Tired of Feeling Guilty for Feeling Tired

I love rest. For the obvious reasons.

But I also love rest because I’m learning, through the discomfort of not working, how to trust God in new ways. Sabbath-keeping requires me to set aside my efforts at deity long enough to rest in God’s ‘enoughness.’ So I protect my rest as the sacred thing it is: I sleep in on Saturdays, I guard my Monday Sabbath day, I walk every morning, I make time for friendship, I take my vacations, my art supplies are always close at hand.

But I’m still tired. And most of the time I’m still overwhelmed.

I’m beginning to name how guilty I feel if I’m not totally joyful and refreshed everyday. (Do I imagine it’s possible for a person to somehow maintain a perfectly balanced life?) It is certainly true that our own exhaustion can be a sign we’re not resting well, a prompt to adjust our habits. At the same time, the point of Sabbath-keeping is not to live an idyllic life through management of our time and energy levels. The point of Sabbath-keeping is to reveal to us the limitations of human efforts. So, ironically, our attempts to perfectly manage our rest can undermine the whole point.

I once heard Pete Scazzero say there’s a Jewish tradition which teaches that Sabbath-keeping actually prepares us for our death in two ways:

1. 1. It lets us practice handing over our work to God, as we’ll do at the end of this life, trusting that ultimately it’s his work anyway.
   2. It gives us practice for being in God’s presence purely for the sake of it.

While it seems morbid to practice for our own death, it’s also freeing. It releases us from that falsehood which too often underlies our choices — if I work hard enough, I can get beyond the limitations inherent in every human life.

Sure, it’s a problem if we avoid rest out of a belief that the world is on our shoulders.

But what about the times when we’d love to rest but life just doesn’t allow it?

• This is the case for parents of small children — even if they choose to take Sabbath, it rarely feels restful.
• And this is the case for bi-vocational Christian leaders — where is there time to squeeze rest between several part-time roles?
• And this is the case for anyone in a pioneering situation — when you’re starting something new there are few people to share the work and it’s your job even to find and develop those people.
• The traumatised person can’t help having panic attacks when they’re trying to rest.
• The person going through hormonal changes can’t do much about the attendant anxiety or insomnia.

The question is: Are we desperately filling our time to feel important and in control? Or are we devoting time to rest well, but finding ourselves limited in how much we can control our circumstances? Either way, we have a healing opportunity to discover the limits of our own capacities.

I’m beginning to name how guilty I feel if I’m not totally joyful and refreshed everyday. It is certainly true that our own exhaustion can be a sign we’re not resting well, a prompt to adjust our habits. (1/3) Click To Tweet

At the same time, the point of Sabbath-keeping is not to live an idyllic life through management of our time and energy levels. The point of Sabbath-keeping is to reveal to us the limitations of human efforts. (2/3) Click To Tweet

Ironically, our attempts to perfectly manage our rest can undermine the whole point. (3/3) Click To Tweet

I’ve learned a lot about rest from several prophetic voices, including Thomas Merton and Eugene Peterson, but sometimes even these Sabbath champions can set up unattainable ideals. There are a few question I’d like to ask these heroes of the faith about rest.

When I can’t sleep I listen to a James Finley audio book on the work of Thomas Merton. In the darkness, James Finley’s voice calms my buzzing brain:

“The practice is to renew in ourselves a childlike sincerity of knowing that this present moment, just the way it is, is the perfect manifestation of the mystery you seek, that nothing, absolutely nothing, is missing here. All that’s missing is our awareness of the totality of all that’s been given to us…We’re not trying to reach a goal…We’re sitting to establish ourself in a godlike compassion for our preciousness and our frailty.”

The words open such a warm, wide invitation that I’ve written them on a little card by my bed.

But these days, when I need something to lull me back to sleep at 2am, I’m feeling myself frustrated with Merton. I’m wide awake at 2am not because I’ve done something wrong but because I’ve been attentive to the challenges at hand. I’ve prayed, I’ve kept a Sabbath, I’ve got myself to bed on time. But still at 2am my mind is racing with impossible situations, conflicts to be resolved. In my current role, where deep rest is much harder to find, I have questions for my hero Merton. He had the luxury to write from his hermitage (getting away to a monastery in the hills of Kentucky was not enough solitude so he then ventured off on his own to a hermitage deeper in the woods!). Merton’s description of contemplative rest is captivating. But he didn’t have to run around all day after children. Merton didn’t have to juggle several part-time jobs or plant a church with very little help.

And another hero, Eugene Peterson, also disrupts our ambitious culture with prophetic invitation to rest. In The Contemplative Pastor, Peterson says we’re often busy because we’re vain, wanting to appear important, or we are lazy, letting other people define our work. I’ve nodded and underlined these sections, determining to be neither vain nor lazy. And sometimes, even after doing my best to prayerfully discern my use of time, I’m still just busy. Peterson cites another hero, C.S. Lewis, who apparently said that only lazy people work hard. I’m guessing C.S. Lewis had a secretary. And a wife. And a well-resourced, established organisation. Not everyone has those things.

Please don’t use my critique to question the wisdom of the words of Merton, Peterson, or Lewis when they extol the values of rest. Don’t use any of this to justify your part in the inhuman cranking out of achievements. If rest is hard for you to choose, step into it — there are life-changing spiritual realities that can only be learned in the discomfort of doing nothing. And at the same time, if you’ve decided to embrace rest, and you haven’t yet discovered perfect balance, I invite you to explore ways to even rest from the pressure to control exactly how well you rest.

