No Longer Tired

Based on John 6

The sun was brutal. After days of walking and preaching and healing, we were exhausted and stopped to rest on a mountainside. We could soon see that a large crowd was following us.

Honestly, I was having doubts about continuing with Jesus. I couldn’t deny that He was unlike any rabbi I had seen. For one thing, no other rabbi would have considered taking on the lot Jesus had chosen as His disciples. Our unlikely gang of fishermen, tax collectors, tradesmen, and misfits didn’t exactly seem like religious material.

That was part of the reason for my doubt. I’d left behind everything that was comfortable, everything familiar and that I knew how to do well. Out on the road with Jesus, it always felt like I didn’t have what I needed for the task at hand. I like to be in control. I like to have what I need. I like to be the expert. I like knowing what to expect.

My wandering thoughts were interrupted when Jesus looked at me and asked a question. I froze. He obviously was testing me. Thousands of people were heading toward us, and Jesus wanted to feed them? Is He joking? He can’t be serious.

But He was.

And He was looking at me for a response. I couldn’t breathe. I searched His eyes but found no hint of what to do. I searched the surroundings. There were no nearby markets or homes, and even if there were, we had very little money. It was impossible. I couldn’t figure out what Jesus wanted from me. The rabbi often taught us truths by asking us questions, always surprising us and shifting the way we think and live. I couldn’t begin to guess what truth He now had in mind.

“Jesus,” I said at last, “it would take nearly a year’s wages to feed these people.”

He smiled and nodded and looked around to see if anyone else had the answer He was obviously looking for.

I couldn’t help laughing when someone laid a few fish and loaves in front of Him. But Jesus asked us to have the crowd divide and be seated. We hustled around, unsure of what to expect. After everyone had sat down in the grass, Jesus broke the food into baskets and closed His eyes and thanked the Father for what was about to happen.

When He lifted his head, we began passing around the baskets of food.

We never came to the end of the food, and people just kept eating as the baskets continued coming around. After everyone had eaten as much as they wanted, we collected the leftovers. There we stood, holding twelve baskets overflowing with bread.

It was too much. Following this man made my every rational thought seem like foolishness. He lived aware of a world I barely believed existed. A world where everything we need is available in abundance and a loving Father is ready to pour it out to us as we do His work here.

I was tired of seeing only what was in front of my eyes. I wanted to see what Jesus sees. I wanted to stop wasting time in worry. I wanted to rest the way He rests. As I stared down at the baskets, I knew this was His way of helping us do just that.

The Stream of Rest

One day, exhausted from teaching the crowd, Jesus and His men got on a boat and a violent storm kicked up. Jesus was asleep as the wind and rain threatened to capsize the boat. While the disciples panicked, Jesus slept peacefully.¹ In all my study of Jesus, I can’t find that He ever worried. Certainly, He was concerned about the people He loved and issues of the day, and as He faced death, He was afraid. But Jesus never wasted energy on doubt and worry. Jesus’s spirit was gentle, unrattled, quiet within Him whether He was facing death or five thousand people who needed something from Him.

So many times the disciples were overwhelmed, but Jesus was at peace.

What did He know that they didn’t, that we don’t?

That day on the hillside, Jesus said to Philip, “How are we going to feed them?” According to John, He said this to test the disciple.² I’ve read the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand many times and heard it in Sunday school. But until my recent study of Jesus, I never really noticed that He was testing Philip. He wanted to shift the disciples’ perspective about what it means to lead and love people. I think we would’ve failed the test, most of us.

I wholly identify with the disciples in their exhausted panic and worry. At times I’ve lugged around an awful lot of anxious, obsessive concerns tucked in my heavy backpack, and not just the big, heavy issues like suffering and leadership. Every morning of my life, I wake up to a lot of people coming up the hill, straight toward me, wanting Honey Nut Cheerios, lunches packed, and a morning snack, and then they come home after school with all their friends, who can eat through a Costco run in 5.7 seconds, and then it is time to think about dinner.

Whether it’s physical mouths to feed or the pressure of deeply wanting to give Jesus to people, I don’t seem to ever escape people flat needing things from me. Do you relate?

I want to ask you a question:

Are you tired?

Are you physically tired? Spiritually? Emotionally? Maybe all of those?

I want you to pick just one. Where are you the most tired?

Got it? Why are you tired?

I think we are all tired. And I don’t think it always has to be this way. Often the truth of God, the immensity of His resources and strength, never occurs to us.

Here are the familiar questions that brought the disciples to this day and bring us to this point in our pilgrimage.

Am I enough?

Is there enough?

Is God enough?

Like the disciple Philip, we often stand paralyzed because we look at our lives and we fear there isn’t enough.

