Let's Heal Together!

True humility is not the elimination of your needs. It is the honest acknowledgment that your needs, like everyone else's, are real, are valid, and ultimately belong before God. What you have been practicing is not humility. It is preemptive self-erasure, and at its root it is a protection strategy, not a spiritual virtue.

Here is what I want to say to her, and to every version of her reading this at whatever stage of the journey she is currently in: the hollowness is not evidence that your faith is broken. It is evidence that your obedience has a motive you have not examined yet. And that motive, once you are willing to look at it with honest eyes, is going to explain a significant amount of the exhaustion you have been carrying, possibly for years, possibly for decades...

What I have observed, in my own life and in the lives of women I have walked alongside for years, is that the patterns we have been examining in this series do not simply exist in our relationships. They migrate. They find their way into our theology, learn the language of our faith, dress themselves in Scripture and spiritual vocabulary, and begin presenting themselves as fruit, when what they actually are is fear with a Bible verse attached.

There is a specific kind of tired that a good night's sleep cannot touch. You know the kind I mean. You wake up after eight hours and you still feel heavy. The weekend comes, you finally rest, and by Monday morning you're already depleted again before the week has even started. You've tried the vitamins. You've cut back on caffeine. You've told yourself you just need a vacation, a slower season, one less commitment. But the tired follows you there too.