There is a version of ministry leadership no one includes in the devotionals.
It lives in the Tuesday afternoons when you have given everything and wonder if there is anything left to give. It lives in the convergence of every hat you wear — mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, minister, spiritual counselor — all of them demanding something from you simultaneously, none of them asking how you are doing underneath all of it.
Twenty years in, I finally had to learn what rest really means when your job is everyone else's soul. And the way I learned it was not gentle.
The Bottom
I was sitting in my doctor's office when she looked at me and asked, “are you under extreme amounts of stress?”
The bloodwork came back. They sent me to a rheumatologist. I heard words like lupus and Sjögren's. More testing needed.
And here is the thing I did not expect to feel in that moment: relief.
Not because the diagnosis was welcome. But because there was finally an explanation for what my body had been trying to tell me for longer than I wanted to admit. I had been physically weak and exhausted in ways I kept overriding. Spiritually, I was in a fog — unwilling to quit, unable to see clearly. Paralyzed at times by the weight of everything I was carrying and too conditioned to put any of it down.
I felt like God was present, but silent. There — but somehow a step removed. Like He was watching me from a distance, waiting for me to stop performing long enough to talk to Him. So I did. I said it out loud. All of it. The anger. The exhaustion. The part I had never let myself say in twenty years of ministry:
And then the thing underneath all of it — the truest, most vulnerable thing: “I just need to know you're here. I just need to know you got me.”
And it was in that moment that I stopped performing, and something shifted within me. Not because everything got better, but because I finally cared more about being right with God than about what anyone else thought of me. For the first time in a very long time, the audience of One was the only audience that mattered.
I could finally start falling apart. Because He had me.
The Mirror
The rest that the illness forced on me brought me face to face with things I had been carefully avoiding.
I saw my people-pleasing tendencies — how deep they ran, and how much they had cost me. I saw my sentimentality, the way I held on to relationships and dynamics long past the point of being healthy because I feared what letting go would mean. I saw my lack of courage — all the things I hadn't said, all the boundaries I hadn't set, all the conversations I had swallowed out of fear of rejection.
And underneath all of it, I saw her — the woman I had become. A woman terrified of being abandoned. Who had built an entire ministry life, an entire identity, around being needed, being present, being indispensable, because somewhere deep down she believed that was the only way to make sure no one left.
The betrayal by the hands of those I had poured into, did life with, considered family, was devastating in ways I still don't have complete words for. I had given at the expense of my own family. I had absorbed unrealistic expectations and, if I'm being honest, I had participated in creating them. Coming to terms with my own role in that was one of the hardest reckonings of my life.
But I came out of it knowing this: I went back and righted my shortcomings. I set boundaries. I did it to please God, not to manage how others saw me. And if that cost me relationships, then so be it. I was no longer willing to lose myself to keep a seat at a table that was costing me everything.
The Return
It was during a recent sabbatical, with a few months of genuine stillness, that God began to rebuild me.
I want to tell you that it was peaceful from the start. It was not. Stillness, when you have been running for twenty years, is terrifying before it is healing. But it was there, in that forced quiet, that something cathartic began to happen. Something I can only describe as being reintroduced to myself.
I met my inner child in that season. And I did something I didn't know I needed to do — I apologized for abandoning her. For building a life so consumed with ministry that I left her somewhere along the way. And she forgave me.
I know how that sounds. But it was one of the most spiritually significant moments of my life.
I liken it to the fallen me going back to the garden and being reintroduced to the innocent me. The created me. The one God called good before the weight of ministry, before the betrayal, before the illness, before the years of performing faith for an audience that was never supposed to be my primary one.
The two of us — who I had been and who I was created to be — met each other in that garden. And we walked out hand in hand. Together. With God leading us forward.
That is Garden Living.
It was in that season that I found Eve in a way I never had before. I watched her try to defend God in the garden, to engage the serpent's question in good faith, relying on her own understanding rather than calling on God. Maybe she thought she could handle it. Maybe the weight of being the one who got it wrong, who got blamed — “the woman you gave me” — felt unbearably familiar. Adam threw her under the proverbial bus in the presence of God Himself. And she had to live with the weight of a narrative she didn't get to write.
I understood that in my bones.
I also understood Naomi, who walked through so much loss that she came home and said, “don't call me Naomi anymore. Call me Mara. Bitter. Because that is what this season has made me.” There is something profoundly honest about a woman who refuses to perform wholeness she doesn't yet feel. God honored her honesty. He brought her back. He wrote the rest of her story.
And Moses, who broke the tablets, who knew what it was to pour out everything for people who forgot quickly and criticized freely. Who led a stiff-necked people through the wilderness while his own brother and sister questioned him.
The Bible became more real to me in that season than it had ever been before. Not as a manual. As a mirror. Full of people who were broken, angry, betrayed, lost — and found by a God who never stopped walking into the garden looking for them.
What God Did Next
He made me whole. Not fixed. Not repaired. WHOLE. There is a difference.
I am more at peace than I have ever been in my life. I can love people now from a healthier place — not from the fear of losing them, not from the need to be needed, but from an abundance that God fills rather than one I have to manufacture.
I know what kindness actually means now — the biblical kind. Not the performance of niceness. Not the management of other people's comfort at the expense of my integrity or soul. The kind that comes from genuine love, held within genuine limits.
I no longer live in fear of judgment the way I once did. I experienced the fruitlessness of that posture — how much it cost me and how little it protected me — and I am unwilling to go back. I now live from a place of healthy boundaries and an authenticity that allows me to be unapologetically myself. Unapologetically faithful. Unapologetically human.
God reclaimed His role in my work. He reclaimed His place in my life. He reset my priorities and redefined what faithfulness looks like for me — not the version others needed from me, but the one He designed me for. He reset me in the garden.
I don't know where you are in your spiritual life as you read this. I don't know what you are carrying, or how long you have been carrying it, or how many Tuesday afternoons have passed where you gave everything and wondered if there was anything left. But I know this:
You matter. Your health matters. The woman underneath all those roles and titles and responsibilities — she matters. And God has not stopped walking into the garden looking for her.
He is not waiting for you to have it together. He is not waiting for you to stop being angry or stop being tired or stop being whatever version of yourself you have decided is too much to bring to Him. He is walking in the cool of the day, and He is calling your name.
Where are you?
Answer Him. All the way. With everything you are carrying. That is how the return begins.