It’s here that we conclude the second season of the podcast, The Quotidian Mysteries — inspired by the reflections of Kathleen Norris and centered on living into the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.

Throughout this season we’ve explored our bodies, our bread, our time, our rhythms, our work, our waiting, our wonder, and the hidden grace woven through everyday motherhood.

We end where so much of the Christian life ultimately leads: contentment.

Together, we reflect on Paul’s remarkable words in Philippians 4 and discover that contentment is not a personality trait or a set of ideal circumstances—it is something learned.

In a culture constantly telling us that peace lies just beyond the next achievement, purchase, or season of life, Scripture offers a radically different invitation: to receive today’s portion with gratitude because Christ Himself is enough.

This episode is an invitation to lay down the restless pursuit of “more” and discover the quiet freedom of receiving the life God has already placed before you.

In this episode, we explore:

— Philippians 4 and "the secret of contentment"
— why contentment is something we learn
— the cultural myth that peace is always one step away
— Kathleen Norris on consumerism and "the tyranny of more"
— receiving the dailiness of life with gratitude
— why ordinary motherhood is fertile ground for contentment
— the miracle of laundry and God's daily mercies

Embodied Practice:

Pause for a moment. Place both feet on the floor.

Look around the room and name five gifts already present.

Not future gifts. Nor imagined gifts. But present gifts.

As you notice each one, quietly whisper:

“Thank You.”

Then finish by saying:

“For today, this is enough.”

Domestic Liturgy for Today:

As you move through your day—

cooking, cleaning, driving, walking, working, waiting—

whisper:

“For today this is enough.”

Featured Quotes from this Episode

“When it comes to the nitty-gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God’s love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it gratefully, as a reality that humbles us even as it gives us cause for praise.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

“I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers... Things exercise a certain tyranny over us.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

“As for laundry, I might characterize it as approaching the moral realm; there are days when it seems a miracle to be able to make dirty things clean.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

Listen to the episode above.

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For this month’s podcast, I speak into the second movement of the R.E.V.I.V.E. framework… Embodied Awareness, which includes themes like:

• noticing & naming

• the holy pause between stimulus & response

• wise watchfulness

Together we’re exploring what it means to become more aware—not in a self-absorbed or hypervigilant way, but in a way that draws us into deeper communion with God.

Many of us have learned to ignore our bodies, suppress our emotions, or push through exhaustion in the name of faithfulness. Others have been taught to look inward for all the answers.

Scripture offers a better way.

Read more

We continue the second season of the podcast, The Quotidian Mysteries — inspired by the reflections of Kathleen Norris and centered on living into the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.

In this episode, we explore the recovery of wonder.

Together, we reflect on the psalmist’s prayer, “Open my eyes,” and consider how motherhood can gradually train us to become practical rather than perceptive, efficient rather than attentive. While children naturally marvel at the world around them, many mothers quietly lose their capacity for wonder beneath the weight of responsibility.

Yet God’s creation continues to proclaim His goodness.

Wonder is not reserved for extraordinary moments. It is awakened when we learn to see ordinary life with fresh eyes.

This episode is an invitation to slow down, recover childlike attentiveness, and rediscover the beauty, mystery, and grace hidden within the everyday.

In this episode, we explore:

— Psalm 119:18 and the prayer, "Open my eyes"
— why mothers often lose their sense of wonder
— the invitation to recover childlike attentiveness
— Kathleen Norris' vision of "the mystics of the quotidian"
— how God's creation continually points us back to its Creator
— why wonder naturally leads to gratitude and worship

Embodied Practice:

Choose one ordinary thing near you.

A cup.
A flower.
A loaf of bread.
A child’s hand.
A beam of sunlight.

Spend one full minute simply observing it.

Not analyzing. Not evaluating. Not rushing.
Simply receive it as though you’ve never seen it before.

Then quietly ask:

“Lord, what beauty have I overlooked?”

Domestic Liturgy for Today:

As you move through your day—

cooking, cleaning, driving, walking, working, waiting—

whisper:

“Open my eyes.”

Not because wonder is absent. But because it is already there, simply waiting to be discovered.

Featured Quotes from this Episode

“...We might best confront the mystery of our daily lives by doing as Jesus suggests, and look to small children, who have a wondrous capacity for living in the present moment.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

“The true mystics of the quotidian are not those who contemplate holiness in isolation... but those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that consume the self.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

Listen to the episode above.

If this episode blessed you, consider sharing it with another.

Share

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Subscribe now

Her name was Charlotte Mason. She was an innovative British educator who lived and worked in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and her philosophy of education, which is still quietly influential in homeschooling communities around the world, was built on a conviction that has taken me some time to fully grasp:

Attention is not simply a skill. It is a habit of the soul.

For Charlotte Mason, the ability to truly see—to observe a wildflower with genuine curiosity, to listen to a piece of music without immediately reaching for distraction, to sit with a story long enough to let it do something to you—was not merely an academic advantage. It was a moral and spiritual one. The child who learns to notice the world learns something about how to be present to it. And the person who learns to be present to the world learns something essential about how to be present to God.

I have been sitting with this idea for some time now, and I keep finding it intersecting with two other threads that the Lord has woven into my life and learning:

Namely, the embodied awareness at the heart of what I believe genuine, wholehearted spiritual formation requires.

And the invitation to vigilance… the call to be watchful, alert, sober-minded… that runs throughout Biblical commands we find in Scripture.

What I want to suggest in this piece is that these three threads are not separate, distinct ideas.

Indeed, God has been revealing to me that they are the same idea, simply spoken in three different languages.

Charlotte Mason had a phrase she returned to often throughout the six-book series outlining her timeless philosophy of education and child-rearing. Something she called the art of seeing.

She did not mean just looking. Looking, in Mason’s framework, is passive: the eyes open, the light enters, the brain registers.

Seeing is something else.

Seeing is deliberate. It requires the cultivation of what Mason called a “living” attention—an active, interested, humble orientation to orient towards and behold the thing before you.

She took her students outside. Frequently. For many hours a day. And while there, she asked them to observe a single leaf, a bird, a patch of lichen on a stone. Not to label it immediately, not to produce a worksheet about it, but simply to see. To stay with it long enough that it became particular, individual, real.

Then she asked them to narrate what they had observed; Narration—a core practice in a Charlotte Mason education—is to tell back, in one’s own words, what was retained from one’s attention. This practice was not primarily about rote memorization or academic output. It was about formation. Because a person who has truly seen something, who has given it their full, unhurried attention, is changed by it in some small way. Their capacity for presence has been exercised. Their habit of noticing has been strengthened.

Mason believed that this capacity, this art of seeing, was one of the primary things a good education offered a person.

And I believe she was onto something far more theological than even she may have been able to fully recognize or articulate.

Something I learned from years of studying the nervous system is that the body sees before the cognizant mind does.

Before you even have words for what is happening, something in your body notices and reads the moment.

You recognize it in the shoulders that climb toward the ears. The breath that goes shallow and high. The jaw that quietly locks. The sudden, inexplicable desire to leave the room, or to say something sharp, or to reach for your phone in the middle of a conversation that is making you feel something you haven’t necessarily named yet.

