a time to heal.

When the quarantine started in the middle of March, I was just as bewildered as the rest of the nation. As I was helping my kids process canceled soccer games, birthday parties, and homeschool co-op activities, I can tell you for sure that I never expected to still be in quarantine nearly eight weeks later.

This has been an experience unlike any other, and I have the feeling that it will leave indelible marks on many.

As I mentioned several weeks ago, David and I tottered at the edge of burn-out this spring. I typically shy away from that term, because it sounds melodramatic. But if you prefer: we were exhausted. Our church lost a staff member this winter in a difficult way, which left my husband working 70-hour weeks to try and minister to our 300-hundred-plus-person church. We were sad and tired and stretched too thin, despite many people helping in any way they could. I was so emotionally depleted that I confessed to him in tears one day that I couldn’t even bear to have him talk to me about church.

I felt like such a failure, not able to be the kind of wife my husband needed.

I told David that I’ve never loved our church as much as I did right then, even in a messy season, but I’d also never been so utterly tired in ministry as I was. I said, “Babe, I’ve given everything I have to give for CPC. There’s nothing left.”

That’s a scary, helpless place to be in, as a pastor’s wife.

The thing about David is that I know if what I really needed was for him to leave full-time ministry, he’d do it in a heartbeat. I know this because he’s told me, and I believe him. But I also knew, even as I shared my heart with him, that God wasn’t releasing us from this calling. Not right now.

And so I just felt trapped. I didn’t want to leave — not really — but I’d lost my joy.

I tell you all of this to set the stage for this post, which is actually about healing. I’ve learned that before healing can ever happen, you have to be honest about hurting. If you minimize it, attempt to muscle through, or numb yourself, you’ll be its prisoner.

So even as our family was gearing up for spring, which is our busiest season as a pastor’s family — with New Members class, elder nominations and training, pre-marital counseling, and a very full Easter weekend — suddenly we found ourselves in a quiet house with everything cancelled or postponed.

The coronavirus pandemic and quarantine has turned out to be just like so many hard or inconvenient things God’s brought into my life — something I’d never have asked for, but full of gifts.

It’s taken some time to be able to see them, though.

I listen to a podcast called What Have You, and last month the hosts, sisters Becca and Rachel, challenged their listeners to use this quarantine time well, to not just spring-clean the corners of our homes, but the corners of our hearts too. That’s what I feel like God’s been doing in me these past eight weeks: spring cleaning the dark, cobwebby corners of my heart.

It’s happened in layers.

First, I needed to physically rest. I need to sleep in later, and read historical novels, watch lots of Disney Plus with my kids and take long walks as a family.

After a couple weeks of those healing activities, I found myself still restless and unhappy on the inside. I thought, “Wait, I’m getting the rest I so desperately needed, but I still seem to be struggling so much. What’s going on?”

I was only able to ask that question because I truly had margin in my life for the first time in a long time.

And more than that, I was able to sit in the uncomfortable silence until I began to see the answer.

Sure, David and I were deeply exhausted from ministry. But my weariness turned out to be more than that. It was a soul-weariness that doesn’t come from outward circumstances. It was a busy fretfulness of the mind and the heart.

When I realized that, it was like a light bulb switched in, illuminating places long swathed in shadows.

As days went on and I read my Bible and journaled all these new revelations, I began to see that many of the struggles I’ve blamed on full-time ministry actually don’t have anything to do with full-time ministry. They stem from unrest in my heart. I saw that they’re habits deeply ingrained in me, habits like performance to earn God’s favor, people-pleasing, and self-reliance. If our family decided to leave ministry, these habits would simply follow me to David’s next job and continue to make me miserable.

Moreover, I can’t blame David for my unhappiness, which I’m ashamed to confess I often did. He has a high-energy, visionary personality, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told him, “You’re wearing me out! I can’t keep up with your pace of ideas and activities.”

But when he tries to gently point out that I also have a visionary personality, and can be just as driven as he is, that he truly doesn’t put half the expectations on me that I regularly heap onto myself, I don’t want to listen. It’s much easier to blame someone or something for my problems, than to consider the fact that their root might be in me.

And yet that is just what the Lord, in His kindness, has used this long quarantine season to show me.

