpful tips that call you out of your comfortable life and into a wild adventure with God. Though she writes from her perspective as a new mom and wife, there are so many lessons for anyone daring enough to read and take to heart the gold nuggets she exposes from her experiences. God has truly blessed her with the gift of writing. I want EVERYONE to read Let The Earth Spin!"

- Julie Bartholomew, Wife & Mother

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caity Neub
• Release date: Mar 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215893036

Caity Neub

Hey, there, friend! As a stay-at-home mama hiding away in the small world of Ohio, most of my hours involve comforting or correcting little ones. But in the margins, I find solace and inspiration in words, small miracles, and any music that moves me to dance. I am most likely crafting a story or homeschooling my recklessly imaginative children—all the while dreaming of returning to the Colorado mountains one day. I’m terribly flawed, I struggle with trying to do things the “right way,” and I only want to get the craft paint out if someone else is going to clean up the mess. Through my writing and my podcast, I share the deepest part of my emotions in order to unveil the deepest parts of God’s heart for women—and His unfailing faithfulness in helping us unwind the tangle of lies we tend to spin for ourselves. I’m here to scrawl the sacred across as many hearts as possible. Find me on Instagram, check out my website, or listen to The Clarity Show with Caity Neub.

Book preview

Caity uses her own relatable stories to help you believe that your own voice, your own gifts, your own beautiful, ordinary life is everything you need...everything you've been called to do by our loving God who is ever-near. We can slow down and just be here, while the earth spins.

- Mikala Albertson, MD; author of Ordinary On Purpose: Surrendering PERFECT and Discovering Beauty Amidst the Rubble

"YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE to put Caity‘s book down! It is filled with so many practical, helpful tips that call you out of your comfortable life and into a wild adventure with God. Though she writes from her perspective as a new mom and wife, there are so many lessons for anyone daring enough to read and take to heart the gold nuggets she exposes from her experiences. God has truly blessed her with the gift of writing. I want EVERYONE to read Let the Earth Spin!"

- Julie Bartholomew, Wife & Mother

CAITY WRITES IN A CONVERSATIONAL style that is so easy to read. Frankly, though her style is her own, Caity rivals Ann Voskamp in writing contemplative, poetic, raw, honest, insightful, and inspiring words that speak truth from vulnerable places. Caity’s stories, familiar as they are to moms everywhere, become meditations on love, forgiveness, and mercy.

- Beth Feia, English Teacher at Mansfield Christian School & Editor of 11 Years

WHAT CAITY NEUB ACCOMPLISHES in Let the Earth Spin is astonishing. A clear-eyed and emotionally honest depiction of a young mother's struggles, successes, and salvation, her book will engage, challenge, comfort and question its readers at every turn. There’s so much to ponder: her interplay of self-doubt and maternal instinct; the ongoing, never-settled dynamic between her identity and her faith; her direct-address approach to readers of all stripes (but especially young women like her); and her quintessential belief that there's a place in God's plan for everyone, that faith takes work, that we can find peace amidst the clamor. I’m neither young nor a mother, but I know a gripping, yet uplifting, tale when I see one.

- Steve Edgehouse, associate professor of English and Modern Languages, Stark State College, North Canton, Ohio

Honest. Caity opens up about struggles not talked about in the Mommy Circles, but are much-needed discussions.

- Melissa Stevenson, 10 years of Children and Youth Ministry

Caity magically pulls you into her life, her emotions, and her fears. Her use of words allows you to feel the pain, struggles, and joys of her life. As you travel with her, you are able to see the transformation and the faith she has not in herself but rather in her gracious God. She understands that happiness and peace are not found in herself or the people around her, but rather in her loving God. This journey with Caity will be important for so many as they travel through life’s ups and downs. God never promised us an easy life, but he did promise to be with us and give us the strength to endure.

- Reverend Brad Wright, Pastor of Risen Savior Lutheran Church & Graduate of Wisconsin Lutheran seminary.

