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I tried all the outside ways first—I imagined the changes I needed to make were about time management, or perhaps having the cleaners come more often. I quickly found it was not about managing time or housekeeping. It was not about to-do lists or scheduling or minutes and hours. This journey has been about love, about worth, about God, about what it means to know him and be loved by him in a way that grounds and reorders everything.
The two sins at play here, I believe, are gluttony and pride—the desire to escape and the desire to prove, respectively. I want to taste and experience absolutely everything, and I want to be perceived as wildly competent. The opposite of gluttony is sobriety, in the widest sense, which is not my strong suit. And the opposite of pride, one might say, is vulnerability—essentially, saying this is who I am … not the sparkly image, not the smoke and mirrors, not the accomplishments or achievements. This is me, with all my limitations, with all my weaknesses.
Years ago, a wise friend told me that no one ever changes until the pain level gets high enough.
And I’m so tired. I miss my friends. I sleep terribly. I snap at my kids more than I want to, and then I lay in bed at night feeling guilty about it. I spend more time asking my husband for help with the dishes or the kids than I do asking him about his life and dreams and ideas. Who wins, then? I handled it all! I showed them! But who is “them”? Who cares? Whose voice am I listening to? What am I trying to prove? What would happen, what would be lost, if I stopped, or if I slowed down to a pace that felt less like a high-speed chase all day, every day?
It looks like I’m resting, too. But I’m not. I’m ticking down an endless list, sometimes written, always mental, getting things back into their right spots, changing the laundry, wiping down the countertops. Some might say this is being a mother, or a homemaker, or this is what women have been doing for generations: tending to the home stuff while men and children go about their leisure. Maybe so, but this woman and mom is exhausted. And tired of being exhausted.
Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for resting your body and your soul. And part of being an adult is learning to meet your own needs, because when it comes down to it, with a few exceptions, no one else is going to do it for you.
It’s about trusting that the hustle will never make you feel the way you want to feel.
Who told me that keeping everything organized would deliver happiness? What a weird prescription for happiness. Why do I think managing our possessions is a meaningful way of spending my time? Why do I think clean countertops means anything at all?
You can make a drug—a way to anesthetize yourself—out of anything: working out, binge-watching TV, working, having sex, shopping, volunteering, cleaning, dieting. Any of those things can keep you from feeling pain for a while—that’s what drugs do. And, used like a drug, over time, shopping or TV or work or whatever will make you less and less able to connect to the things that matter, like your own heart and the people you love. That’s another thing drugs do: they isolate you.
As I unravel the many things that brought me to this crisis point, one is undeniably my own belief that hard work can solve anything, that pushing through is always the right thing, that rest and slowness are for weak people, not for high-capacity people like me.
believed that work would save me, make me happy, solve my problems; that if I absolutely wore myself out, happiness would be waiting for me on the other side of all that work. But it wasn’t.
It had never occurred to us, in church-building or any other part of life, that someone would intentionally keep something small, or deliberately do something slow.
If I work in such a way that I don’t have enough energy to give to my marriage, I need to take down some chairs. If I say yes to so many work things that my kids only get to see tired mommy, I need to take down some chairs.
People love it when you say yes, and they get used to it—they start to figure out who the people are who will always say yes, always come through, always make it happen.
That’s the heart of it: I don’t want to pray for anything that I may have caused, or that I could undo on my own.
He has all the time in the world to sit with me and sift through my fears and feelings and failings. That’s what prayer is. That’s what love is.
seems to me that Christians ought to be free in meaningful and radical ways to bow out of the culture’s insistence on proving and competing.
In more fundamentalist strains of the faith, there’s great value on happiness, constant kindness, selflessness above all else. These are wonderful things … that, over time, make it really hard to say things like, “I need help.” Or, “I can’t do this anymore.”
I love being a Christian, but I think sometimes I err on the side of believing in the ideals, or, on the other side, connecting with God through his creation, through the face of a child or the words of a friend or the color of the sky. The ideals and the tactile stuff of the world, yes, but the person of Christ: almost not at all. I don’t think that’s particularly indicative of my church or my tradition—I think that might just be me, and I wanted to figure out why.
As my friend asked me more about it, I think what might lie beneath that sort of middle missing layer of prayer is my own discomfort with need—my need. Jesus, when I think of him, is the face of such love, such deep connection, it makes me feel uncomfortable with my own need, with needs that I don’t want to admit to having.
“Be not afraid, my dear one. He says, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ Be still and know. Be still. Be. It starts with ‘be.’ Just be, dear one.”
I’m honest, I let words like responsible and capable govern many of my years. And what good are they? Words that I’m choosing in this season: passion, connection, meaning, love, grace, spirit.
The words tough, responsible, and should have never led me to life and wholeness.
It’s about rejecting the myth that every day is a new opportunity to prove our worth, and about the truth that our worth is inherent, given by God, not earned by our hustling.
You can’t be a poet when you start to speak in certainties.
It seems to me like most of us were taught that jealousy is bad, and so when we feel it, we should push it away from ourselves as quickly as possible, get rid of it fast. But I’m learning that envy can be an extremely useful tool to demonstrate our desires, especially the ones we haven’t yet allowed ourselves to feel, and so I committed to learning from my jealousy toward her.
What makes you say, “Must be nice”? What longing might your jealousy lead you to, if you’re brave enough to listen to it before you push it away?
This little tribe may look squeaky clean, maybe like the kind of people who have no problems, like the kind of people who’ve only ever been swimming in the shallow end. But no one only lives in the shallow end. Life upends us all, and there’s no sparkly exterior that can defend against disease and loss and cheating spouses. We carry depression and wounds and broken marriages. We carry addictions and diseases and scars and loss of faith. We carry it because that’s what love is. That’s what friendship is.
Just because you have the capacity to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Management, organization, speaking and traveling: you must ask not only what fruit they bring to the world, but what fruit they yield on the inside of your life and your heart.
your family and your very self are included in the kingdom you wish to serve, and if they are not thriving, the whole of your ministry is not thriving.
you’re tired, you’re tired, no matter what. If the life you’ve crafted for yourself is too heavy, it’s too heavy, no matter if the people on either side of you are carrying more or less. You don’t have to have a public life or a particularly busy life in order to be terribly, dangerously depleted.
