Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”
They asked him, “Then who are you? Are
you Elijah?”
He said, “I am not.”
“Are you the Prophet?”
He answered, “No.”
Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”
John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”
—John 1:19-23
1.
I woke up this morning tired.
Incredibly, tired.
I work really hard to live a slower, simpler life than the insanity of what’s considered “normal” in our time; to eliminate hurry as best I can; to walk at the pace of love, which is to say, to walk slowly.
But this last month just got away from me.
My calendar was already in the red zone, with this month’s schedule set to be the busiest of my year (you know how it goes), but then we hit an unexpected crisis with one of our kids, then a tragedy struck a member of our extended family, about whom we care deeply, then a few last-minute work demands got piled onto my already-maxed-out load, all of which conspired to totally stress me out, then I started waking up at 3am, heart beating, mind racing, then I got even more stressed, and more tired …
In other words: life happened.
As it always does.
Every age has a spirit or mood, a kind of emotional atmosphere: ours is the age of exhaustion. The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it “the burnout society,”² and it’s incredibly hard not to get sucked into the maelstrom.
But the problem isn’t just that we get sucked into hurry; it’s so much deeper. As the writer John Ortberg has said, “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”³ The problem isn’t just that I did too much, too fast; it’s that I forgot who I was, my identity. And I lost sight of who God created me to be, my calling.
Has this ever happened to you?
Have you ever found yourself lying in bed after a fitful night’s sleep, hitting the snooze button, again, eyes bleary, heart weary, thinking to yourself: How am I here? Why do I always overschedule my time? I know better than this. How is it I’m totally maxed out — again?
If so, you are not alone. I’m with you, with the added caveat that I am literally the guy who wrote the book on hurry, which adds no small dose of shame to the psychic pile.
The truth is: I am growing in this, just slower than I’d like to admit.⁴
For many years, waking up tired was normal. My default setting, followed by a twelve-hour IV drip of caffeine and herculean feats of willpower.
Then it became regular or recurring, but not constant; the stretches of healthy tired (as opposed to toxic tired) got longer and longer.
Now it’s sporadic. It still happens, but it’s no longer my baseline.
Spiritual growth is like this, right? Slow. Iterative. Three steps forward, two back; learning by failure as much as (or far more than) success. Humbling, on the best of days. “The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story. It is a series of humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound.”⁵
So: what do I do?
What Jesus did when the pressures of life hit a tipping point: disappear …