Your body is paying attention even when your mind may not be.

This is what I mean by embodied awareness: not a practice of hyper-focusing on physical sensation as an end in itself, but the cultivation of a particular kind of honest noticing. The willingness to ask:

What is my body telling me right now?

Not as the be all, final word on what is true. But as a messenger worth listening to.

To bridge Mason’s philosophy with this understanding of the nervous system… The body is doing something very like what Mason’s students were doing with their leaves and their birds.

It is observing. It is registering particulars. It is accumulating information about the present moment that the conscious mind may not yet have caught up to.

Embodied self-awareness is not self-focus. It is self-honesty in the presence of God. And it begins, like all genuine seeing, with the willingness to actually look.

Let’s move now, word-nerds, to examine some New Testament Greek that forms a scriptural foundation for the art of seeing.

Turning to 1 Peter 5:8,

“Be sober-minded (nepho); be watchful (grēgoreō).
Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion,
seeking someone to devour.”

Originally, nēphō meant “to abstain from wine.” But by the time the New Testament was written, the word had broadened into more of a metaphor: to remain mentally, emotionally, and spiritually clear. Nēphō carries the sense of a mind unimpaired by fog, by numbing, by the dulling of perception that comes when we move through our days on autopilot.

The subsequent related word translated “watchful,” grēgoreō, similarly means to be awake and alert.

Nēphō describes an inward posture: clear, sober, settled, and anchored in Christ. Gregoreō describes the outward expression of that posture: remaining awake, attentive, and discerning to what is happening right now.

The command to biblical vigilance is, in other words, attentional.

It is deeper than moral performance or religious rule-keeping. It is about staying awake — genuinely, presently, sensorially awake — to what is actually happening in and around you. Alert to the movements of the Spirit. Alert to the invitations of grace. Alert to the strategies of the enemy. Alert to the state of your own soul, your own body, your own patterns of thought and feeling and reaction.

And the order matters here: First, become internally steady. Then, watch well.

Why this order?

Because if you are inwardly unsettled or unanchored from God’s presence, your watchfulness can warp itself into suspicion, anxiety, hypervigilance.

But if you are operating from nēphō, watchfulness becomes that which God intended it to be: discernment, wisdom, peaceful attentiveness.

These ideas are central to the practice of embodied awareness found within the R.E.V.I.V.E. framework… a practice of attending to God with our whole person: mind, body, and spirit. This is the biblical alternative to both spiritual complacency and trauma-driven hypervigilance.

Nēphō and gregoreō paint a picture not of an anxious Christian scanning for danger, but of a peaceful disciple, anchored in the restfulness of God’s grace, as well as awake to God's presence, alert to what’s here and now, and secure enough in Christ to respond with wisdom (walk in the Spirit) rather than fear (gratify the flesh).

What this also means is that one of the most striking images that opposes embodied awareness, in the scriptural imagination, is not simply outright wickedness.

It is sleep.

It is the numbed, distracted, half-present drift of a life lived just below the surface of its own reality: sleepwalking through days without fully inhabiting them, moving through relationships without fully seeing the people in them, performing rhythms of faith without truly attending to the God within them.

And this is where I find Charlotte Mason’s art of seeing and the biblical call to vigilance meeting each other on the same narrow road:

Both are asking us to wake up.

Here is the, perhaps, uncomfortable implication of all of this:

The fragmentation of attention that defines modern life is not merely a productivity problem. It is a spiritual one.

A woman who has trained her attention to be more interested in an infinite scroll of curated images, rapid-fire content, and algorithmically optimized stimulation, who has spent years exercising the reflex of the quick glance rather than the sustained gaze, is a woman whose capacity for the art of seeing has been quietly, incrementally diminished.

Not destroyed, mind you. But certainly diminished.

And if attention is the organ of spiritual perception, if vigilance requires a wakeful, unfogged, genuinely present awareness, then the chronic fragmentation of our attention is not spiritually neutral. It makes us less able to notice what God is doing. Less capable to catch the body’s early signals before they become full-blown sinful reactions in the flesh. Less available to sit with a Psalm long enough for it to reach us. Less equipped to truly see the child in front of us, the particular beauty of this particular morning, the specific mercy hidden inside this unremarkable Wednesday afternoon.

Less able, in Charlotte Mason’s language, to see at all.

Please know that this is not a call to guilt or self-condemnation. I am writing this as a woman who has spent far more hours than I care to admit asleep—dazed, phone in hand, eyes fixed on a screen, attention anywhere but here.

But I want to name it plainly, because I think we have underestimated what is actually at stake.

So, with all this in mind, what does it look like to redeem your attention?

I’ll preface by saying that, like anything on this walk, it doesn’t happen perfectly, nor all at once.

But we can partner with the Spirit to be formed in this area, incrementally. And this formation occurs slowly, incrementally, in the small daily choices that either exercise or atrophy our capacity for presence.

Go outside

Mason’s prescription was deceptively simple: go outside. Stay there. Observe one thing carefully. Then describe what you saw without notes.

Be Present

The biblical prescription is not so different:

Be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10).

Set your minds on things above (Colossians 3:2).

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely — think on these things (Philippians 4:8).

These are not instructions for the effortlessly spiritual. They are wise guidance for a person whose attention requires training — whose mind, like all our minds, tends toward drift, distraction, and the relentless pull of the urgent over the important.

Notice

And the embodied awareness I speak of throughout this space is, I believe, one of the most practical entry points into this kind of training available to us.

Because we cannot attend to what we have not first noticed. We cannot bring to God what we have not first honestly seen. We cannot name what is happening in our bodies, our hearts, our homes, our motherhood — cannot repent, cannot return, cannot receive — until we have first developed the willingness to look.

Notice the sounds around you. Notice the feeling of your body. Notice the texture of the present moment.

Not as a therapeutic technique, but as an act of faith. As the beginning of the kind of attentiveness that can, over time, and only by the grace of God, become the art of seeing.

This month we are exploring the theme of Embodied Awareness, the second movement in the R.E.V.I.V.E. framework. If you’d like to go deeper into this teaching, I’d encourage you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. As a paying member of The Kingdom Mother Community here on Substack, you receive an exclusive monthly audio teaching podcast, an invitation to gather as a community around edifying books, and a private chat to engage with other members.

Together, we will read “Embracing the Body” by Tara Owens.

Read more

And, nearly every weekday morning, I don’t particularly feel like getting out of bed.

The room is dark. The house is quiet. My bed is warm and comfy. There is always a compelling argument for sleeping just a little longer.

“You’ve been busy.”
“You didn’t sleep well.”
“You deserve another thirty minutes.”
“You can do what you need to do tomorrow.”

Sometimes those thoughts are true. Sometimes they aren’t.

But over the years I’ve realized something.

If I waited until I felt like getting up, like spending time in early morning prayer, like exercising… I probably wouldn’t get to these things very often.

So, I get up.

Not because I’m exceptionally motivated or disciplined. Not because I enjoy every early morning. Not because I’ve learned to override my body’s need for sleep.

But because, at some point, I made a commitment.