A few months ago I listened to a podcast series by Christian therapist, Adam Young, on spiritual warfare, and I was thunderstruck by it. I remember thinking: “This may just be the key to a whole lot that’s going on with me.” But life was so busy and I was so intent on distracting myself that I didn’t make the time to process what I heard and apply it to myself.

But now I can do it.

Adam Young talked a lot about how Satan attacks us in our mind, through accusation, shame, believing lies about ourselves and God.

And this, my friends, brings me to my point: I’ve discovered that the deepest problem of my burn-out is right here, in my mind. I’ve long been passive in the area of my thought life, allowing lies to infiltrate every part and define who I think I am.

I sit with my Bible and read the truths of God’s Word each day, but somehow they stop short of shaping my thought life. The Enemy, who prowls about like a roaring lion, seems to steal these truths away, before they ever really touch my thoughts and my heart, and to whisper lies instead.

I’ve just called it something innocuous, like “perfectionism” or “driven-ness” or “struggling to know intimacy with God” or “being an Enneagram One.”

Instead of claiming those parts of my mind with Christ’s power, I’ve given in and just kind of lived with them, with this low-grade unhappiness and defeatism. I say I have a problem with people-pleasing, and that’s true. But when I’m absolutely gut-honest with myself, it’s my own opinion of myself I fear more than anyone else’s.

I’ve lived years and years of my life berating and shaming myself as a habit, feeling unworthy and like a failure. The things I do that are wrong or maybe not wrong, just not awesome, only prove my point to myself. That’s how I end my day, laying awake in bed under the sharp prickle of anxiety, rehearsing the daily liturgy of my failures, angry at myself (at God?) that I could blow up at my kids again. That’s how I can not accept compliments from anyone, ever, how I believe what the voice in my head says about me instead of what God in His Word says about me, what David says about me.

I am my own greatest accuser.

I thought lack of contentment had to do with wanting a bigger house or more plants or cuter clothes. But it turns out that contentment has to do with me. I live in perpetual discontentment with myself and try to call it sanctification, thinking that surely this is God’s will for my life — to never settle, to be always striving to “be better.”

Well, the lesson of quarantine is what a sad lie that all is.

That’s actual the narrative of American self-sufficiency and success, not the narrative of the God of the Bible.

And not only am I being passive in my thought life, I’m actually living in sin by giving the Devil a foothold every single day. I’m losing the battle. I’m setting my mind on things of the flesh.

This was very sobering for me to discover.

And yet tremendously freeing too.

In recent months, I’ve confessed to a few close friends and mentors my inability to believe, deep in my core, that God unconditionally loves me, and I’ve asked for them to pray that I’ll learn what it feels like to be God’s cherished daughter. And I truly think the last several weeks have been an answer to that prayer.

As I use this space and the stillness of long hours at home to honestly face my real feelings, instead of denying them or trying to polish them up so I’ll feel like a good Christian, as I give them to God to shine the light of His truth on, I find my heart opening up to Him in trust. I’ve always known He is good, but I feel His goodness to me in a more personal way.

Daily, I open His Word, seeking to put on the full armor of God and resist the Devil, who accuses me, asking my Father to show me who He is, so I can know Him and worship Him.

I thought that the verse about “taking every thought captive” meant not thinking impure or unkind thoughts about people, but I’m finding that it’s so much more than that. Taking every thought captive is learning to live the way God created me to live, gazing on His beauty, and adoring Him. It heals my soul and grows me strong in the core of my being as I become less preoccupied with me, and more with Him.

When the accusations come — whether from spiritual warfare or simply from my own broken personality — I don’t need to tremble in fear that they might actually be true. Instead I can say, “Well, yes. I am a sinner. But that’s only the truth about me. The most important truth about me is my Father. He is beautiful and strong and powerful and loving, and He has credited His Son’s perfect righteousness to my account.” I’m free in Him.

Of course habits that I indulged for years and years cannot be unlearned in one quarantine period.

But even that thought doesn’t stress me out like the thought of sanctification once did. I have a lifetime to learn new habits in my mind, one day at a time. God is very present in my learning. He will never leave me or forsake me. I can even have fun while I’m learning. And that makes all the difference.

 

Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
he has struck us down, and he will bind us up…

Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth.

– Hosea 6:1,3