On Prayer, Rest, Self-Care

I’ve had the growing sense throughout the last year that what has been working for many years is no longer working. Writing and traveling and speaking at the pace I’ve been doing it is no longer working for my life. For my spirit. For my body. For my home. 

To be clear, there is no crisis here. There was no crash, no fracture. It’s not, in any way, that things are in trouble with our marriage or our kids. Essentially, it’s the opposite. I married Aaron because I love to be with him, because he makes me laugh and makes me think and because he was the first person I ever met that I’d willingly miss a party to be with. I didn’t marry him because I wanted to be business partners and childcare partners, ships in the night building the same family but rarely sitting on the same couch at the end of the day. 

And our kids are fine. They’re better than fine. They’re so great. And the thing is, I don’t want to miss as much as I’ve been missing. I want to be more present and connected to them, less frantic and depleted. This isn’t really about Aaron or the boys. It’s about me. 

It’s about me finally getting to the point where I don’t care if someone else could live my life and keep my schedule with the greatest of ease. I can’t. It stopped working. 

One of my greatest flaws is that I look too much to the left and the right. I gauge myself too often by what she can do or what he can handle. And so many of my friends and family members are really special, really talented, really hard-working people. 

How can I say I’m tired when I look at her workload? How can I complain when she has four little ones at home? How can I pull back when he’s handling this, and this, and this. 

Most of the writers I know are publishing faster than I am. Most of them are traveling more than I am. For a long time, I’ve ignored the voice inside me that says, no more. I can’t anymore.

This isn’t a crisis of identity or calling. I want to be a writer. I love being a writer and I’m thankful every day for the opportunities I’ve been given. And I love to travel. Some of the sweetest memories of the last few years have been the moments of connection with readers at events. 

Speaking at APU’s commencement was a total highlight, one that will stay with me forever, and taking our family to England and speaking at an amazing church there was such a wonderful adventure. There are friends I’ve made all over the country and all over the world because we talked and hugged and sometimes cried together before or after an event, on the way to the airport or in a hotel lobby or coffee shop. 

This isn’t about not writing anymore or not traveling anymore. This is about shifting the math--more of this, less of that. This is about listening to my soul and my body, about giving up my need to be known as an extremely capable person.

For the last several years, I’ve been saying yes yes yes—and then after the fact, hoping my body and spirit and soul and life can accommodate all the yeses I’ve said. Now I’m starting with this actual body, this actual life. What does it need? How much can this person that I am--physical and spiritual--do?  It doesn’t matter what someone else can do. What matters is that I can’t do this anymore. 

And I don’t care if that makes me weak or fragile or completely non-special in someone else’s eyes. What other people think of me is less and less valuable. And what’s increasingly valuable to me is a life that works for me. 

I’m traveling back to the very, very beginning, and I’m starting with prayer. Not the frantic prayers of someone who’s already signed up for an insane schedule and unrealistic set of commitments and needs to be bailed out or carried through. 

But the prayers that start at the very beginning. Here I am. Just me. Fragile me. Human me. God, what do you want to occupy my days? What do you want to guide my choices?  

And I’m relearning rest. Less frantic multi-tasking. More sleep. More slow. More of those magical unplanned moments and hours—the ones that, to be honest, make me feel nervous and guilty, but that I think just might transform me along the way. 

And self-care. Basically, I hate the term self-care. It sounds like a luxury item. It sounds like something that fancy, well-manicured and perfectly-coiffed women do, something for people with lots of time on their hands. That’s a confession, of course, because my disdain for things like caring for my body and taking time for myself have brought me to this place: humbled enough to admit that I’m aching for a little self-care. 

This is a fumbling and ranting way to write about this. It has, I realize, all the rough edges of real time, something I’m just finding the language for. But it’s where I am, and I want to invite you into it. 

In the next couple posts, I’ll write more about some new disciplines I’m undertaking, the incredibly important conversations that have helped me along this path, some practical steps I’m learning, and the trickiest part of all: how I just finished writing a book that I really, really love, and I want to do everything I can to share it with people. How do you slow way, way down and still promote a book at the same time? I don’t really know. But the funny thing is I’m not that worried…

What I do know is that my starting points for this year are prayer, rest, and self-care. 

More to come.