I decided that whatever I am being called to wake up early to tend to—be it to exercise, record a podcast episode, facilitate a reading group, etc—is an act of faithful stewardship. And stewardship, I’ve discovered, often asks something of us before it gives something back.

The fruit comes later. The decision to show up comes first.

Does not the same principle apply to much of the Christian life?

We’ve spent the past month in The Kingdom Mother reflecting on rest. On grace. On relinquishing striving. On practicing the presence of God.

And, I believe every word of it. I know we desperately need to recover true rest.

AND—I also wonder if, in our eagerness to correct a culture of hustle, we’ve begun to confuse rest with comfort. Or worse, we’ve quietly begun allowing our feelings to become the primary authority over our lives.

We live in a world that constantly tells us to listen to ourselves. Honor your truth. Do what feels right. Protect your peace. Follow your heart.

There is a bit of wisdom hidden in some of those ideas. Many of us—especially women and mothers—have spent years overriding genuine exhaustion, ignoring our bodies, and believing that faithfulness meant never acknowledging our limits.

That correction has been needed. Is needed.

But every correction has the potential to become an overcorrection. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve begun treating our feelings as instructions rather than information.

The fact that I don’t feel like getting out of bed tells me something. It doesn’t necessarily tell me what to do.

The fact that I feel anxious tells me something. It doesn’t necessarily tell me what to do.

The fact that I feel uncomfortable tells me something. It doesn’t necessarily tell me what to do.

Our feelings matter.
Our bodies matter.
Our nervous systems matter.

But they are not our master.

One of the verses I’ve found myself returning to lately is Jesus’ simple instruction:

“Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” (Matthew 5:37)

Such a short, simple direction. And yet it carries enormous weight, does it not?

To let my “yes” be yes means becoming someone whose word can be trusted. It means that my commitments aren’t continually renegotiated according to the mood of the moment. It means that an expression of loving my neighbor will sometime asks me to genuinely inconvenience myself.

Not always, of course.

There are seasons when wisdom says, “Rest.” There are seasons when illness, grief, postpartum recovery, or genuine limitation require us to step back.

We are creatures, not machines. We are finite by design.

But there is also ordinary discomfort.

The discomfort of getting up before dawn.
The discomfort of apologizing first.
The discomfort of showing up when we’d rather stay home.
The discomfort of exercising when we’d rather sleep in.
The discomfort of keeping our word when it’s no longer convenient.

I’ve been thinking about how often Scripture calls us to faithfulness rather than comfort.

Jesus rested. He also walked toward the Cross.

Paul knew contentment. He also endured hardship.

The Christian life has never been about avoiding sacrifice. It has always been about offering ourselves in love.

And perhaps this is where rest finds its proper place.

Rest was never meant to be used as a way to be less faithful.
It was meant to make us freer to be entirely faithful.

When I no longer have to earn God’s approval, I am free to keep my promises without trying to prove myself. When I know I am securely loved by my Father, I can choose the inconvenience of love without secretly hoping it will make Him love me more.

Grace changes the reason I sacrifice. Not the reality that I sometimes will.

I think that’s one of the quiet fruits of secure attachment to God: It produces steadiness.

Not perfection. Not endless productivity. Not a frantic inability to say no.

Steadiness.

A woman whose “yes” means yes. A woman who doesn’t idolize comfort. A woman who also doesn’t worship productivity. A woman who has learned to discern the difference between honoring her creaturely limits and simply obeying her temporary feelings or passing preferences.

That kind of discernment requires wisdom. And wisdom cannot be reduced to a formula.

Some mornings, faithfulness will look like going back to bed because your body genuinely needs rest. Other mornings, faithfulness will look like getting out of bed because love asks you to keep the commitment you made.

The question is not, “What do I feel like doing today?”
The question is, “What does love require of me today?”

That is a very different question.

And perhaps it is the bridge between rest and the next movement of R.E.V.I.V.E.

Because next month we’ll begin exploring Embodied Awareness. We’ll talk about our bodies, our emotions, our nervous systems, and the stories we carry. We’ll learn to pay attention with compassion.

But we’ll also remember something equally important:

Awareness is not the same as obedience.

Our feelings are gifts. They are messengers. They invite us to pay attention. They help us notice what is happening within us.

But they are not our Lord.
Christ is.

And because He is, His grace has made us wonderfully free.

Free to rest.
Free to receive.
Free to say no when wisdom calls us to.
And perhaps most surprisingly of all—Free to inconvenience ourselves in love.

We continue the second season of the podcast, The Quotidian Mysteries — inspired by the reflections of Kathleen Norris and centered on living into the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.

In this episode, we explore the lost art of margin.

Not the kind of margin that magically appears when life finally slows down, but the small spaces we learn to protect in the middle of unfinished work, ordinary responsibilities, and the constant demands of motherhood.

Drawing from Jesus’ invitation in Mark 6:31 and Kathleen Norris’ reflections in The Quotidian Mysteries, we consider the possibility that what feels like “dead time” may actually be a season of hidden growth—a holy place where God is quietly at work beneath the surface.

In this episode, we explore:

— Jesus' invitation to "come away" before burnout, not after it
— why the deepest challenge of spiritual life may be learning to pay attention
— the difference between true rest and escapism
— how our culture trains us to fill every empty space
— why margin is less about having free time & more about becoming available to God
— how silence, waiting, and seemingly unproductive moments can become places of communion

Embodied Practice:

Today, choose one ordinary task. And do it without input.

No music.
No podcast.
No audiobook.
No phone.

Just the task. And your own presence.

Notice what arises.

Discomfort.
Restlessness.
Boredom.
Peace.
Curiosity.

Whatever you notice, simply notice. And quietly whisper:

“God is here too.”

Allow the space to remain unfilled.

Domestic Liturgy for Today:

Whenever you encounter a pause:

waiting for water to boil,
sitting in the school pickup line,
standing at the sink,
waiting for a page to load…

whisper:

“I do not need to fill every space.”

Let the pause become prayer. Let the margin become an invitation.

Featured Quotes from this Episode

“And it always seems that just when daily life seems most unbearable, stretching out before me like a prison sentence, when I seem most dead inside ... that what had seemed like ‘dead time’ was actually a period of gestation.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

“If they are wise, they treasure the rare moments of solitude and silence that come their way, and use them not to escape... Instead, they listen for a sign of God’s presence and they open their hearts toward prayer.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

“Actually, margin is not a spiritual necessity. But availability is.”

— Richard Swenson

Listen to the episode above.

If this episode blessed you, consider sharing it with another.

Share

To receive future episodes, devotionals, and spiritual formation resources straight to your inbox, subscribe here:

Subscribe now

Not entirely away like in a drawer in another room… Just out of reach, somewhere I’d have to get up and walk to. In its place, I keep a book or something to keep my hands busy nearby. So that in the small pockets of downtime that naturally arise — namely, during independent work time — I reach for a something truly restful instead of escaping into a screen.

It sounds like such a small adjustment. But it has not felt small.

Because what I noticed almost immediately was how often my hand wanted to reach for the phone anyway. Not because I needed it or because anything urgent was happening there... Just because some part of me, in that ordinary, repetitive, slightly tedious moment, wanted to be somewhere else.

