[00:00:00] Chealsia: What do you do for work? What I do for a living is one of the first things I’m asked whenever I meet someone new. So it can be easy for me to bury my identity and value into that one simple answer. What do I bring to the table? What can I do? How am I useful?

[00:00:23] Justin McRoberts: Utility is the thing in our culture that most often steals our ability to, live beloved or live whole or live completely.

If our jobs do what our jobs are supposed to do, they support us so that we can do the work of our lives. And the work of our lives has to do with loving people.

[00:00:44] Chealsia: That was author and coach Justin McRoberts. He gives us a vision for seeing both our jobs and our service, not as ways to prove or earn our value, but ways to express love, joy, and connection.

Welcome to the Created For Podcast, an intimate space where our everyday lives intersect with God’s redemptive story. I’m your host, Chealsia Smedley.

Today I’d like to introduce you to Justin McRoberts. Justin is an author, podcast host, musician, and spiritual guide. He spent more than 20 years in ministry coaching people to live lives marked by wholeness. And today we’re talking about his most recent book, Sacred Strides: the Journey to Belovedness in Work and Rest.

I love how intimate and approachable this book is and how Justin shares personal stories that invite us to break free from the ways our culture tempts us to measure our value based on our usefulness. And instead, embrace work and rest as a way to love and be God’s beloved. So Justin, thank you so much for being here today.

[00:01:55] Justin McRoberts: My pleasure. That was a great intro.

[00:01:57] Chealsia: Oh, thank you.

Yeah. I’m excited to talk to you about work and rest and usefulness and being beloved.

[00:01:58] Justin McRoberts: Amen.

[00:02:06] Chealsia: Um, and so maybe you could start by sharing a little bit about Sacred Strides and why you decided to write a book about this.

[00:02:13] Justin McRoberts: Oof. Um, so that, that question has the layers to it. So I have been, in conversations with, people about kind of work rest rhythms predominantly about Sabbath keeping and rest as it relates to work for like, like two decades.

And so these are, these are stories and reflections that I’ve been in for a long time and how, how my art professionally tends to work is I tend to… It’s not even a tendency, it’s just a practice. If I’m gonna publish something in this way, in a book, I will want to know that it actually lands squarely in people’s actual lives. Books are a way for me to have captured lived experience and relationship over time which is why my books tend to be more narrative than they tend to be teaching. Teaching comes from here, like I’m thinking, I’m thinking about a thing. Stories come from like one’s whole person. I’ve been in these conversations for a long time because the relationship with the rhythm between work and rest are our primary pathways to, the, the fullness of life.

[00:03:19] Chealsia: Yeah. I think there are some really important things that you even shared in that work and rest as the pathways to how we can experience the fullness of life, right? It’s this thing that we do. All the time. But then there’s this desire or need to say, okay, if I’m not working enough or if I’m not being productive enough, I guess I’m not valuable.

And so how have you seen even that lie show up in your own life as you think about work?

[00:03:45] Justin McRoberts: Man, so many, so, so many ways. I mean, a lot of the stories in the book are my process of like coming to that knowledge. The antigospel of utility rears its ugly head in all, in all spheres of life.

So, what utility does which is to say, like you, you, you measure your worth by whether, you know, can you provide for your family?

Can you leave a legacy? Like those kinds of things like your value is in what you can buy. And, and we consider those things, this is the religious context, we, that, that’s shallow. It’s not about what you earn in life. So evil isn’t stupid. The darkness, the, resistance, whatever you wanna call it, isn’t an idiot.

And so it doesn’t show up in a religious context and try to do the same thing. What it does is it masks itself by saying you want to be useful for Jesus. Your value is in your ability to contribute to Kingdom initiatives, to the mission. And what we miss is like, that’s the same story.

You’re still measuring what you’re worth in relationship to somebody’s bottom line. This is just a church’s bottom line or some imaginary, version of Christ. Whereas in Christ your worth is rooted in your belovedness, which is to say like, you can’t earn it and God’s honest truth, you can’t really define it. You can’t measure it. It’s hard to talk about because you can only receive it, you can only open your hands and say, I need you to give this to me ’cause I don’t know how to get there. So I find that a lot in like, my desire.

I wanna do good work. I’ve always wanted to help people. I’ve always wanted to inspire. That’s been true forever and ever and ever.

[00:05:29] Chealsia: Hmm.

