I have a friend who gets up every morning at 4:30am and writes. He’s a hip hop artist and he did it originally as an experiment to see what would happen if he wrote one song per day for a year. I asked him what he’s learned, and he said, “I’ve learned that writer’s block is a lie.” What a beautiful expression of discipline! His year and his thoughts contain many things that I’d like to revisit at a later time and corroborate a lot of what I call, “Showing Up,” which will be a separate message in this series. “Showing up,” is about working in a routine instead of waiting for inspiration to strike. Showing up believes that lightning strikes those who are best positioned most often and most reliably. Inspiration rewards the disciplined. Again, that’s a talk for a different day.

So he said, “Writer’s block is a lie.” I love that. Of course, for the first 8 years of my preaching, I would have agreed with that. I never once experienced a blank soul. For the first several years of preaching, I was getting out a full decades worth of pent up messages. Then after that, it was more like a travelogue of whatever the Lord was teaching me then or he and I were exploring together. But then one day…8 years into the work, right at the beginning of the year, something new happened. It wasn’t that I didn’t have thoughts. It wasn’t that I wasn’t learning. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in love. It wasn’t that I couldn’t preach. It was the absence of something I just sense as normal and for me essential for preaching, an eagerness to preach leading up to it and a pleasure and drive in the preaching. As more of a prophetic teacher, I experience a “burden” of the Lord for a topic and the goal of a message is to transfer “the burden” from me to the people…Perhaps another way to put it is, I’m moved by the Lord, and if it works, they’re moved by what moves me.

Not even deadline panic? In terms of preparation, the Lord communicates objective information for my task in subjective aspects of my awareness. Over the years the Lord has taught me that the place he speaks to me for what to say to others is in “my heart.” But two years ago, for about a month, when I put my heart in that place of asking, “What do I want to say to the church this weekend?” The answer was a calm, peaceful silence. Nothing. Not anger. Not depression. Not hopelessness. Just nothing. Perfectly calm pond. No need to say a thing. Nothing to prove. Nothing to earn. Not enough deadline panic to get me going. Wow!

That has happened before, that when I prayed I got nothing, but every other time that happened sharing went long or worship went long or we got snowed out or I forgot that someone else was scheduled to preach or share. And all of those times my first thought was, “Oh no! What’s wrong with me?” And then Sunday would happen and I’d realize, “Oh! Nothing’s wrong! The Lord didn’t put a sermon in my heart this week because he knew what the agenda for the service was. Nothing’s wrong with you.” And through that process happening enough times, I’ve grown to trust what my heart is telling me to talk about, even though I don’t understand why it’s right.

Illegal. So, two years ago in January when my soul was wordless, I wrote down the thoughts I was having about the silence. I wrote a sermon called it, “Learning to play the rests.” And, not catching on to what was happening until afterward, I preached it. The congregational response was warm and positive. “Great sermon, pastor. One of your best!” Uh huh. No. “No it wasn’t. It was illegal,” I said. I felt like I stole cookies from the jar. I knew, but not fully until I preached it and felt the total lack of burden from the Lord. Ew. Just human words. My intuition told me I was to take a month off immediately. So I lined up other people from the church to preach the remainder of that January. This is how we learn. We aren’t under law, so we have no need to experience condemnation. We’re just learning. We try. We fall down. We get up, circle back, clean up our mess, and try again. That’s all we ever do. And we enjoy the learning. I learned that when my soul is silent, I need to be silent, because God is doing something I don’t know about under the surface.

“What’s wrong with me?” That’s what I often thought when I didn’t instantly burst with ideas and passion. I studied writers and writers block. I questioned if this might be the end of my pastoring…but oddly, I had plenty of prayers for people. Plenty of sincerity on my praises. It was just my voice that was dormant. So I studied writers and writing. It was a deep season of reflection and meditation on the creative process for me. This whole series resulted. It was very important for me. I’m so grateful that I read secular writers who said, “This happens to everyone. Don’t freak out. You’re okay. You’re normal.” I’m so glad I didn’t get stupid charismatic advice about demons or sin or workaholic secular advice about muscle through or just take a vacation. Both of those camps would be right about some things. But neither of those camps would have been the truth for me in my situation.