Anywhere else, really.

For just a minute.

When I am distracted, tired, overwhelmed, discouraged, or emotionally depleted, my first instinct is not to rest.

It is often to seek relief.

And the two are not necessarily the same thing.

Relief says: I want this feeling to stop.
Rest says: I need to be restored.

Relief desires immediate comfort. Rest thirsts for renewal. And because relief is usually faster, it is often more attractive.

When we’re overwhelmed, we scroll. When we’re discouraged, we binge-watch. When we’re lonely, we consume content. When we’re stressed, we shop. When we’re weary, we disappear into our phones.

None of these things are necessarily sinful in themselves. The issue is not the activity. The issue is what we’re asking it to do for us.

We are often looking for escape when what we truly need is rest.

A few weeks ago, I recorded a podcast episode about a word the desert fathers used for exactly this confusion: acedia.

It’s an old word — often translated as sloth, easy to mistake for simple laziness. But the desert fathers were describing something deeper.

Acedia comes from a Greek root meaning “lack of care.” It isn’t primarily about doing too little. It’s a restlessness. A listlessness. An inability to remain present to God and the life we’ve actually been given.

A desire to be somewhere else. Someone else. Doing something else. Living some other life.

The desert fathers called it the noonday demon, because it doesn’t typically strike during crisis or tragedy. It strikes in the middle of ordinary faithfulness. In the repetition. In the monotony. In the sameness of folding the same laundry, making the same meals, answering the same small interruptions, day after day after day, when the sun is high and there’s no shadow left to hide in.

If that sounds familiar to anyone raising children, I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Our work is repetitive... Often hidden… Frequently interrupted. There are meals to make, dishes to wash, laundry to fold, questions to answer, messes to clean, and needs to meet.

And the temptation of acedia whispers:

Anywhere but here.
Anything but this.
If only I were in a different season.
If only my life looked different.
If only I could escape for a little while.

Because our phones offer an endless stream of novelty, distraction, and stimulation, we rarely have to sit with that temptation for very long. We can leave mentally without ever leaving physically.

But acedia is never satisfied. The more we feed it, the hungrier it becomes. Because the issue was never really our circumstances; The issue was our resistance to receive the life God has actually given us.

Escapism is acedia’s favorite disguise. And this is where I think most of our counterfeit rests actually live.

Escape helps us avoid reality. Rest helps us return to it.
Escape numbs. Rest restores.
Escape disconnects us from ourselves, others, and God. Rest reconnects us.
Escape often leaves us feeling more fragmented than before. Rest leaves us more whole.

This is why I can spend forty-five minutes scrolling and emerge feeling strangely depleted — but ten minutes sitting quietly on the porch with a cup of tea and a Psalm can leave me feeling renewed.

The first distracted me from my exhaustion. The second cared for it.

None of this means relief is evil, or that rest must always look spiritual to count. But there’s a telling difference between something that restores you and something that simply removes you, for a little while, from a present you’ve quietly decided you don’t want to be in.

Escapism promises relief and delivers distance. It doesn’t ask you to bring your tiredness to God. It asks you to outrun it.

And the trouble with outrunning anything is that it’s always there waiting for you when you stop.

Here’s the deeper, harder truth underneath acedia and its many disguises: At its root, it is a resistance to reality.

A refusal, albeit often unconscious, to consent to the life God has actually given us. Our limitations. Our vocation. Our particular body, particular children, particular four walls and unglamorous, repetitive days.

Acedia treats our limits as enemies to escape rather than gifts to receive.

But Scripture tells a very different story about limitation. Our humanity was never meant to be a problem to solve. It is the very place where God meets us.

Not in some imagined, elsewhere version of our life, but in the one we’re actually living. Right now. As we are.

The Greek word translated “give up” here — eklyo — carries the sense of becoming undone, losing heart under pressure. Scripture doesn’t call us to try harder. It calls us not to give up. Not to flee.

To stay.

When Jesus says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” He is offering something deeper than distraction.

He is offering Himself.

Not escape from our lives. His presence within them.
Not removal from responsibility. Communion in the midst of it.
Not numbness. Peace.

This kind of rest does not always feel dramatic. In fact, it is often profoundly ordinary.

A walk outdoors.
An afternoon nap.
A conversation with a friend.
A nourishing meal.
A Psalm prayed slowly.
A moment of silence before God.
A sunset.
A garden.
A deep breath.

A reminder that we are creatures, not creators. Beloved daughters, not saviors.

This rest does not pull us away from reality.

It roots us more deeply within it.

This is what the desert fathers meant when they counseled, simply: stay in the cell. Remain present. Not because the present is easy, but because it is exactly where God has placed us, and exactly where He intends to form us.

Perhaps the question this month, as we explore the theme of rest, is not:

How can I get away?

But:

How can I return?

Return to God. Return to the present moment. Return to the life I’ve been given. Return to my limits. Return to gratitude. Return to reality.

Because the opposite of acedia is not productivity.

It is presence.

And perhaps true rest is simply learning to be present to the God who is already present to us — not elsewhere, not someday, not in a different season or a better version of this life.

Here.
Now.
With Him.

If this topic resonates with you, I’d love to have you join The Kingdom Mother Community for paid Substack subscribers — a space for women moving through the R.E.V.I.V.E. framework together, gathering around good books, and walking out practical, embodied, formation-focused practices month by month.

Subscribe now

We continue the second season of the podcast, The Quotidian Mysteries — inspired by the reflections of Kathleen Norris and centered on living into the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.

In this episode, we explore the deeper story beneath busyness.

Together, we reflect on Psalm 127 and its startling warning about “the bread of anxious toil.” We consider how busyness often becomes more than a schedule problem—it becomes a way of seeking worth, security, identity, and enoughness apart from God.

We explore how modern motherhood can quietly train us toward urgency, over-functioning, and striving, and how the gospel invites us into a different way of living: not for belovedness, but from belovedness.

This episode is an invitation to lay down the burden of proving your worth and to receive again the truth that you are already loved.

In this episode, we explore:

— Psalm 127 and the "bread of anxious toil"
— busyness as a source of identity and self-worth
— the nervous system and chronic urgency
— why productivity can never satisfy our need for enoughness
— the theology of sleep and creaturely dependence
— belovedness as the foundation of faithful work
— the freedom of relinquishing what was never ours to carry

Embodied Practice:

Before your next task today, pause. Sit still for thirty seconds.

Notice your breathing. Notice your body.

Notice any urge to rush ahead or prove yourself through productivity.

And quietly whisper:

“I am already loved.”

Allow yourself a moment of being before doing. A moment of receiving before producing. A moment of belovedness before accomplishment.

Domestic Liturgy for Today:

When you find yourself hurrying...
When urgency rises...
When your worth begins to feel tied to your productivity...

Pause and whisper:

“I do not need to earn my belovedness.”

Let this become a small act of resistance against the bread of anxious toil. A return to the truth of who you are.

Featured Quotes from this Episode

“Life is what happens to you when you are busy doing something else.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

“It is as if I have taken the world’s weight on my shoulders and am too greedy, and too foolish, to surrender it to God.”

— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

“As believers, we can relish sleep as not only necessary but as an embodied response to the truth of Scripture: we are finite, weak creatures who are abundantly cared for by our strong and loving Creator.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

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It is not much time… But it is mine.

And almost every week, I spend it the same way: writing, researching, working on something for The Kingdom Mother.

I love this ministry. And I love this work. So, for me… it’s what I choose to spend my solo time doing.

But some weeks, when that pocket of time finally arrives, all I can actually muster is a nap.

I used to feel guilty about that. As if a nap were a wasted opportunity. As if the only acceptable use of free time was more output — even when every part of me was asking for exactly the opposite.

It turns out that guilt doesn’t just live in the big, obvious places. It hides in the small margins too — in a Thursday afternoon, in an hour alone, in the question of what we do when no one is asking anything of us at all.

I started noticing it even more once I recently deactivated Instagram.

(Perhaps you’ve noticed? Or wondered where my IG has disappeared to? I like to heed the nudges of God to step away from time to time. Turns out right now is one of those times.)

In the time I’ve gained in stepping away from that platform, I’ve found myself learning to knit. Returning to watercolor, a passion I hadn’t touched in years. Teaching myself to sew… slowly, badly, happily.

None of these have built my platform. None of them have produced a single piece of “content.” None of it has necessarily served others.

But what they have been have been goodness for my soul. Maybe I can admit that it has taken me an embarrassingly long time to let that be enough.

I also suspect I’m not the only one who has confused rest with laziness, and productivity with worth.

The Kingdom Mother’s Rest Menu

Rather than giving you another “plan” to follow, I’d like to offer you a menu instead.

Like any menu, you don’t need to choose everything. In fact, I’d encourage you not to.

Pick one or two practices that resonate with your current season and experiment with them this month. Or use this menu as a jumping-off point to create your own collection of rest anchor points.

Let these be small invitations to return to the God who is already holding you — not just new burdens disguised as self-care.

Because here’s the irony of writing about rest: the flesh can so easily hijack our best efforts and turn even this into another to-do list.

The practices below are not a prescription. They are not a formula. They are not another checklist of things to accomplish. They are simply a collection of ordinary ways a mother can learn to receive God’s care and return to His presence when she finds herself drifting into striving, exhaustion, or self-reliance.

These are a handful of ordinary ways we can cooperate with God's invitation to rest.

So, before I share The Kingdom Mother’s Rest Menu, I want to slow down and tell you something important…

If this topic resonates with you, I’d love to have you join The Kingdom Mother Community for paid Substack subscribers — a space for women moving through the R.E.V.I.V.E. framework together, gathering around good books, and walking out practical, formation-focused practices like this one, month by month.

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We say these things and we laugh. A little ruefully, maybe a little proudly. And the woman standing across from us nods in recognition, maybe raises her (cold) coffee cup in solidarity, and offers her own version of the same confession.

And somewhere in that exchange, without either of us meaning to, we’ve agreed on something:

Busy is good.
Busy means you matter.
Busy means you’re doing it right.

We live in a culture that has made an idol of productivity. Loudly and proudly.

With podcasts and planners and morning routines optimized to the minute. With the subtle but persistent message that your worth is directly proportional to your output.

That overflowing calendar, mama? Pipe down—it’s just a sign of a full life.
That exhaustion? Oh, don’t worry—it’s just the unavoidable cost of ambition and achieving excellence.
Thinking of slowing down? Don’t even consider it—you’ll be falling behind.

We have baptized busyness in the language of faithfulness.

“I’m doing it all for my family.”
“I’m building something that matters.”
“I’m being a good steward of my gifts.”

And… Okay, sure… perhaps we are. I do not doubt the sincerity and applaud the righteous call to excellence.

But, I want to ask an honest question. A kind of question that requires us to sit still long enough to actually answer it (are you crawling out of your skin yet?):

What if our busyness is not faithfulness at all?

What if, beneath the productivity and the striving and the relentless forward motion, there is something far more unsettling: a deep, unexamined belief that we are only valuable when we are useful?

The glorification of busy is not merely a cultural problem. It is a theological one.

Because at its root, the compulsion to produce—to always be doing, building, achieving, managing, optimizing—is a quiet declaration of self-sufficiency. It is the subtle, daily insistence that things will not be held together unless I hold them. That the outcome depends on my effort. That rest is a luxury I have not yet earned.

It is, in other words, a failure to trust God.

Not a dramatic, ”Oh, Lord… What have I done?” kind of failure. Not a full on crisis of faith. Just the persistent, habituated drift of a soul that has forgotten, again, that it is not in charge.

The flesh is very good at this drift. So is the world. So is the enemy… who has no greater trick than convincing a faithful woman that her striving is actually her sanctification.

And so we keep moving.

Even when our bodies are begging us to stop. Even when our children need our presence more than our productivity. Even when God Himself, the One who rested on the seventh day and called it holy, is extending an invitation we keep declining.

In fact, when we are depleted, run down, overwhelmed, exhausted… we do not reach for what nourishes us. We reach towards what feels recognizable and familiar and safe. Which, for the daughter of Eve, means reaching towards greater control, or urgency, or perfectionism, or endless people-pleasing.

Be honest—Does any of this land for you?

Earlier this year, I found myself thrust into a season of forced limitation through early pregnancy that I couldn’t manage my way out of.

What it cracked open in me was not what I expected. It wasn’t just physical exhaustion; It was the exposure of something I’d been quietly believing for years:

That I am most valuable when I am accomplishing something visible and useful.

But hear me mama, that is not the Gospel. That is the world’s counterfeit.

And I suspect I am not the only one who has confused the two.

God did not rest on the seventh day because He was tired.

He rested because the work was complete. Because He looked at what He had made and called it good. Because He wanted to model — from the very beginning, before sin entered the picture, before there was any reason to strive — that limitation is not a liability.

It is a gift.

The Sabbath was not an afterthought. It was not a concession to human weakness. It was woven into the fabric of creation itself: a weekly, rhythmic reminder that we are creatures, not creators. That the world does not run on our effort. That there is a God who holds what we cannot, sustains what we don’t, and works even, and especially, when we are still.

God’s Word says God grants sleep not to those who have earned it. Nor to those who have finished everything on their lists.

To those He loves.

Which is to say: to us. Always. Already.

The invitation to rest is not a reward waiting at the end of a productive life. It is a posture available to us right now… in the middle of the undone laundry and the unanswered emails and the season that refuses to slow down on its own.

But receiving it requires something the flesh resists with everything it has: Namely, relinquishing control.

I want to be careful here.

I am not interested in painting a portrait of a perfect woman — serene and unhurried, gliding through her days in linen, a candle always lit, never behind, never overwhelmed. That woman is not a vision to aspire to. She is a just a new Cottage-core idol in the age old clothing of idolatry.

The resting woman I am thinking of is not perfect.

She is in process.

She is the woman who catches herself white-knuckling another to-do list and pauses, just for a moment, to ask: Whose voice told me I had to do all of this today?

She is the woman who keeps a Sabbath imperfectly, who guards it fiercely anyway, who has decided that one day of ceasing is not laziness but liturgy.

