Let’s pretend we’ve having coffee together in a funky little shop called The Mudhouse.
Of Monsters and Men is on the stereo and you’re looking at me and saying I look tired, and I agree. I’m weary. And my spirit is grieving something fierce.
“I want to quit,” I tell you. “I’ve been fighting it this week, I just want to stop blogging.” But I have no reason for wanting to quit except for sorrow. A deep sorrow over a broken-hearted world.
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| via reckless youth on instagram |
And you’re saying you understand. You have just finished 31-days-of-something and you’re exhausted and I want to be the first to say, It’s okay to take a break. In fact, you need to. My friend Sarah Mae is doing 40 days of Sabbath from the Internet and I intend to take an extended break over Christmas.
There’s always time to be still. To know God, in the stillness. Less of us, more of him, and sometimes we think we have to produce when really, we’re slaves to no one. Christ calls us friends, and there is freedom in this. We serve God alone, and have nothing to fear. So, when we’re burning out, we need to quiet our souls (tweet this).
Here, friends, are 10 ways to find that stillness:
1. Turn off the laptop completely.
2. Cry, and laugh, a lot. Experience that ALIVE feeling again.
3. Read a novel or a memoir or the Psalms in your pajamas.
4. Take a bath with some Epsom salts and a magazine.
5. Eat some dark chocolate. And then eat some more.
6. Write a letter to someone you trust.
7. Write in your journal. Because sometimes it’s good just to ask yourself how you’re doing.
8. Hug your kids. Because they’re your greatest story.
9. Kiss your husband. Because he’s your biggest fan.
10. Pray. The kind of praying that finds you on the floor. The kind of praying that feels like home.
Don’t be afraid to rest friends, because in doing so, you give OTHERS permission to rest. And in the stillness, we know God. We hear his voice. We hear him wooing.
So, KNOW when to write, and when to stop.
And if God is calling you to write, then know you’re engaged in a spiritual battle because this is what this blog world is friends: it’s a place to speak the truth in love. It’s a place to engage, sometimes, in battle. Our words are holy tools being used to carve out the tomb, to resurrect a God the world says is dead, to point and say–LOOK, he’s alive and he’s here in our midst and do we know Him?
Do our words know him? Do our blogs know him? Do our families and our children and our husbands and our relatives know him? Does the man who delivers your mail know him? Does anything else matter?
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| via jadessong on instagram |
It’s Civil Wars on the radio now. The couches are soft in this coffee shop and I could sleep right here. I could read a thousand books, I could paint, I could play guitar, I could stop writing. But not now.
Because my spirit is telling me it’s time to rise up and fight. It’s time to dive deep into Scripture and deeper into prayer and to know the One who gave me breath. The one who gave me life, to know him so the world might too.
So I ask you, friends and bloggers, to join me. To know what you stand for. To put on your spiritual armor, to choose your words carefully, to know your Savior intimately, to engage in battle so that none will be lost.
If not to bring him glory.
(Do you know what you stand for? I love this song–please note there is an expletive)