I once took a Japanese maple sapling from the backyard and put it in a pot because otherwise it would have gotten mowed down. I kept in on the porch and watered it. Then during fall I thought, “You know, I ought to bring it in and protect it from the harshness of the winter. Plus, it would simply grow all year round then and it would be bigger faster!” But then I had a better idea. I should probably research that. I did. What I found was so good. I found that you can do it! You can bring a tree inside and it will skip going dormant. And it will grow year round. But after three years of doing that it will die. It will exhaust itself, because it depends on the seasons changing to set growth and rest rhythms for it that are sustainable. “Holy God, Almighty. You know what you’re doing far better than I.”

I thought something was wrong with my soul. But it’s not dead. It’s dormant. It’s not a sign something’s wrong. I’ve been doing it wrong and my soul knew something I didn’t. I need sabbath. I need work, but I also need rest, and I need the right rhythm of them in order to thrive. And so do you.

Whatever your work, the creative muscles that do it were designed to rest at regular intervals. Rest is tied to recovery so that we can work sustainably. The Lord created us and he knows how we’re designed to flow in the rhythms of life. Breathing in and out is a rhythm. Night and day are rhythms. Seasons changing annually are rhythms. The tides. You get it. And work and rest are meant to be in a rhythm. Adam and Eve worked in the day and walked with God in the evening. That’s fascinating.

Vegetable Police (Kasey Stern) talked about his exercise routine and how initially he just did pushups and situps every day and for the first while he saw really fast gains, but then he plateaued. He had been using a book called “Convict Conditioning,” which is a callisthenics method for use without weights in prison. What that book told Kasey was that he should only work one muscle group once per week, and then move on to another, and work out only about three times per week. That sounds backwards. He thought if he worked out every day, more often, he’d gain more muscle more quickly. But you workout people already know what I’m going to say. He didn’t give his body time to repair and recover and rebuild. All the energy was going to work instead of building muscle. So he pulled back, worked out only three times per week for fifteen minutes, and only each muscle group once per week, and instantly he started beating his personal bests and seeing his body change. That sounds backwards. But it isn’t. Fresh legs get more done. So do fresh minds.

Abraham Heschel said:

“If a man works with his mind, he’ll sabbath with his hands, and if a man works with his hands, he’ll sabbath with his mind.”

Notice several things about Sabbath from this quote:

It isn’t passive. Rest is not the same as passivity. Engagement of a different sort is often more restorative than inactivity.
It isn’t legalism. Sabbath isn’t lauded as a means of avoiding God’s displeasure (legalism) but because it is beneficial
It’s personalized. Heschel’s advice customizes what constitutes “sabbath” to your situation
It’s pragmatic. Thus it implies some experimentation to see what “works”

Henry Miller was a writer. I haven’t read anything he wrote so I have no idea if he’s worth recommending, but I came across him in my reflections on writer’s block. He took up painting, even though he said he has zero natural gifting at it and at school the art teacher told him to not pursue it because it would be a kindness for other people to not have his paintings inflicted on them. But he paints anyway! He does it because he loves doing it, and it brings him joy. When it comes to his writing, he has these seemingly ironclad rules for himself that I’ll probably mention later in my “Showing Up” talk. But even after all the discipline of showing up every day there are times he is blank and it isn’t working.

What more could be expected of me? Like trying to run on broken legs, the instrument of the writer is the mind, and the preacher is the heart. Imagine being a violinist and trying to play beautiful music on a broken instrument. The best plan would be to repair the instrument and then proceed. Sometimes people are giving us the best they’re currently capable of, because their playing on a broken instrument. Sometimes, they don’t even know. They’ve been pushing so hard for so many years that they have become in some sense tone deaf to their own brokenness. And if it’s true of them, then it could be true of you and me too. We might not be fully aware of our condition and we might think, “I showed up, and I tried. What more could be expected of me?” What could be expected is that we arrange our life so that we can thrive, and not just survive.