"2 Corinthians 1:3 -7 says, ‘Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the suffering of Christ flows over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort, which produces in you, patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer...so also you share in our comfort.’

"Our purpose(s) in life are often fraught with tension, worry, shame, depression, and confusion. We cannot control our thoughts and feelings, especially those generated by Satan. By the grace of God and by faith in Christ Jesus, we can only react to such thoughts and feelings, knowing and believing that God would never punish or abandon us.  It’s then that we find His purpose in our life experiences in a world spinning out of control.

"In her book, Let the Earth Spin, Caity Neub reacts to and uses her real life experiences to do a remarkable job of showing how God’s comfort flows to believers when they suffer for Jesus’ sake. Her book brings so much encouragement and comfort to others who face life’s great challenges. A must-read for all of us, ‘for the suffering of Christ flows over into our lives and through Christ our comfort overflows to others.’ "

- Pastor Clyde Kieschnick, Pastor of Zion Lutheran Church, Lutheran pastor for 32 years

Real and relatable, Caity Neuberger is someone you’ll come to love through her strong yet vulnerable story.

- Jean Ruark, Director of Paul Sawyier Public Library

Introduction:

The Spinning

There is an urgency to all of our movements—you must keep up, go faster, be more efficient, stay productive, get successful, and do more —or you might lose your spot in the race. Time creates an anxious hole inside each of us that we fill with work and worries and strivings. How do we let the Earth spin as it was meant to, while keeping our place in the pages of our own lives?

Imagine with me for a moment that you are watching someone else’s kid—not yours, of course—as he throws a rock up straight up in the air. (Obviously, your child would be far too smart to attempt this.) I’m trying to hit the sun, he tells you. He keeps on trying even as you walk away, completely disinterested in someone so out of touch with reality. What’s so comical about this picture is that not only is a child too weak to launch anything past his own lawn, but even if he was somehow able, there is no way that a rock would make it through the Earth’s atmosphere or the gravity-less space between us and the sun.

Our attempts at control are like that little boy throwing a rock: we’re not even close to achieving what we’re after. God is so far out of our sphere of influence that we can’t understand His ways, let alone tell Him what to do with our lives. And even if we only measure our efforts against other flawed humans, we still cannot keep up.

God taught me that I have two choices: accept the major relief that comes when I stop trying to take charge of things bigger than me or keep throwing rocks in the air and hope to (eventually) make my mark on the Earth.

I had four kids in four years within just over four years of marriage, and my twenties were overwhelmed by a tide of diapers and tears. My four firework-like children (they are loud and colorful and belong at every celebration) included a set of twins, but did not include a nanny, a daycare, close-by relatives, or any other form of reprieve from my motherly duties. As motherhood ignited depression, anxiety, and a literal fear of the dark in me, my thoughts became colored by anger and frustration and despair. My life felt like an empty pit, one which I would never climb out of. Because once you’re a mom, that’s the end, isn’t it? You’re forever changed, forever bound to your kids, and forever stuck in one role. My time as an individual had ended, and I fought it tooth and nail.

The problem was not really that life was so dull for me. The problem was that it was all so exhausting.

Is this the way that God meant for motherhood to be? Where is the beautiful life we’ve been promised? Why is God holding out on us? God must not love me very much, we think, if this is all He has for me.

Since God doesn’t seem to be in the business of giving us what we want, we begin to take matters into our own hands. We begin to believe that we must keep spinning faster and faster, matching the Earth’s rotations, in order to create for ourselves the amazing life we are meant to have. We are hamsters stuck on a spinning wheel, and we are the ones making ourselves run faster.

But if God really loved you, wouldn’t He give you the things you want? Wouldn’t He stop letting you be hurting, lonely, and depressed? If God was real, wouldn’t He rescue you from all of this?