[00:05:30] Justin McRoberts: Um, but in the midst of that, what I have discovered and I’m learning to practice, which is why I wrote the book, is that the outpouring of my life has to come from a place in which I know my value and I know I’m cared for, and that that’s what I’m giving away.

As opposed to like, if I do this, well, if I do this good thing, well then I’ll have value. That’s how it shows up most regularly for me.

[00:05:53] Chealsia: Yeah, and I think that like in Christian spaces we’re used to, especially in Protestant spaces, we’re used to saying like, it’s not, it’s about grace. It’s not what you earn. Like you are accepted fully by God. But then we also do this thing where we say, okay, now you’re a Christian, how are you gonna serve?

Like, what are you gonna do? How are you gonna participate? And so there’s like truth to that desire to participate with what God’s doing. Um, how do you kind of handle that tension?

[00:06:21] Justin McRoberts: We never learn things wholeheartedly or completely at first. In other words, we kind of have to want lesser things in order to make our way down the pathway.

It’s not all that different than like you show up to youth group, you show up to church, you show up to, at the college ministry ’cause they’re like, like people you might be attracted to, then. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just a lesser thing that gets you in the door. So the desire for purpose, I have to, I have to chase that.

And there’s a whole conversation here about limitations. I am specifically in my immaturities, I’m not ready to chase like true deep value and meaning, and if I wait until I’m pure hearted, like I’m never moving. So I’m gonna chase lesser things.

I’m gonna chase incomplete dreams. And then once I get there, and this is everyone’s experience, we chase meaning we chase purpose. We chase, I want to feel valuable by doing and accomplishing things for Jesus. And then this happens every time we get there. We accomplish something, we achieve and we’re still not happy.

We’re still not fully satisfied. I think we have to experience that level of disappointment. It’s what Henry Nouwen calls the ministry of disappointment. I think we have to experience that disillusionment so that we live with fewer of those illusions. if I’m living in so far as I still do, I still live with these inclinations that if I do the right stuff and if I do it well enough, I’ll have a unique and wonderful value in the world and people will like me.

I will still move into spaces and do things for those lesser reasons, and Grace meets me there. As I experienced that disillusion, that actually didn’t satisfy my soul, I get to ask the question like, so what is it that I’m actually chasing?

[00:07:55] Chealsia: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:56] Justin McRoberts: Then, that tension doesn’t get resolved by, by sorting it out in my head, it actually gets resolved by me getting to the places I think I’m supposed to be, experiencing disappointment and disillusionment, disillusionment, and then doing the work of examen to move beyond that into what it is my soul is actually desiring.

[00:08:12] Chealsia: Hmm. Yeah, can you share an example of your life of how you’ve experienced that disillusionment and then learning?

[00:08:21] Justin McRoberts: I planted a church with a dear friend of mine in 1998, 1999 and boy, pastoring, if you really wanna do it well, and your heart’s in it, man, it’s so hard.

[00:08:36] Chealsia: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:37] Justin McRoberts: We got into the thing because, and again, lesser reasons that Christ has redeemed. We got in because we looked around at church and we said, we can do this better. This is like our, this is like very American. This is very white evangelicalism.

Like, look at all these people doing this. We can make a better product. That was like our whole thing. So we got in and we weren’t wrong. In some ways, we definitely, we improved on the model, as we saw it. And the thing we didn’t count on was, our own needs.And we thought that by banking on our talents and, and our work ethic and our abilities, we could build something good, true, and beautiful that would last.

[00:09:14] Chealsia: Hmm.

[00:09:15] Justin McRoberts: And so when it started to fall apart, I started to fall apart. And I found myself, this is just so how the Lord does things. I was on a trip with, an organization called Compassion International. We were visiting, church partners outside of Calcutta, India. And I’m in my head thinking about how this project, this work, that I was pouring my heart and soul into is now falling apart.

And who am I now?

[00:09:37] Chealsia: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:38] Justin McRoberts: What, what happened? I thought I built something that lasted. And as I’m walking through the lobby of the hotel, after this very long day, I step in this, sand mandala. They had hired an artist in this hotel to build these sand mandalas on the floor.

