“I don’t like having to acknowledge my finitude.” I said to my husband just a few days ago. In the midst of busy seasons—this multi-passionate, recovering perfectionistic, people-pleaser often feels the tendency to go everywhere and be everything to everyone all at once. In short, sometimes I wish I was God, and yes that is as bad as it sounds. But I think it’s actually more common than you might realize—how many of us try to live as though we have no limits, when God lovingly wove them into all of creation? How many of us fall prey to an idolatry that looks “holy” from the outside because we are doing “good things?”
Part of the gift of Sabbath is a weekly reminder that I am not God—nor do I need to be as truly indispensable as he is—in order to be dearly loved.
But that’s a lesson that I will probably be re-learning every Sabbath for the rest of my life. And if it wasn’t for my deeply painful season of burnout in 2018, I don’t know if I ever would have learned it at all.
All my life, my insecurities have driven me to over do it. Perfectionism demanded that everything be “just so,” and people pleasing commanded me to dance like a marionette for the approval of others, no matter what I was feeling. I have lived in seasons where the praise of many voices confirmed that I was doing “all the right things,” but no one saw the tumult in my own soul where I functionally believed that I must keep doing all this “stuff” for anyone to actually value me. Saddest of all, I believed that was why God kept me around too.
As a relatively high capacity person, it took me awhile to burn out from all of this, but enough suffering in our family life finally clinched it in 2018 and we finally stepped away from ministry life for what we called a “sabbatical,” not realizing that we would never actually go back—at least, not the way we had been before.
It’s a humbling thing, burnout. Especially if you are used to being a high-capacity “do-er”. It’s possible that you are here in this corner of the internet because you have started to feel the edges of that strain, but haven’t quite fallen over the edge of it yet. Or maybe you are on the upswing, recovering from a bone-deep exhaustion that you are now hearing named as the very real experience of someone trying to be more than her finite being can hold (by God’s grace.)
There’s another phrase that gets mis-used. “By God’s grace.” When I say it here, I hope you read it as the gifts that God gives us to withstand seasons of busyness and difficultly that we have been thrust into but that are outside of our normal range of comfort. I DO NOT MEAN that because of God’s grace, you should try and do all the things no matter the season.
Before our season of sabbatical took us away from ministry life, we were walking through a deeply painful season of illness with our daughter, meanwhile, I never stopped hosting small group. Never stopped making meals for other people in the church. Never stopped trying to do and be more to others in our community. I would hope for enough time in between flare ups to clean up the house and the inevitable chaos that was left by a bored toddler (Boaz) being left to his own devices, while I tended to the chaos of illness left by a daughter who would throw up for hours and be unable to sleep for days because of the pain of her flare up.
I’m not sure what I was trying to prove. Or if I thought it was a sign of strength that I just “kept going” despite all this. But I’ll never forget, when we finally admitted that we needed to take a step back, pretty much everyone in our life looked at us like “yeah. We know.” And that surprised me. I was preparing for them all to try and talk us into staying and continuing to run ourselves ragged for the sake of “the ministry,” but Jesus had clearly given them a wisdom that I did not yet possess.
Fast forward to 2023—and our plates are piled high. We’ve got our day jobs, and our dream jobs and our side hustles. We’ve got five kids to keep in clean clothes, and dishes to wash, and playdates to arrange. We have a small church community, and we love to walk alongside others through the ups and downs of life. But even though I am still very physically exhausted (thank you twins), I am in a much healthier place of relating to myself and to others in the midst of a busy season of life. I no longer only ask what others need, but I turn my palm to my chest, and ask the Lord to show me what I need as well. I lean in to the fact that I must allow the Lord to tend to me, even as he calls me to tend to others. This is not the navel gazing “self-care” than I had demonized in my early twenties. (Click here to read my post about how I used to hate this term.)
This is what it means to rest in the deep, abiding peace that comes from knowing my own value and my own belovedness before the creator God—regardless of what I’ve done for him lately. And it is only in receiving it, that I can begin to effectively communicate to someone else about her value and belovedness. It must start with me. Can I really give rest to someone else, if I’m not receiving it for myself?