We wrestle with these questions because our lives seem to be spinning out of control—and things are out of our control! But God is keeping the Earth spinning just the way that it was meant to, and He wants to whisper to your weary, worried heart:

Though your planet spins at an alarming rate, you don’t have to.

God is not expecting you to keep up. He is not expecting you to get it together. He is asking you for something else entirely.

During the last six weeks of pregnancy with my twins, I spent the dark hours at night curled into a pillow nest on my bed, trying to shut off my brain. Besides having up to pee during the night, I would usually be startled awake with uncomfortable Braxton-Hicks contractions or leg cramps.

One night, as I felt a leg cramp jolting me awake, a verse that I had been memorizing came to mind: But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.1

It was one of the verses I had been memorizing to use during labor. I focused on the words instead of the clenching of my muscles, gulping God’s peace down like pain medication. I breathed slowly. And I didn’t fight the cramp this time. Instead, I relaxed all of my other muscles and simply breathed deep. I leaned into that moment. And then I continued to recite the rest of the verses:

‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in Him.’ The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.¹

I barely felt the pain anymore. Could God’s Word be pain medication, after all? Leg cramps weren’t anything new for me, but usually I fought them, squirming away from the discomfort. This learning to allow pain instead of fighting it, to breathe into the pain instead of away, to finding  peace in the midst of it? That was very new to me.

My mind and body were both being trained to accept circumstances that are outside of my control. In other words, God was teaching me to allow the spinning of the Earth to happen (the chaos and the discomfort and the uncertainty) while trusting Him so completely that I no longer raged against it.

That night, I got to choose peace and a trust in His word and I saw immediate results. Sure, a leg cramp is a small thing, and people deal with them all the time. But does their pain ever turn into something better? Because right then, God turned my leg cramp into a kind of ecstatic joy and trust in my Savior that I could not explain.

How can pain have anything to do with joy? How can birthing a baby relate to receiving God’s will for our lives?

During labor and delivery, the pain of contractions (though difficult to endure) are actually a good thing; they prepare your body to push the baby out. The other pains during labor, both big and small, are trying to send you signals—telling you to change positions, stay hydrated, relax, etc. That’s why it’s so important to stay in tune with your body during this process. If you stay present instead of wishing it away, you can actually work with the pain, and allow it to do its good work. This alleviates all the extra pain that comes from being tense, stressed, or afraid. But as soon as you try to fight against a contraction, the pain intensifies, and fear of the pain starts to grow. This inside tension (fear) causes your muscles to tense up, too, increasing the pain even more.

It’s a crazy cycle that, for the most part, is entirely within our control.

I learned (first through personal study, and later through labor and delivery with my twins) that we can choose to ride out the waves of pain with peace, knowing that the pain is both normal and important. Knowing that God is good and anything that comes at us can be handled through the power of His Spirit. Acceptance grants us access into peace and joy, no matter the battle being fought.

Or, on the other side of the spectrum, we can choose to live in fear, and fight against the pain. We can choose to believe lies instead of the truth. We can make our journey much more painful and much less fruitful by tensing up in fear as we go through hard things (whether that be childbirth, losses, bad days, or stressful work). 

This book is the story of how I ruined my own life. The harder my circumstances got, the more I squirmed and writhed and tensed up in fear. This book is also the story of how God freed me from my spiraling and spinning. He taught me to observe, participate, and serve with joy while contraction-moments erupted all around me.

Which way do you want to choose to live? Tense and on high alert to run, or at peace and ready to move with God’s voice?

Through returning to these three simple components of our identity as women and followers of Christ—Observing, Participating, and Serving—we can learn again how to single out God’s voice in the crowd. We can return to the fullness of our own lives, without trying to keep up with the Earth’s spinning.

On this journey, we will face the darker parts of life. They will reveal things to us that the highest, brightest moments of our lives never will. One of these special truths that emerged for me was this: God isn’t going to take the hard things out of your life, but He does want to free you from their power.