They’re beautiful pieces. If, if your audience doesn’t know sand mandalas are, it’s, it’s sand art, and the people who make sand mandalas, they’ll take tiny grains of sand, like pinch by pinch, and they’ll build these pieces and it looks like paint, but it’s actually just sand. And they’re gorgeous. And these were probably like, like four, five feet across. They’re a good size. I mean, some of the ones they build on the streets are like, they’re, you know, seven or eight monks on their knees for days building these things.

So this is in the hotel.,Well, like I said, I’m in my head. I’m totally, I’m in this myopic state and I, I just plant my big dumb foot. It’s not that big. It’s like, I’m like 10 and a half. I plant my, foot in the middle of this mandala, and as soon as I do, ’cause it’s sand, I slide out and I’ve just, and I’ve ruined this thing.

[00:10:35] Chealsia: Hmm.

[00:10:36] Justin McRoberts: And the artist is down the hall, building another one. And I look up and I start profusely apologizing, ’cause I’ve ruined, because I’ve ruined his work. And you can see this story coming together here.

I’m so sorry. I totally blew it. I wasn’t, I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t mean to blah, blah, blah, blah.He comes walking up the hallway, very calm. He kneels down and starts collecting the sand. And kind of moving stuff around the parts that were ruined. And I’m still apologizing. I’m still caught up in my failure and he says I don’t build them because they last.

I build them for the joy of it, and that undid me.

[00:11:22] Chealsia: Yeah.

[00:11:22] Justin McRoberts: I had been trying to build in ministry things that would last because I thought it was still, here’s the, here’s the gospel of utility. It was still about accomplishing something. It was still about building a better product.

And the invitation of the gospel, the invitation of the kingdom is actually this.You will never build something that lasts. Only God builds things that last. Your call is to not build things that last. Your call is to build things in joy.

So now on the other side of this disillusionment: stop chasing meaning by building things that work, by building things that last by building things that are effective and start pursuing me by building out of joy and connection.

[00:12:07] Chealsia: That really resonates with me. Even as someone who’s been in ministry for a long time and the, when you, I think a lot of times when you go into spiritual work, it is this like idea of, oh, this is gonna last into eternity and this is going to be something that gives you that sense of purpose far beyond anything that you could do in the secular world, which is a lie because the secular work is just as important as spiritual work.

Um,

[00:12:36] Justin McRoberts: Yes it is.

[00:12:37] Chealsia: And so when you talk about this joy piece though, can you talk a little bit more about that and what that could look like for someone who is maybe even like working a job where they’re like, this isn’t what I wanna be doing, you know?

[00:12:51] Justin McRoberts: Yeah. Uh, well the first thing is, you know, talk to folks. If you’re in a job that isn’t it for you. Uh, talk to folks who are working in the exact careers that they design for themselves and ask them if it feels like it every day. ‘Cause it doesn’t, like the job is always just a job.

I count myself among the lucky few who get to do this. Like, I’m, I’m doing what I designed to do. Like I set out a long time ago, I’m gonna make art, I’m gonna write books, I’m gonna podcasts, I’m gonna do these things. Um, my days, I really, I, I enjoy what I do, but my days feel like workdays.

And what I’ve learned to value in them is not just that I get to do this cool stuff, it’s actually the conversations that I have with people. It’s actually the connections I have with people, which is exactly the same kind of thing that’s available for anyone in any context. If our jobs do what our jobs are supposed to do, they support us so that we can do the work of our lives. And the work of our lives has to do with loving people, which is the thing that’s available to you regardless of what context you’re in.

So your job, even if it’s not, “it” as a job, probably is positioning you to be good and kind and available to folks who probably don’t have anyone else around them living with that same consciousness.

Musical Break

[00:14:12] Chealsia: In your book, you share about like in and through the work that you do, you are invited to love the world around you and the people in it, not because you’re useful, but because you’re loved.

What is the alternative to this usefulness?

[00:14:34] Justin McRoberts: Yeah. Uh, this is where Sabbath rest, and, the practice of rest in general is so vital. To develop a more contemplative life, not for the sake of becoming a contemplative, but for the sake of being able to be present to my own soul’s needs, desires, to be able to be present to the actual, rhythms of grace, in the world.