Are we supposed to be this tired and defeated?

What has God put inside you to do for Him, and what would hold you back from that? What holds you back from putting this book down and absolutely going crazy obeying God no matter what He says? All in. What holds you back?

What is the voice in your head? What do you hear? Name it.

Is it rejection? Fear of failure? Disappointment? Inadequacy? Are you weary from trying to resolve all that? God isn’t waiting for you to resolve it. He wants to move through these very weaknesses.

Because God is enough and has enough, we can rest.

This is counterintuitive. The world tells you the way to be confident is to believe in yourself. So we keep pushing forward in our resources to prove we have what it takes. But Christians know that the road to confidence and peace is believing in Jesus and what He provides.

AN IMPOSSIBLE HOPE

Go over to my Instagram and prepare to fall in love with my amazing kids. Scroll down. My youngest son, Cooper, is there—way too many pictures of him. Everyone thinks I like him more than my other kids because he’s on my Instagram more than the others, but he is the one who always lets me take his picture.

Cooper was abandoned as a young baby and never knew his parents. Due to some complications in my son’s paperwork, he was never matched with a family throughout toddlerhood. He became the oldest child in the orphanage by the time we came to get him. So that means that every one of Cooper’s friends, in the nearly four years that he was there, was adopted while he was not. Cooper watched as a mom and dad came to pick every single friend he had. But no one came for him.

One day after he was finally home I asked, “Did you think we ever would come?”

His answer shocked me, “I knew you were gonna come, Mama.”

So why would a four-year-old boy believe that he was going to be adopted? Coop didn’t have a reason to hope for that. Nobody had told him, “You will be adopted.” Or looked him in the eyes and said, “Your mom and dad are coming.” They never told him he had a mom and dad until the day we were in the building. The minute that he met us was the minute after he found out he had a mom and dad. And yet it was as if he was just waiting for us, as if he knew we were coming and now we were here.

You’d better believe we had a lot of answering to do for the next few years as to why we had not come a little bit sooner. I always tell him, “Dude, I would’ve swum the ocean if that would have been enough to get you.” He doesn’t have much patience when I try to explain governments and paperwork.

The stories about my son in the orphanage for those four years he waited are legendary. Every visitor to the orphanage we’ve ever met remembers him. They tell us he was joyful and wild and smart. He even shared his occasional treats from Westerners with the younger kids. He broke up fights. He was a leader. The kid was epic.

He watched every friend he made get a family, while he continued waiting. Why was he joyful?

Coop had hope. He had a vision. He had a picture of a mom and dad picking up little boys on the other side of the blue door that guarded his orphan home. He’d seen a truck drive off with his friends into a world with a mom and dad and sisters and brothers. He didn’t even know what a mom and dad were except that they bring you toys and juice and new shoes (he is really into shoes) and they take you away in a car that he had always wanted to ride in. Somehow that vision, that glimpse, that hope was enough while he waited.

He thought, I bet that’s going to happen to me one day. Why wouldn’t it?

If you and I could hold on to a clear vision and hope of a secure home and a God coming for us, I believe it would rest and still our fearful self-protective hearts.

Why do we struggle to believe that Jesus has come for us?

Why do we keep checking out with distractions and addictions?

Why do we hold back from all that God wants from us?

Even if we are doing some of it, why do our hearts so often feel discouraged and downtrodden, worn thin? Why, if we really believe that heaven is coming and it’s not that far away?

If you look back at the three stories we have read about Jesus, you’ll see a clear theme emerging. This theme sang hope into my weary soul as I desperately came to Jesus for a new way to do this life. Here is what He shouted to me from the pages of Scripture:

I go overboard for My people, My kingdom.

The wine. Go back to the wine. Did you see how I told you how big the jars were? I gave you exactly the size of the jars, exactly the number of gallons they could hold to show you that they would never, ever run out.

The woman at the well. She went to fill up her jar, to take a drink of water. I was clear: “I have water that will never run out. You will never be thirsty if you drink the water that I have.” Abundance. Plenty.

The fish and loaves. I knew how many people there were and how much they would eat, and I made sure each one of My twelve disciples would leave holding a full basket to show them, to show you, I work in abundance.

You are enough and you have enough BECAUSE I AM ENOUGH.

This is how our God works, but we have been functioning in a scarcity mentality. Rather than trusting in His abundance, we try to be enough and get enough as if there isn’t enough. And we are exhausted from trying to do all this on our own.

NOT ABOUT US

I have functioned believing that there is not enough. Feeling urgent because there is not enough time, anxious because the work is too big and there is not enough help, troubled that I am not doing enough, fretting that there may not be enough money, worried there is not enough space for what I want to create, and then if I do create it, that it is not good enough to be worthy of that space.