She is the woman who asks for help when she needs it—not without discomfort, not without the old voices rising up to call her weak—but who asks anyway, because she has slowly learned that needing others is not failure. It is humanity. It is the very design God ordained.

She is the woman who has begun to locate her worth not in what she produces but in who she belongs to. Who is learning to open her hands instead of tighten her grip.

She is not a finished product.

She is a woman actively, quietly, countercurturally choosing a different way.

And in a world that worships at the altar of productivity, that choice is nothing short of rebellion.

To rest in a restless culture is a prophetic act.

It says: I am not what I produce.
It says: There is a God who holds what I cannot.
It says: My worth was settled before I did a single thing today.

It refuses the lie that busyness is next to godliness.
It resists the idol that says more is always better.
It insists — quietly, stubbornly, faithfully — that the One who made us also sustains us, and that our striving was never the point.

This is not passivity.

The resting woman is not a woman who has given up.
She is a woman who has given over.

There is an enormous difference.

Giving up is resignation: the collapse of a soul that has lost hope.

Giving over is surrender: the release of a soul that has found something more trustworthy than her own strength.

Jesus does not say: finish everything first, then come.

He does not say: earn it, optimize it, schedule it.
He says come.

Now. As you are.
Burdened and unfinished and behind and uncertain.

Come.

Like most things I share here, I am not writing this from the perfect rest of arrival.

I am writing it as a woman still being formed… still catching myself in the old patterns, still tempted to measure my days by what I accomplished rather than who I abided in.

But I am also writing it as a woman who has tasted, in small and ordinary ways, what it feels like to lay the burden down. To stop performing and start receiving. To let God be God for five minutes… and then ten… and then, slowly, for a whole morning.

And I can tell you: it is better.

Not easier. Not without resistance. But better. Truer. More alive.

So here is my honest invitation to you, wherever you are in this:

Notice where busy has become a badge.
Notice where rest feels threatening rather than restoring.
Notice what you believe about your worth when you are not producing.

And then—gently, without self-condemnation—bring what you find to the One who already knows.

He is not waiting for you to have it together. He is waiting for you to come.

We continue the second season of the podcast, The Quotidian Mysteries — inspired by the reflections of Kathleen Norris and centered on living into the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.

In this episode, we explore the rhythms that quietly shape a life.

Together, we consider how God has designed human beings for rhythm, repetition, and routine—and how the ordinary patterns of a mother’s day become powerful instruments of spiritual formation.

We reflect on the truth that our lives are not primarily shaped by extraordinary moments, but by the small acts we return to again and again.

This episode is an invitation to see the repeated tasks, recurring routines, and ordinary transitions of daily life not as interruptions to spiritual growth, but as some of God’s primary means of forming us.

In this episode, we explore:

— Deuteronomy 6:6–7 and the spirituality of ordinary rhythms
— why human beings need routine and repeated anchors
— how rhythms create nervous system safety
— the formative power of habits, rituals, and liturgies
— morning and evening rhythms as acts of remembrance and surrender
— motherhood as a life built from small repeated acts of love
— the sacredness of repetition in both worship and homemaking

Embodied Practice:

At your next transition today, pause.

Before entering a room.
Before beginning a new task.
Before getting out of the car.
Before moving on to the next thing.

Take one slow breath.
Notice your feet on the ground.
Notice your body.

And whisper:

“God is here too.”

Stay for one breath longer than feels necessary.

Let the pause become a way of returning.

Domestic Liturgy for Today:

Throughout the day, especially during transitions, whisper:

“God is here too.”

When moving from:
- work to dinner
- homeschooling to chores
- chores to rest
- activity to stillness

Pause and remember:

God is not only present in the extraordinary moments.
He is present in the ordinary rhythms that make up a life.

Listen to the episode above.

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This is an English translation of an excerpt from a recent testimony I shared from the platform of Educación Viva, a community of Spanish-speaking Charlotte-Mason homeschool mothers. To watch the original in Spanish, click through the YouTube link below.

The gospel is so beautiful because it begins exactly where all our striving ends. The message of Jesus is not try harder or fix yourself or make yourself worthy. It’s something far more disorienting than that… especially for women like me who had built their whole identity around becoming better:

“You cannot save yourself. That is why I came.”

For years I believed freedom meant becoming a better version of myself. Now I understand that true freedom begins when we stop trying to be our own savior.

Dallas Willard once said, “Grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.” That distinction matters so much to me as a mother — because motherhood requires enormous effort. So does marriage, homeschooling, faithfulness, love.

The question is never whether we work hard. The question is: What spirit is that effort flowing from?

Fear? Proving? Desperation?
Or love, peace, and abiding?

You can work very hard and still be deeply at rest in God.

That has changed everything about how I approach motherhood. I am called to be faithful. To nurture, to teach, to love. But I am not called to be anyone’s savior. Not even my children’s. That position is already occupied. And thank God it is not me.

A Word for the Homeschooling Mother

I want to speak directly to you for a moment, because I think what God has taught me through my own story has everything to do with why you’re here, doing what you do.

Homeschooling is one of the most beautiful vocations I know. But it can also become one of the heaviest burdens a mother carries—if she’s carrying it in the wrong spirit.

And I say that gently, because I have lived it.

There is a particular kind of pressure that finds homeschooling mothers. It whispers things like:

Their outcomes depend on you.
If they fall behind, that’s on you.
If they struggle, you didn’t do enough.
If they stray, you should have taught better.
You chose this — so you have to get it right.

And underneath all of that is a deeper lie, one that sounds almost noble: If I just learn enough, prepare enough, become enough… then I’ll finally feel like I’m doing this right.

We accumulate curricula the way I used to accumulate healing modalities. We research methods the way I researched nervous system regulation. We pour over books about education and child development and gentle parenting—all good things, mind you—but sometimes driven by the same quiet desperation underneath:

If I just get this right, everything will be okay.

But here’s what I’ve had to learn, slowly and sometimes painfully, as a homeschooling mother:

You are not your children’s savior.
That position is already occupied.

You are called to be faithful, not flawless. You are called to show up, not to be perfect before you show up. You are called to teach your children, and that includes letting them watch you repent, rest, and receive grace.

In fact, one of the most powerful things you can teach your children has nothing to do with any curriculum. It’s this: watching their mother trust God with what she cannot control.

When they see you lay down the weight of their perfect outcomes—when they watch you pray instead of panic, rest instead of strive, extend grace to yourself the way you extend it to them—you are teaching them something no textbook can.

You are teaching them what it looks like to abide.

Jesus didn’t say perform for me and I will love you. He said abide in me and the fruit will come. Not through striving. Not through having the perfect rhythm or the right method or the most organized home. Through remaining connected to Him.

So if you are tired today… if you woke up this morning already behind, already measuring yourself against some standard you can never quite reach, I want you to hear this:

You do not have to be enough.
He already is.

Your children do not need a perfect mother. They need a mother who knows where to take her imperfection.

And the most important thing happening in your homeschool is not the lesson you planned for today. It’s the Spirit of God working in and through a mother who has stopped trying to save herself—and started trusting the One who already has.