Whatever is hard in our lives squeezes us, rather like a contraction of the muscles. It is an outside force that feels like it has the power to shape us. But God says differently. He says that we, in our minds and hearts and souls, have the power to not only respond well to our circumstances but also the ability to affect those circumstances in a positive way.

I want to invite you to dig down into the dirt of knowing God. Don’t let it be enough for you to simply hear the tales of seas split apart and bread multiplied to feed thousands; decide that you want to feel the sea-spray and taste the manna yourself. I have been many places, and I’ve seen God in all of them. I’ve felt God’s presence in a Colorado thunderstorm. In the operating room of a hospital in Texas. On the sunset-tinged grass of Ohio. During an English class in Bangkok. There’s no limiting this God and there’s no question that He exists. He is a real God who is really right here for you. So the question is not, Is God here for me? The question is, Will I trust God’s plan for me?

God is enough when your circumstances aren’t. Are you ready to find this out for yourself?

Own this journey for yourself, and chase God down in the Bible as you move throughout this book.

The First Layer:

Observing

Chapter 1:

The Trajectory

My Sorel boots crunched in the snow on the sidewalk, the freezing winter air whipping at the exposed skin on my neck and the naked hand I used to hold a phone to my cheek. But the rest of me was bundled up warmly enough that I didn’t notice the cold. Colorado’s massive amounts of snow had taught me to be prepared, if nothing else. But my hands were shaking for reasons other than the temperature.

One ring.

Two rings.

I didn’t know if I was hoping she would pick up or not.

Hi, how are you? my mom’s voice crackled through, excited as always to get a call from me.

Hi, I said. Ahead of me, a bus pulled up to the stop, and I sighed. That was my ride home. Maybe...maybe now wasn’t a good time to talk about this. Maybe I should just tell her I had to go and rush to catch the bus.

How are you doing? she asked. Dad’s here, too!

They were both there. Well. I couldn’t put this off any longer. I cringed and walked past the bus, past my chance to head home after a long day of work at the ski resort, and walk-slid into a snowy parking lot nearby. Hopefully another bus would be here in fifteen minutes.

I had fifteen minutes to get this conversation over with. I could handle that.

I’m fine, I managed. How are you guys?

Their words started to blur. But when they asked about Josh, my boyfriend, I crumpled inside.

Hey, I, uh...I have something to tell you guys. My heart began to pound and I squeezed my eyes shut. In that moment, I hated every part of being a daughter, and every inch of myself. I, uh...

And then I spoke the two words that no parent ever wants to hear from their unmarried daughter:

I’m pregnant.

THAT WAS A LONG, CONFUSING winter.

My family was living thirteen hundred miles away, in Ohio. My best friend, who had been working at the ski resort with me, had returned home to Ohio, as well. And my boyfriend had recently moved about a two-and-a-half hour drive from me.

I kept my pregnancy a secret from everyone who was living close to me for as long as I could. My bosses at work, most of my friends, the people calling for me to hit the slopes when work ended—none of them knew. To say that I was lonely was an understatement.

But while I desperately needed someone, I couldn’t voice the mistake I had made. I didn’t want to see the way people would look at me. How my confession would come out all choked, the way it did when I spilled it to my parents. Besides facing the shame of being that girl who was stupid enough to get knocked up, I was also terrified that my bosses or coworkers would treat me like a delicate China tea cup, changing my work hours or cutting them altogether. I needed to continue working, needed to carry on as normal while shame chewed at my insides and nausea swept through my body.

I coped by working harder than ever and eating a steady diet of potato chips and apple juice to keep the morning sickness at bay.

On the bus rides to and from work, I lived in headphones and lost wanderings. What was going to happen to me? How had my life changed so quickly? I hated feeling like my new baby and my impending marriage were Mack trucks barreling towards me that I was powerless to stop. I didn’t really want to discover how this was all going to turn out.

That’s when the whispers would come.

Lies poisoned my mind all winter. Satan hissed that I didn’t deserve this and that I needed to get out of it. That the