So back to Henry Miller, he said that when he can’t write, he paints. Writing is wisdom and insight, but painting is joy. They access totally different parts of his personhood. So when the reservoir is empty, he paints while the reservoir is refilling. It occupies the mind. It gives the hands something to do. You can’t make the reservoir refill. You aren’t the source. You aren’t the spring. But you get to steward the reservoir, for you ARE that reservoir. You can’t make it happen, but you CAN arrange your life to let it happen.

“As long as it takes.” Jason Upton told a story when some of us were up at a worship conference a while back, about attending a retreat where an elderly saint who was blind was the key leader of the weekend. He came in, stumbled around for five slow minutes finding his chair, finding his microphone, struggling with each little thing in such a way that they all felt like they should help, but were too shy to say anything, and what if somehow it’s insulting for me to offer, and in the end, that five minutes seemed like twenty. One odd thing was that he didn’t seem to get overly upset though it was nearly comedic, and nearly sad. Finally, the gentleman sat there, disheveled in front of his microphone, and he said one line that I’ll never forget. A line that clearly struck Jason as profound in it’s spiritual applications: “Sometimes, it takes as long as it takes.”

You can’t make the reservoir refill. But you can empty it by not listening to the feedback that is telling you that you’re out of rhythm.

What is the reservoir? Think of it as an inner tank or underground aqueduct of fresh water. Under the surface there’s a supply that replenishes our life. We each have reserves, creative reserves, emotional reserves, physical reserves, setback reserves, willpower reserves. Humans are capable of doing more than we think…for a while. But at some point, the reserves deplete, and then we crash hard and fast. Some of us aren’t living sustainably, but we haven’t figured it out yet because we’ve learned how to operate below optimum capacity and we haven’t learned that hope, joy, and peace are meant to be normal.

St. Francis said:

“Don’t change the world. Change worlds.”

One of the functions of sabbath is for us to swap worlds, stopping the lying narrative that everything depends on us, and receiving the truth that God is our faithful source and supply and all-sufficient provider who will do the heavy lifting as we learn to abide, work from rest, live from belonging, strive from approval, serve from security, and manifest a kingdom that’s already won, rather than imagine that victory depends on how perfectly we perform today. Faith sees things as already eternally done that haven’t transpired in time as of yet. During Sabbath rest we enter into the world of Jesus. When sabbath is over we’re meant to carry that perspective with us back into the work so that we work from rest, not from lack, not from anxiety, not from fear that if we don’t achieve our lives have no value.

Rest in the run. Bryan Hibbs sat down next to me and prayed for a long time with his eyes closed. Finally he said, “I just hear the Lord saying, over and over, ‘There’s rest in the run. There’s rest in the run. There’s rest in the run.’” He was pretty sure it was a metaphor, and it likely is, but what he didn’t know, is that my wife had recently said to me, “You’re not okay. And I need a better version of you, upgrade yourself. You CAN do better, and you WILL do better.” I was in deep grief and lament and depression. I thought, “I’m not blowing up with anger. I’m not acting out. I’m available. I’m expressing emotion. I’m doing the best I can? What does she expect from me?” She said, “No. Are you REALLY doing the best you can? Honestly?” I searched my heart before God and realized. “No. There’s a few more things I know I could be doing.” I started running the next day. 2 miles. No excuses. No walking. Go as slow as you want. But mind over matter, spirit over body. Let’s go. I’m still going. I’ve been going ever since. I started jogging as a way to offload stress to combat my depression and create margin for whatever circumstantial negatives come up in a given day. Running produces an endorphin release that causes me to feel more creative, more hopeful, less negative, and more constructive. Obviously, it also long term stabilizes my glucose and is overall just a healthy move from a cardiovascular perspective. But the primary reason I do it is mental and emotional health. Many times, if I have the option for a nap or a run, I’ll take the run, because I’ve found that what Jesus said to me through Bryan is true, there’s rest in the run.