I’m borrowing really heavily from Thomas Merton. If I am aligned most of the time with the rhythms, the sounds, and the pace of machinery, then I, I am deafened to the rhythms of God, Um, to implement rest practices so that we can pay attention to the rhythms of God to pay attention to our own life rhythms and to practice saying no to even good things, we say yes so much because, because utility promises us so much and because everything else around us is screaming like this is the way to value and this is the way to happiness, to learn to say no, there’s this great, um, analogy. I wish, this is funny, I’m about to give a great analogy. That’s, it’s, it’s a great story. Uh, a guy named David Brooks, author, who used to write for The New York Times quite a bit. He writes about, um, how baseball has the brain hacked. Do you know the story?

He, he, he, late nineties, mid-nineties. He shows up at a Major league baseball game. And he gets it a little bit early and there’s professional athletes on the field practicing. And one of the persons on the field is a guy named Jeff Kent and Jeff Kent at the time of the story. He is 38 years old, which is pretty old for baseball, and he’s been playing baseball for years and years and years.

He’s still playing, I think third base for the Dodgers. And Kent, was even at the time, like one of the best defensive infielders in in all of baseball.

It strikes Brooks a little sideways. He’s like, why? Why is someone at 38 years of age running these drills. ’cause he’s out there picking up ground balls and throwing ’em in the first base.

Like it’s a drill that he would, that, that, kids are running that day and that, Jeff Kent would’ve run almost every day since he was six. So for 32 years he’s about to play a baseball game and get paid millions of dollars to do it. He’s one of the best on the planet. Like why are you practicing?

And he says this, he says, because when a baseball comes off a bat in a major league ball game, it’s going anywhere between like 85 and 125 miles an hour. And when it does, you don’t have time to think about what you’re supposed to do. Your body just has to react and respond.

[00:17:06] Chealsia: Yeah.

[00:17:08] Justin McRoberts: To develop practices of rest, earlier in life, or, or when we don’t feel like we need it, preps us when we actually do. So as a, as a teen, as a college age person, as a person in young adulthood, when I’ve got all the energy in the world, to learn to actually say no to good things, so that in adulthood when life comes screaming at you, before you are exhausted, you know how to say no to things that are demanding your time.

This is what spiritual discipline does. It forges us into the kind of people we want to be, so that when it’s time to actually be that person, we are that person. there isn’t a philosophy.There’s quite literally only the practice.

[00:17:52] Chealsia: A practice of rest, a practice of prioritizing that rhythm of saying, I’m not gonna be able to do everything. I know my limits.

[00:18:01] Justin McRoberts: And actualize that early when you don’t, when you don’t feel like you need it, because at some point you will, and if you haven’t practiced it, you won’t be able to do it when it’s time.

[00:18:09] Chealsia: Yeah. So we’ve talked about rest. We’ve talked about working from a place of joy and connection. That still stands out to me. When you talk about joy and connection, is that you talking about belovedness?

[00:18:22] Justin McRoberts: It’s a way to talk about belovedness. Yeah. So like I said, belovedness is, the way I talk about, you know, what Parker Palmer would call our relentless desire to be fully alive. Belovedness is our identity and our wholeness as it’s offered to us and given to us by God in Christ.

Um, it’s a practice in lived reality that kind of escapes really great definition.

It’s a thing I, I come to know in the depths of myself. It is this mysterious connection I have between myself and God, and then between myself and myself, like I know myself differently, and it’s hard to explain.

It’s like it really is like this sort of like lifelong practice of that moment we chase in romance, where we’re just like, I can’t even tell, I don’t even, I don’t even know what it is. I just like, she just makes me feel like. Uh, like, that’s like a sliver of what it feels like, to know that I’m held together, entirely, and that when I give the best of my work, it doesn’t matter what it, accomplishes, it matters that it was an outpouring of who I am and that that’s not an expression of ego. That’s an expression of me giving back the best of who I am, which was forged and formed by this loving person. Belovedness really does tend to, uh, escape, cognitive definition. It is a lived, embodied, and practiced experience.

[00:19:40] Chealsia: So how do we start practicing belovedness in our everyday life?

[00:19:45] Justin McRoberts: Amen. Uh, there’s this book. There’s this book called Sacred Strides. It’s a really good starting point. Um, my favorite thing to prescribe for folks these days, is again, the practice of rest, but in the practice of rest, what Frederick Buechner calls listening to your life, what Parker Palmer calls listening to your life. Paying attention to her own heart, souls and minds.

So here’s, maybe a touch of, 40,000 foot philosophy. I think we don’t trust our own souls very much. If there has been a dominant pitfall in religious teaching among evangelicals and among mainline Christians, it has been to forge a kind of mistrust for our own souls and our own souls’ desires.