Today I still grow. I still repent. I still make mistakes. I have hard days as a wife and a mother… maybe more than I’d like to admit. But I no longer wake up every morning trying to save myself. I no longer believe God’s love is waiting for a better version of me. I no longer live under that incessant and unbearable demand for healing, improvement, and self-renewal.

Because Christ has already done what I could never do for myself.

The greatest miracle in my story isn’t that my circumstances became easy. It’s that in Christ, I finally found a peace that didn’t depend on my ability to fix myself. A peace that was there before I deserved it, extended by the One who had been pursuing me all along.

You do not have to save yourself.
You do not have to earn His love.
You do not have to carry the weight of becoming enough.

He already has.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t just go away with a good night of sleep or a relaxing midday nap.

Maybe you’re (more than) familiar with it.

You wake up weary. You move through your day tired. You fall into bed completely tapped out. And somewhere in the back of your mind, beneath the unfinished to-do lists and the unread messages and the mental load that never fully powers down, there is this quiet, persistent ache that whispers:

Something has to change.

Here is what I’ve noticed, both in my own life and in the lives of the women I walk with:

We may not actually have a rest problem.
What we have is more a resistance problem.

Rest is available to us. God ordained it from the very beginning: He wove it into the fabric of creation, named it good, and then extended the invitation again and again across the entire arc of Scripture.

And yet.

We stay busy. We keep striving. We add one more thing, carry one more burden, hold it all together for one more day… convinced, somewhere beneath the surface, that if we just do enough, manage enough, hold on tightly enough, everything will be okay.

The underlying problem is never a lack of invitation. It is that we have quietly, unconsciously, learned to resist the very thing our souls most desperately need.

And that resistance doesn’t live in our calendars.

It lives in our bodies, our beliefs, our identities, and the places we’ve learned — often long before we ever knew Jesus — to source our sense of worth, safety, and belonging.

The flesh draws us away from rest.
The world draws us away from rest.
The enemy draws us away from rest.

Again… the obstacle was never really the invitation; Rather, it was everything conspiring, from within and without, to keep us from receiving it.

Before we can receive rest, we have to understand what is keeping us from it.

That is what this audit is for.

The full Rest Audit is available to all paid subscribers. If this article spoke to you, I’d love to have you join us in The Kingdom Mother Substack Community…

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We continue the second season of the podcast, The Quotidian Mysteries — inspired by the reflections of Kathleen Norris and centered on living into the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.

In this episode, we reflect on time itself.

Together, we explore what Scripture teaches about seasons, rhythms, and the gift of creaturely time. We consider how modern motherhood often feels rushed, fragmented, and marked by a sense of scarcity—and how God invites us into a different relationship with time.

This episode is an invitation to stop treating time as an enemy to conquer or a resource to control, and instead receive it as a gift entrusted to us by a faithful God.

In this episode, we explore:

— Ecclesiastes 3:1 and the wisdom of seasons
— Chronos and kairos: chronological time and God's appointed timing
— why mothers often experience time scarcity
— the difference between urgency and faithfulness
— God’s pace versus productivity culture
— creaturely limits and the grace of unfinished things
— stewarding time without trying to master it

Embodied Practice:

Choose one small movement.

Perhaps:
— lifting a cup
— folding a towel
— taking a sip of water
— walking across a room

Now do it slowly and intentionally.

Notice:
— the pace
— the movement
— the sensations in your body

And quietly whisper:

“There is an abundance of grace for this moment.”

Notice any impulse to rush ahead.

And gently return.

You do not have to outrun time to be faithful within it.

Domestic Liturgy for Today:

When urgency rises…

When you feel behind…

When your chest tightens under the pressure of everything left undone…

Pause and whisper:

“There is an abundance of grace for this moment.”

Not for next week.
Not for next month.

For this moment.

Let grace return you to the present.

Listen to the episode above.

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Do you know what my first thought was?

How are you people going to survive without me?

I didn’t say it out loud. I thought it… quickly, quietly, with a particular mix of exasperation and—if I’m being completely honest—something that felt uncomfortably akin to satisfaction.

Because if everything falls apart without me, that means I am essential.

If the house only functions when I’m in it, that means I matter.

If they need me — truly, deeply, practically need me — then I am safe.

I have worth.
I have a place.
I am enough.

Upon first reflection, I told myself I was just being responsible. Capable. A good mother. A faithful steward of my home.

But underneath all of that industriousness was something far more revealing:

I didn’t trust anyone else to hold it.

Including God.

Here is what I’ve come to understand about our internal war against rest:

It isn’t laziness that keeps us from it. Often, it’s the opposite.

We resist rest because our flesh has spent years — decades, in some cases — learning exactly where to find its sense of worth, safety, and belonging. And it is very, very good at returning to those sources automatically, efficiently, and without asking our permission.

The body is a creature of habit. Neuroscience tells us that our nervous systems are wired toward predictability; Wired toward the familiar grooves of behavior that have, at some point in our history, helped us feel seen, safe, secure, and soothed.

For many of us, that groove is doing.

Checking the boxes. Managing the variables. Anticipating every need before it becomes a crisis. Being the one who holds it all together.

These patterns didn’t come from nowhere. They were learned. They were, at some point, adaptive… brilliant, even. A child who learns to be exceptionally capable, to need very little, to keep things running smoothly, to never be a burden — that child found a way to survive her environment.

But a grown woman still running that same program isn’t thriving. She’s just surviving in a bigger house.

And here’s where it gets spiritually complicated:

We can be walking with Jesus — genuinely, sincerely walking with Him — and still be running this program on autopilot. Because habits of the flesh don’t dissolve at conversion. They submit, slowly, to the ongoing work of sanctification. And in the meantime, they keep firing.

So we go to church. We open our Bibles. We pray… genuinely pray. And then we close our journals and immediately pick back up every burden God just invited us to lay down.

Not because we don’t believe Him.

Because the flesh forgot.
Again.

This is precisely why rest must become a spiritual discipline — a practiced, intentional, repeated act of will. Because left to its own devices, the flesh will always default to striving.

Let me name the thing beneath the thing.

When God invites us to rest, He is not simply offering us a nap or a break from the daily grind.

He is asking us to relinquish control. He is asking us to stop being the main character. He is asking us to let something — be it the house, the children, the outcome, the future — exist outside of our micro-management & constant grasping for control.

And for a woman whose nervous system has learned to equate control with safety, that invitation doesn’t feel like relief. It often feels like danger.

Because if I stop holding it together, who will?

If I stop anticipating every need, what gets missed?

If I put down the weight, does it mean I don’t care?

If I ask for help, does it mean I’ve failed?

These are not rational thoughts. They are somatic ones, rising from the body’s procedural memory, from years of implicit learning about what keeps us safe and what puts us at risk.

The nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a genuine threat and the discomfort of releasing control.

It only knows: this feels unfamiliar. Unfamiliar is dangerous. Hold on tighter.

And so we do.

We hold on tighter.

We do more. We ask for help from no one. We see everything that needs doing and we do it. Because the alternative, that yawning open space of not-doing, feels like freefall.

What we’re really resisting, underneath all the productivity and the capability and the I’ve-got-this, is this terrifying question:

Who am I if I’m not the one holding it all together?