Alone with God. One strange thing is that on the Myers Briggs personality profile I’m an ENFP, but I value solitude so much that I’ve often identified more with the introvert than the extrovert. Part of that is from this deep lived experience that teaches me that the place where “the work” gets done is alone with God. Obviously, I’m drawn to connect to people and I probably have some form of communication with 10-20 people per day, which isn’t that rare, I would assume, but it seems to me that the socializing is pouring out and emptying the reservoir, and the solitude is refilling it. I could be wrong. I’m energized by people as well, but going to a party is definitely something I would pay money to avoid. Small talk? I’m not great at that. Can we just skip that and get right to being real friends?

What’s my point: Jesus often got alone to be with the Father. Throughout the gospels we see that getting away from people to pray was his pattern. Some of us think of prayer as us laboring and giving birth. There’s a place for that. Some of us pray through a list. I’m sure that’s fine if that works for you. Others of us are very mystical and our goal in prayer is to experience God’s presence and hear his voice. That’s fine too.

Experimenting with sabbath…ineffectively. Years ago I used to take every Monday as a hard day off because Sunday wasn’t my sabbath, how could it be? So I tried to take Monday and use that as my sabbath. But all that happened was I would crash hard, and then anything that disturbed my crash was NOT something I had contracted for. I replaced furious adrenaline fueled activity with total passivity. What I saw when we had a young man visit us years ago was that Jesus’ “time away” wasn’t spend doing nothing, or being passive. It was spent actively going after the Lord. His solitude was active, not passive. He was talking to God, asking God questions, taking a walk with the Father, asking which disciples should he pick to be the 12, asking if his work in the hometown region was coming to a close and if it’s time to move on, hearing the affection of the Father spoken over him. “No one knows the Son but the Father.” Everything Jesus did in public was overflow of what he had talked about in secret with the Father.

Solitude, in itself, is not enough. Solitude has a purpose. Fellowship with the Father.
Fasting, in itself, is not enough. Fasting from food has a purpose, to feast on what God has said and is saying.
Rest, in itself, is not enough. Rest is about finding the right activity that is the restorative counterbalance for your soul.

Sabbath is for us. As Jesus said when his disciples picked grain and ate it on a Saturday, “The Sabbath was made for people, not the other way around.” God commanded us to rest and recover, not because he likes rules. He modelled and gave it to us as a gift, because he understands how we’re formed. Jesus didn’t get alone to be with the Father out of duty because he read Richard Foster’s wonderful book, “Celebration of Discipline,” and said, “Oh I guess to be right I gotta do that too.” No. He got with the Father for the same reason you eat food. You hunger for it, and are satisfied by it! Jesus said that he’s the vine, and we’re the branches. But you know what? The father is the sap. And that’s why Jesus lived the exact way he’s inviting us to live. Sap. Vine. Branches. Then let the fruit happen.

Recreation. What an interesting word. To create over again. Play and rest are essential for recovery so that we can work well. Focusing on recovery is as important as focusing on work. It’s interesting to think about the ways God built this natural rhythm into so many things.

–The Day: work in the day, rest at night, mercies new every morning, each morning a resurrection

–The Week: work all week, rest on sabbath, Each Sunday a mini Easter

–The Year: seasons of the year: planting, growth, harvest, dormancy

–7 Years: Let the land lie fallow so the soil can recover etc.

–50 Years: Once a generation: the Jubilee year where everything goes back to the covenantal inheritance (grace!) no matter how badly you’ve messed it up in the interim

Dealing with what comes up in the wilderness. Sometimes we don’t realize that we’re accumulating stress and pain and “stuff.” And sometimes the scariest thing is to stop producing and performing and proving. We aren’t totally aware of the extent to which we’re outrunning things we’re trying to live down. It’s like outrunning a slow wave. “Everything’s okay, as long as I can still keep producing.”