We don’t really trust ourselves, and I get that. Like if you’re a 16-year-old moron, I was a 16-year-old moron. Uh, and there are certain ways I shouldn’t trust myself, but I should learn to, I should learn the difference between, not right and wrong desires, but between good and bad desires.

And and like, what is it that I’m really wanting? Instead of just saying, it’s all like, if you want it, then it must be bad. Or if you, or if you want it and it’s good for you, you’re gonna do it poorly. Um, the, so the sin narrative, I, I’m not anti-sin. I am, I’m a big believer in sin.

It’s one of the theological claims that you could just look around and be like, see,um. But I don’t buy the notion that I should just then ignore my soul and my soul’s desires. What I think I should do, what I try to coach people towards is this, pay attention to your own soul.

So how do we practice belovedness? How do we practice living into belovedness? Your heart, soul, mind, body, the entirety of who you are is, and this is what we say, and we proclaim. We are designed to live in union with Christ.

[00:21:24] Chealsia: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:25] Justin McRoberts: If that’s the truth, then it’s gonna work like hunger in the same way that my body is designed to work on the fuel of food.

[00:21:31] Chealsia: Yeah.

[00:21:33] Justin McRoberts: So I should learn in my soul to pay attention. Like when you are living your life and you come to the end of a week, making some space to stop, look back over the weeks is again, the practice of examen. Look back over the week and say like, okay, where was I fully alive?

Like, where did I feel connected to myself, to the people around me, and to Christ? Where, where was that actually happening and where was that not happening? Where did I, where did I feel that sense of desolation? So that I could not learn to live rightly, but so that I could learn to identify my own soul’s desires.

‘Cause your heart wants to live in a posture of lovingness. Your body wants to live in health. Your brain wants to live in a posture of confidence and stimulation.

The world around you isn’t trying to offer you those things. It’s trying to sell you very, very cheap versions of those. So pay attention when you come to the end of the week instead of just moving on to the next week.

Where were you fully alive? Where were you least alive and how do you start building a life? How do you continue to build a life that looks more like the former? We have to pay attention to our own souls. We can’t prescribe this to people. We can’t do like a sermon series or, or a book and say, this is how we fix it.

The prescription is, do you know what it feels like to be fully alive in Christ?

[00:22:42] Chealsia: Hmm.

[00:22:43] Justin McRoberts: And only you in relationship to Christ can figure that out. So create some space and start having that conversation with your own soul.

[00:22:49] Chealsia: What if you get to the end and say, I don’t know what that feels like?

[00:22:53] Justin McRoberts: Keep practicing

[00:22:55] Chealsia: Yeah.

[00:22:56] Justin McRoberts: and try some things out. Because of course you don’t. Of course you don’t know.

And that’s the beauty of practice. I’ll be 50 years old at the end of the year, right? So the answer to what it looks like for me to be fully alive now is very different than, what it was when I was 35.

[00:23:10] Chealsia: Yeah.

[00:23:11] Justin McRoberts: It’s a relationship I have with Christ with my own soul. And relationships change over time because I change over time. Again, it’s not like this, this isn’t book knowledge. This isn’t like, oh, this is what belovedness is. That’s a practice and it is an embodied practice. And I’ll, learn it this year and then it’ll change.

And then in a couple weeks, I’ll have to relearn it and say, okay, what now?

Who am I now? On the other side of this, the practice of examen, which requires space, which is the practice of rest.

[00:23:39] Chealsia: It sounds like you’re saying the opposite of usefulness is this idea of belovedness. Is that right?

[00:23:46] Justin McRoberts: Yeah. uh, I would flip that and say utility is the thing in our culture that most often steals our, ability to, live beloved or live whole or live completely.

You know, Christ’s warning in Luke is like, what, what’s, what is the value of accomplishing absolutely everything you ever wanted to accomplish and losing your soul? Um, I mean, the challenge in there is so, scandalous to the western mind.

That like your soul, which you experience in things like joy and happiness and peace.

[00:24:26] Chealsia: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:28] Justin McRoberts: So in a sense, isn’t what Christ’s saying here, that like you experiencing joy, and experiencing peace and experiencing love, nothing is worth trading that in for.

Nothing.