This is, at its core, a question of identity.

And identity rooted in performance — however sophisticated, however sanctified it appears — is always fragile.

Because performance has a finish line that keeps moving. Because capability can always be questioned. Because the day will inevitably come when you cannot hold it together, and… then what?

The older I get, the more I recognize in myself the particular shape of Moses’ error when Yahweh calls him to liberate the Israelites.

For a chapter and a half, he asked the wrong question:

Who am I to do this?

And God, in His patient mercy, refused to answer it.

He didn’t tell Moses how capable he was. He didn’t list Moses’ qualifications or remind him of his strengths. He simply said:

I AM who I AM. I will be with you.

The answer to Moses’ insufficiency was not a better understanding of Moses.

It was a fuller revelation of God.

And so it is with us.

Our striving — our white-knuckled, well-intentioned, exhausting refusal to rest — is, at its root, a failure of vision. We have fixed our eyes on our own capacities and our own limitations rather than on the infinite, omnipotent, omnibenevolent One who is actually in control.

We are not God. We were never meant to be.

And rest is, perhaps, the most radical act of agreeing with that truth.

Rest, in the Biblical sense, is not merely the cessation of activity.

The Hebrew word menuchah — the rest God ordained from the very beginning — conveys something far richer: a settling, a belonging, an arrival. The end of wandering. The beginning of home.

This is not the rest of collapse. This is the rest of trust.

And trust, it turns out, requires something the nervous system cannot generate on its own: a reliable object. Something… Someone… who will not shift, will not fail, will not drop what you’ve handed over.

This is what makes Christian rest categorically different from anything the world offers.

Secular wellness tells us to resource our peace from within: from breath, from regulation, from the body’s own capacity to settle. And while these practices may have genuine value, they have a ceiling.

Because here’s the truth: the body is not safe. Feelings are not secure. And a peace sourced from our own interior landscape is only ever as stable as our circumstances.

Jesus is not our circumstances.

When we begin to slowly, imperfectly, repeatedly practice handing things to God — the chaos we came home to, the outcome we couldn’t control, the help we needed to ask for — something begins to shift. Not magically, but incrementally, the nervous system began to learn a new thing:

I can release this. And something more reliable than me is holding it.

That is the neural pathway of faith. And it is forged not in a single moment of surrender but in many, many small ones; Each time we choose, against every habituated instinct, to lay it down.

Let’s practice

Rest is not a feeling you wait for. It is a posture you practice.

Here are three places to start:

1. Notice where you refuse to ask for help.

Not as self-criticism — with curiosity. What does the refusal protect? What does it say about where you’re sourcing your worth? Bring that honestly to God.

Lord, I am finding my identity in being needed.
Show me what it looks like to need You instead.

2. Leave something undone, on purpose.

This is a small but profound act of defiance against the tyranny of productivity. One thing. Left undone. As a declaration that your worth is not in your output. Notice what rises in you when you do. That is information. Bring it to Jesus.

3. Practice the breath prayer of rest.

Breathe in: Jesus, You are holding this.

Breathe out: Thank you that I don’t have to.

Not once. Repeatedly. Until the body begins to believe what the mind already knows.

Rest is not the reward waiting at the end of a productive life. It is the foundation from which a faithful one is built.

You were not made to hold it all together. You were made to be held.

I’ve just launched The Kingdom Mother Community for paying subscribers. This new space includes an exclusive:

• Monthly audio teaching/podcast that follows the arc of the R.E.V.I.V.E. framework

• Monthly book club—reading guide, discussion questions, and live Zoom call

• Private community chat here on Substack

I’d love for you to become a member.

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This new “community” concept & monthly audio teaching is something I’ve been quietly praying about for a long time.

A slower space. A deeper space. A more personal space.

Less polished teaching. More honest reflection.

A place where we can sit together in the presence of God and explore what it means to live as women rooted not in performance, but in grace.

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We continue the second season of the podcast, The Quotidian Mysteries — inspired by the reflections of Kathleen Norris and centered on living into the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.

In this episode, we reflect on the prayer Jesus taught us to pray:

“Give us this day our daily bread.”
— Matthew 6:11

Together, we explore what it means to live with daily dependence upon God rather than chronic striving, grasping, scarcity, or self-sufficiency.

We consider how motherhood often pulls us into future-oriented anxiety and vigilance, and how Jesus gently returns us to this moment, today.

This episode is an invitation to receive rather than grasp, to trust rather than hoard, and to rediscover the quiet holiness of ordinary nourishment and daily provision.

In this episode, we explore:

— daily bread as a spirituality of dependence
— manna spirituality vs scarcity mentality
— the nervous system and future-oriented anxiety
— receiving instead of grasping
— creatureliness, limits, and daily need
— the holiness of ordinary nourishment
— repetitive care work as sacred participation in God’s provision

Embodied Practice:

Take one small bite or sip slowly.

Notice:

• the texture

• the taste

• the nourishment

Do not rush. Let yourself receive it consciously.

And whisper:

“Thank You for today’s provision.”

Notice any impulse to hurry, multitask, or move past the moment.

And gently return.

This is creaturely life:
receiving,
nourishment,
dependence.

And it is holy.

Domestic Liturgy for Today:

As you prepare food today—cutting vegetables, packing lunches, washing dishes, setting the table—whisper:

“Give us today what we need for today.”

Not next week.
Not forever.

Today.

Let ordinary, daily nourishment become a prayer of trust.

Listen to the episode above.

If this episode blessed you, consider sharing it with another.

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We continue venturing into the second season of the podcast, called The Quotidian Mysteries — inspired by the reflections of Kathleen Norris and centered on living into the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.

In this episode, we explore a theology of the body through the lens of motherhood, embodiment, and the Incarnation.

Together, we consider what it means that Christianity is not a disembodied faith, but one rooted in flesh, breath, touch, limits, and ordinary embodied existence.

We reflect on how many mothers quietly experience their bodies as burdens to overcome, rather than places where God desires to dwell and commune with them.

This episode is an invitation to receive your body not as an obstacle to holiness, but as part of your humanity before God.

In this episode, we explore:

— Romans 12:1 and embodied worship
— the sacredness of creaturely life
— motherhood as profoundly embodied vocation
— the difference between the body and the flesh
— the Incarnation and what it reveals about God’s view of the body
— embodied awareness as communion rather than self-fixation
— how ordinary care work becomes holy ground

Embodied Practice:

Place one hand over your heart
and one over your abdomen.

Notice:
— the warmth of your body
— the movement of your breath
— the quiet evidence of life within you

And whisper gently:

“God meets me here too.”

If discomfort or judgment rises, notice it without shame.

Your body is not interrupting your spiritual life.

Your embodied life is one of the primary places where God desires to meet you.

Domestic Liturgy for Today:

As you care for your body today —
washing your hands,
stretching your back,
eating a meal,
resting for a moment,
taking a breath —

whisper:

“Lord, receive this body in love.”

Let even bodily care become a form of prayer.

Listen to the episode above.

If this episode blessed you, consider sharing it with another.

Share

To receive future episodes, devotionals, and spiritual formation resources straight to your inbox, subscribe here:

Subscribe now