Outrunning the wave. The only sabbatical I ever had was incredibly turbulent even as it was restorative and enjoyable. It was turbulent because I stopped outrunning the wave. I sat at home after five tours of duty. And stuff came up and came out. It wasn’t all good, and it wasn’t all bad, but sooner or later if you don’t deal with what you’re carrying, it will deal with you. You’ll either own it and work through it, or it will start to own you and work through you. You’ll be mastered by what you choose not to master. Like Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, what’s out there is what you take with you, and you may end up your own worst enemy if you take the wrong things.

Work ON your life, not just IN your life. Stepping outside the work gives us perspective on both the why and the larger what of our lives. All of us spend so much time working IN our lives, but when we pull back and take time apart, we end up being able to begin processing bigger picture perspectives, we can begin to work ON our lives.

“This will be fun!” Not. I have a pastor friend who asked me where to go on Sabbatical was expecting that I would give him lots of fun vacation spots and ideas for fun times with the family. Instead I told him to prepare himself for repressed pain, anger, sadness, grief, and other unsavory feelings and beliefs to emerge. Later Carrie said, “Hey they don’t live in that state, why are they there on fb?” Hmmm. So I called him. He said, “Well, on Sabbatical my wife told me I was either stepping out of pastoring or she was leaving me.” Well, I was right, but not quite.

We each have limits, and if we’re not aware of our limits, we could be accumulating a wave that eventually catches us, destructively.

Don’t feel unspiritual because you have limits. You were created with limits. The Holy Spirit’s power isn’t meant to bring you to the place where you don’t need people and don’t need sleep and don’t need boundaries. This is actually one of the things the Holy Spirit wants to teach each of us. How to live in the rhythms God designed for us to thrive. So if you’re experiencing your limits, you’re normal. If you’ve ever felt burnt out or blank, you’re normal. If you’ve ever let stress build until it broke you, you’re normal. And if you’ve tried to follow these patterns and still experienced seasons of dormancy, you’re normal. And for every one of us, there’s something here to learn.

So what are some signs that we’re accumulating too much stress and not living in the rhythms of rest and recovery? Doctor Sherrie Bourg Carter says we show the stress buildup, the accumulating wave, in three areas:

I.) Physical and Emotional Exhaustion

II.) Cynicism

III.) Feelings of Ineffectiveness

I. ) Signs of Physical/Emotional Exhaustion…

Chronic fatigue
Insomnia
Forgetfulness/Impaired Concentration
Physical symptoms like chest pain, palpitations, headaches, achy and sore muscles all the time
Increased Illnesses
Loss of appetite
Anxiety
Depression
Anger

II.) Signs of Cynicism

Loss of enjoyment
Pessimism
Isolation
Detachment

III.) Signs of Feelings of Ineffectiveness

Apathy and Hopelessness
Irritability
Unproductive and Poor Performance

Dr Bourg Carter says “Burnout isn’t like the flu. It doesn’t go away unless you make some changes in your life.”

Years ago I had taken on WAY too much stuff. I was trying to do all the stuff my predecessor did, some of the things my heroes did, plus all the stuff I wanted to do. One of the elders came to me and told me to make a list of everything I was doing. Then he told me to put a plus by the ones that energize me and a minus by the ones that stress me out. Then he said, delegate all the minuses that you can while still being faithful in your role. That advice proved to be one of the most strategic nuggets of wisdom I ever received, which has born so much fruit for years to come.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Find the stress — and cut it out with vigilance
Find what fills your tank — and do it in a disciplined routine
Learn to say no – create healthy boundaries
Exercise
Be with positive people
Closeness to God is connected to wholeness – sozo, centering prayer, experiential worship, writing, spiritual pathways
Play – everything is spiritual, don’t listen to religious people or you’ll become like them.
Get back to your biggest WHY and your clearest WHAT, and cut the other stuff out
Don’t compare how much you can handle with anyone else. You aren’t them.