[00:24:44] Chealsia: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:46] Justin McRoberts: That’s a scandalous thing to say in, in the, in the context of, again, like white evangelical American pursuits of like religious goodness.

You’re, so, you’re telling me that like ending global poverty, if my goal, if my mission is to end global poverty, that if I, if like I’m not supposed to wanna trade my soul in, my joy, for the pursuits of ending global poverty, I think that’s exactly what he’s saying.

I think exactly what he is saying is I’m not trying to use you to make sure every kid on the planet can eat. I want every kid on the planet to eat for the same reason. I want you to live fully alive is ’cause that I created all of you to live in belovedness and joy. And if you sacrifice your belovedness in order to make sure someone else has what they need, you’ve canceled out the thing that I’m doing.

I’m not suggesting that people don’t work real hard at things that matter.

I think you should a hundred percent work hard and go spend yourself really well, but do so from a posture of joy and know that he’s the one that holds all things together, and you’re participating in like his work of reconciling all things.

[00:25:50] Chealsia: Okay. Yeah,

Is there a passage in scripture that you return to when you think about belovedness or that has helped this come alive for you?

[00:25:57] Justin McRoberts: Yes.

Yeah. Uh, the baptism of Christ. Jesus goes, into the water. John baptizes him, which is a, which just the setup here is that Jesus has to go seek that out. It wasn’t a thing that just happened. Jesus positioned himself in a practice, in a liturgical practice to receive this from the Father.

He’s baptized. As he comes outta the water, he hears the voice of the father saying, this is my son, whom I love, with whom I’m well pleased.

The cheap version of that is you’re mine. I love you. I’m proud of you.

He’s not healed to the best of our knowledge. He’s not healed anyone.

He hasn’t turned water into wine. He hasn’t called the disciples. He hasn’t announced his massage. He certainly hasn’t like been crucified and raised. He’s done none of the things that we identify as like the work and the life of Christ.

And there’s the father saying, this is perfect.

[00:26:56] Chealsia: Hmm.

[00:26:56] Justin McRoberts: I love you. You’re mine.

I’m really proud of you.

[00:27:00] Chealsia: Yeah.

[00:27:00] Justin McRoberts: Uh, I come back to that over and over and over again. That that’s where it starts. That like what? I don’t know what the conversation was like if there was a conversation on the other side of the resurrection between the father, the son and the spirit. I have no idea what that is.

That’s not for me to know. But we do know that before any of it started for Christ, He receives intentionally, goes to practice to intentionally receive His belovedness from the father. Ah, if that’s what starts, if that’s where it starts for Jesus, well then. That’s where it’s gotta start for me. And I’ve gotta imagine, and I, I do imagine that when Jesus took time to get away, to pray, like that’s what he was returning to.

I mean, imagine the, the freaking demands on that guy’s life all the time and his energy. And like he would get tired and he would get worn out. He would get frustrated and then he would return to the Father. And I’m just assuming that in those late night overnight sessions over and over and over again, he would hear from the Father, listen, I love you.

You’re mine and I’m proud of you. Probably not marching orders. Here’s what’s gonna happen tomorrow. And you got to, like there’s gonna be a kid with some bread. Make sure Philip finds him. Like you don’t know what’s coming tomorrow. You don’t know what the challenges are that you’re gonna face.

You don’t know what your successes and failures are gonna be like, here’s the thing you can know: I love you. I’m proud of you, you’re mine.

[00:28:24] Chealsia: I think that’s a great place to end. And I love how you often refer to God as the one who holds all things together. And so as we’re thinking about all of these different parts of our lives, like what does it look like to be held by God in our work, in our rest, in, in everything in between.

[00:28:39] Justin McRoberts: Amen

[00:28:59] Chealsia: I Justin doesn’t give us a formula for how to rest, or even how to approach work from a place of joy and connection. Instead, he tells us it’s something we practice with Jesus, that it’ll change over time as we’re being shaped and formed by His loving presence. So for me… that could look like guarding some space in my life each week to maybe ask the question of where I felt fully alive in Christ, or maybe simply resting in the sun and reminding myself that I am loved, I am His, and that He is proud of me before I do or say anything. I want to create that space now so that when I’m tempted to search for value in my work or try to live up to the demands of usefulness, I’ll be free to say no because I’m loved.

What could it look like for you to practice working and resting from a place of love?

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