Sabbath is our saving grace for the long, long weeks so full of busyness as we work hard to make our family’s dreams come true. It serves to filter out some of the activity and noise that we would otherwise fall into all seven days of the week. It beckons us to lay down our tools for a time, so that we can remember that we can be still, and still be loved. It takes intention to cultivate, but I’ve learned the hard way that its very necessary—and beautifully I have discovered, that it is worth it.
Weariness laces every exposed edge of this season, but it’s not the same as the burnout I experienced in the past. Here, I learn weekly to lay it all down. And with that weekly practice comes rhythms of rest in my day to day that keep me grounded and remind me that I am finite—and that’s not a bad thing as I had once supposed. I am human, and not machine. I have limits, and I must set boundaries (with both myself and others.) I do not have all the time, energy, or resources in the world—but I can pour in and invest well what I do have to the very specific things that God is calling me to in each given moment, whatever that looks like.
Church life may burn us out, especially in western evangelicalism where busyness is seen as a badge of honor and power is consistently given to the ones who hustle hardest. But life in God does not burn us out—life in God is the stream in the desert. The oasis in the heat. The shade of a large tree sheltering us for a time, before we put our hands to the work again. It doesn’t mean we won’t ever be tired, but like the Israelites on their 40 year trek, God’s grace of rest and Sabbath in these seasons may just keep our shoes from wearing out on us. (Deuteronomy 8)
I may still not be sleeping at night, but daily the sun rises, and I find I have enough to keep going. Just enough sometimes. Barely enough some mornings. But enough—and rest will come sooner or later, in some form or other, if I allow myself to intend to receive it once it does.
But perhaps that is easier said than done.
Not only is Sabbath an often overlooked Spiritual Discipline, it is the only one of the Ten Commandments that Christians seem to celebrate breaking. I don’t say this to be legalistic. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that we would not celebrate someone committing murder the way we applaud “church people” for consistently ignoring the Biblical imperative to rest.
It’s not only the external factors though—as I said for myself, there are so many internal insecurities and bad motives that kept me busy when I should have been resting. For you they might be quite different, but I would like to challenge you as your first step towards learning how to Sabbath, take a look inside yourself and learn what it is that hampers you from receiving rest when it comes? What anxieties crawl beneath your skin when you stop “doing”? What fears lurk behind the closed door of your bedroom when you lay your head down at night with some things left unfinished?
Until we address the mental blocks, the bad theologies, and the toxic ways of securing the love and affection of others in our lives, we will not be able to fully receive the rest that comes with Sabbath.
Until we lay aside the false belief that if we somehow just worked hard enough we do all the things all the time, and be all the things to all the people—
Until we let go of the belief that we must perform to be loved—
Until we embrace the beautiful GIFT of our human finititude—
We will not be able to fully embrace the gift of Sabbath rest.
Though I wouldn’t wish our season of burnout on anyone, the provision of it is so clear to me now. Without that season, I would not have been able to see and overcome so many of the barriers that were in the way of my truly receiving the rest that God always longed to give me. I was too proud. Too sure I was right. Too overconfident in my own powers and abilities and strength. Burnout humbled me. It broke me. And when I had nothing left to give—God taught me to receive.
What mental/theological/physical barriers do you contend with when it comes to trying to cultivate space to rest in your life? I hope to address some of these in the posts to come, so please share if you have a moment! Let’s learn from each other.
Grace and peace to you Dear Readers—this is the House of Rest, where you can be still and still be loved.
You can be still, and still be loved.
Amen?
Amen.
Thanks for being here Dearest Readers.
Warmly,
Gracie
This one.
Oh I loved this!! After years of the doing and going and then truly pushing myself beyond measure over the last 18 months .. it hit that burnout level you described in 2018 .. I am now here in my healing and recovery if you will and it is humbling .. it has served a purpose in showing me immense clarity on where I need to spend my energy -- and learn to take rest! I find it hard to rest -- the mind wanders in anxiety and such when I do “get that time to” that I should be doing more. But looking at it from God’s perspective his gift to us to take that sabbath - bc we cannot do it all and we must lean on him and his guidance.
Also ..
Thank you for sharing this as it truly made me feel less alone in my current season