Play the rests. In music, the notes you don’t play are just as important and carefully chosen as the notes you do play. When I write without singing, I forget to leave space to breathe. It sounded great in my head, but in practice, it’s doesn’t work. Great guitar players often copy horn players, who have to stop to breathe. The horn players in turn are often copying female vocalists, who also have to use what’s called “phrasing.” Again, the notes you don’t play are as important as the ones you do.

When the conductor tells you to sit out a section in the musical piece, it is because your strategic silence serves the overall music better. Novice musicians in a band simply play at full volume the entire time. Master musicians know that listening is what makes a great musician so great. If you listen, you find a way to serve the music, instead of show off what you are capable of playing. Nobody cares what you are capable of playing. We care about the FEELING of the song. When a great band plays, they have dynamics. The volume and the parts are carefully selected to intermarry feeling and complement each other. Again, what you don’t play is as important as what you do play in creating music. Rest is as important as work in creating a life that is in sync with the music of the master conductor. Learning to listen and play the rests is critical to letting the feeling of the song God is singing come through you.

People can sometimes tell. We often think that we’re letting people down if we slow down or back out of things we had previously been involved with. But we’re often not entirely aware of how we’re actually doing as we go about the things we’re involved with. We can think we’re not blowing up and yelling at people so we must be alright. They can be thinking, “Man. They’re under so much stress and not at peace or happy at all.” But others may be able to recognize your signs of carrying too much stress more quickly than you think. This isn’t an off and on thing, this is a thing with gradations, shades. We can run, like a car in the red zone, in short bursts, but if pushing too high rpm’s becomes a pattern, we can do serious damage.

Margin for setbacks. Every job has the “sweat of the brow” that the Lord told Adam and Even would be the case. If your work is physical, the sweat may be more literal. But no job is without sweat and setbacks. The goal of living with the rhythms of work and rest is that we have margin to handle the setbacks so we work well, so we work effectively and productively, even happily, long term.

Questions

Do you sabbath with your hands or your mind?
Did you relate to the list of burnout symptoms? Which ones? Why? When?
What have you learned about rearranging your life around healthy rhythms of work and rest?
Do you know of some things you should probably offload for this season? What are they? Who are you going to tell so you don’t just keep going?
Do you feel like you can’t offload the activities that are burning you out? If so, please talk to somebody like an spiritual friend, or a counsellor.
Does your work have any version of “writer’s block?” or not? Some don’t! Praise God for that…If so, what has helped you keep creating? What has refilled your reservoir? (help me)
Who do you trust to give you reliable feedback about your stress levels or burnout quotient?

Ask the Lord

Have I learned what it means to live and work from a place of rest?
What do you want to say to me about rest?
What empties my reservoir?
What refills my reservoir?
Am I able to admit when I’m empty or does it hurt my pride to admit that I’m weak?
Are proving, performing, pleasing and producing driving me or am I able to rest in the Gospel and work from that rest?

Selected Scriptures

- Genesis 2:2-3 On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested from all his work. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation.
- Exodus 20:8-11 Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 You have six days each week for your ordinary work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. On that day no one in your household may do any work… 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.
- Mark 2:23-28 23 One Sabbath day as Jesus was walking through some grainfields, his disciples began breaking off heads of grain to eat. 24 But the Pharisees said to Jesus, “Look, why are they breaking the law by harvesting grain on the Sabbath?” 25 Jesus said to them, “Haven’t you ever read in the Scriptures what David did when he and his companions were hungry? 26 He went into the house of God (during the days when Abiathar was high priest) and broke the law by eating the sacred loaves of bread that only the priests are allowed to eat. He also gave some to his companions.” 27 Then Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.28 So the Son of Man is Lord, even over the Sabbath!”
- Luke 5:16 Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
- Romans 14:5 In the same way, some think one day is more holy than another day, while others think every day is alike. You should each be fully convinced that whichever day you choose is acceptable.