At a time when the world and church are in upheaval, we’re all pioneers. Pioneering can mean tireless work to start something new, creating or redeeming human structures that one day might allow more sustainable rhythms of work. God calls us into his rest and at the same time, he promises that this work might kill some of us. God wants his children to flourish and at the same time, following the Father took Jesus to the cross. God brings good things from our sacrifices, and at the same time, sometimes it just feels like being poured out. This is the kind of work known by pioneers and apostles and missionaries and martyrs, the kind of work that becomes more common in times of major upheaval in the church. Times like these.

I’m not saying you’re more spiritual if you’re exhausted. Simply that you’re in good company if you are.

Merton’s description of contemplative rest is captivating. But he didn’t have to run around all day after children. Merton didn’t have to juggle several part-time jobs or plant a church with very little help. (1/3) Click To Tweet

C.S. Lewis apparently said that only lazy people work hard. I’m guessing C.S. Lewis had a secretary. And a wife. And a well-resourced, established organisation. Not everyone has those things. (2/3) Click To Tweet

If you’ve decided to embrace rest, and you haven’t yet discovered perfect balance, I invite you to explore ways to even rest from the pressure to control exactly how well you rest. (3/3) Click To Tweet

There have been seasons in my life when I’ve avoided rest out of my reliance on my own intellect and capacities. Not only did it lead to physical burn-out, it led to anxiety and despair and doubt. I’ve learned the hard way my own humbling need for rest. But now I find myself in a season when I just am not able to rest as much as I’d like. I’m not working on days off because I choose to but because I’ve looked for help and haven’t found it. I’ve begged God for other ways to do things, and so far the prayers are yet to be answered. It’s not sustainable long term, but my prayers are teaching me that sometimes, for a season, this mission is just really hard work. I work very purposefully to integrate as much rest as possible into these seasons, understanding that it may never be as much as I’d like. I’m learning that this is not a sign God has forgotten our human needs, but I’m feeling God’s invitation to somehow rest even as I work nonetheless.

I’m learning that whatever work I do is still God’s work in and through me. My capacity to think, to breathe, and to communicate is God’s energy in me. I may be fully engaged, working my heart out, and at the same time, I could do none of it without the life force, the creativity, and the energy that comes from God. The multitude was fed with a little boy’s lunch. But even what the boy offered — the wheat, the fish — began as gifts God made.

And so I’m going to keep fiercely protecting my weekly Sabbath, and I’m going to do my best to keep my daily promises to my family, and to my pillow, and to my journal, and to my walking shoes. And when I have limited capacity to control my schedule, to rest as often or as well as I’d like, I’m going to embrace something else I’m learning from Merton and the Benedictine tradition — their call to Ora et Labora (‘Pray and Work’). At first these words struck me as a reminder to balance carefully our prayer and our work — to take time to contemplate and time to get stuff done. But too often, I keep the two separate. Maybe as beginners we need to learn a healthy rhythm between these two disciplines. But after years of that rhythm, the lines between work and prayer begin to blur. The Benedictine tradition affirms that to work is to pray and to pray is to work. This is not just work-prayer balance but work-prayer integration. As Joan Chittester puts it, “Work is not just a job; it is our exercise in miracle making.”

When I stop to ask how I got myself into this hard work, I remember the invitation often began from times of deep contemplative rest. I sensed God’s presence and his invitation to follow and I said yes, thinking it would feel like more of this good feeling. But more often continuing in that direction which began with rest means stepping into challenge after challenge. I wondered at first if it was a cosmic bait and switch — God getting my attention with peace, and then leading me into crisis. I’m starting to see that instead, God is saying “There are some places that don’t know my presence. Will you go with me to those places, even if it means not always feeling this peace?” What a gift: to choose to have less peace so that others might have more!

I want to be like Jesus, taking time away to rest in the Father as much as I can. At the same time, it strikes me that when Jesus offered us rest, within the same breath he said, “Take my yoke upon you” (Matthew 11:28-30). He didn’t choose a metaphor of a bed, but of a burden. There is a strange kind of rest in our work, a lightness we find, knowing that even these endless to-do lists, these bottomless inboxes, these never-ending needs of our world, can’t keep us from communion with the Lord. Thank God that he’s not only with us on beaches and back porches. Thank God that he’s hard at work in all the ordinary toil of our days.

And so I return to those words of James Finley with a hope that I might one day learn: The point of rest is not to rest perfectly. The hope is to embrace our limitation — even our inability to manage the perfect work-life balance, even our limited capacity to schedule our moments well or to spend them well when we’ve scheduled them. 

Nothing is missing here but our awareness of the rest that’s already been given to us. We’re not trying to reach a goal, we’re not trying to rest correctly. We’re sitting in a godlike compassion for our preciousness and our frailty.

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Mandy Smith is the pastor of St Lucia Uniting Church in Brisbane, Australia, and author of The Vulnerable Pastor: How Human Limitations Empower Our Ministry (IVP, 2015) and Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith Beyond the Baggage of Western Culture (Brazos, 2021). Her newest book, Confessions of an Amateur Saint: The Christian Leader’s Journey from Self-Sufficiency to Reliance on God, releases in October 2024 (NavPress). Mandy has been a Leading Voice for Missio Alliance for many years, and is also a DMin cohort co-leader at Western Theological Seminary. Mandy and her husband Jamie, a New Testament professor, live with their family in a little house where the teapot is always warm. Her work can be found at TheWayIsTheWay.org.

God calls us into his rest and at the same time, he promises that this work might kill some of us. God wants his children to flourish and at the same time, following the Father took Jesus to the cross. (1/3) Click To Tweet

God brings good things from our sacrifices, and at the same time, sometimes it just feels like being poured out. This is the kind of work known by pioneers and apostles and missionaries and martyrs. (2/3) Click To Tweet

Sacrificial work becomes more common in times of major upheaval in the Church. Times like these. I’m not saying you’re more spiritual if you’re exhausted. Simply that you’re in good company if you are. (3/3) Click To Tweet