Maybe you have a God-given dream, and you look around and you see other people doing something similar and that shuts you down. You will get to see God work crazy miracles out of your life if you stop looking side to side and instead consider the good things that are right in front of you. But we look side to side and say, “Someone is already doing it; my dream is taken.”

God must be thinking, Are you kidding? Do you see the planet? There are about seven billion people. The world is very large. There is room for all of you, if I have called you to it. There is need in the world. Go for it! I actually have enough favor, gifts, talents for you to each accomplish the purposes I have laid out for you before time.

Jesus wanted His people, He wanted us, to shift the way we view our lives and to shift our view of the way God moves and works. So He began the feeding of the five thousand with a test. He wanted to expose the limits of the disciples’ faith and then bust through those limits to leave the ones full of doubt holding the leftovers of His extravagant more than enough.

In eternity past God planned, I will make exactly enough food for how many bites every single one of these humans is going to eat, and then I will have exactly twelve baskets full when they’re all done.

That is an impressive miracle. Can you imagine the guys standing there, each holding his overflowing basket? Don’t you know they must have been all looking at each other saying, “Daaaaang.”

Their perspective shifted from what they didn’t have to all that God did have.

God had a message for the disciples as they stood there with the overflowing baskets: With Christ all things are possible. When you try to solve human problems with human resources in your human strength, there will never be enough. However, if you would like to follow Me and work with Me, I will meet the deepest needs around you and in you and through you with unending resources in supernatural, all-powerful strength.

So what then is holding back God’s Spirit from moving through us in miraculous ways?

I know what it was for me. Fear. I refused to sacrifice the idol of people’s opinions. I was so afraid of the invisible thoughts of people.

Last night I sat with a friend who is wrestling through the tension of the call on her life and what people will think if she risks it and obeys. And her fear is that she would appear self-promoting. Oh, I get that! That was mine too. So I did nothing.

As if what God was calling us to had anything to do with us. As if our reputation mattered enough to sit on our gifts, training, and dreams that could actually help people and make God known to this world.

I think of Moses, when God asked him to be a part of setting His people free. God said, My people are in bondage, and I want to set them free and take them to the land flowing with milk and honey.

And all Moses heard was, “Me? You want me?” Then Moses and God went round and round about how inadequate he felt. But God’s plan was never about Moses. God said He would accomplish the work. God alone would set free His people suffering in bondage.³

I’m not writing about this because I’ve seen this problem in everyone else; I’ve seen this unbelief in myself. I have seen this self-focused fear in myself today.

I texted Zac as I left to write today and said, “I don’t know if I’m even good at this or if I should be doing this. I’m leaving my babies and I’m going to write about Jesus and I don’t even know if I’m adequate to the task.”

I texted this to him—today.

And as he often does he reminded me, “Jennie, this isn’t about you. This isn’t for you. God will accomplish His work to set His people free.”

Like Moses, we begin to believe that since we are not adequate, then we shouldn’t do what God has called us to. And we limit the work of God through us because we think it is all about us, our abilities, our resources.

But it is never about us. It is always about hungry people in bondage whom God wants to set free.

WHAT IS HOLDING YOU BACK?

Consider those things that are holding you back—the things you say you don’t have enough of. Is it not enough talent? Money? Time? Space? Creativity? Personality? Need?

Now, I want you to picture the streets in heaven. I want you to picture streets as far as you can see and every street is full of warehouses as far as you can see.

I just want you to picture all that God has and all that He wants to do.

Then you land in heaven with Him. He looks you in the eyes and says, I wanted to go crazy through you. I wanted to change your neighborhood, your city. And you kept going up to your room and watching Netflix.

You say, “I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t gifted enough to accomplish that dream, God.”

He says, Come here. You see that road? Can you see the end of it? No? That is My road and all those warehouses have every gift. And on the road up there, those are the endless warehouses with money. And that one there was full of more vision than you could imagine, all Mine that I wanted to pour out through you.

For all that I ever prepared for you to accomplish, I was also waiting to equip you with every single thing you needed to do it.

“But you know my past. I made so many mistakes. I messed up over and over again. You didn’t even want me to talk about You.”

He says, Let Me show you something. Meet My Son. Look at His hands. You know why He went through that? To set you free. So that you could set others free. You were so forgiven, I especially wanted you talking about Me.

Our God, He is waiting to pour out of us and pour into the world, but we stop Him. We think that He is limited. We think that He only picks special people and special things to appoint or bless. I’m going to tell you a secret: there are no special people. Ouch, right? You may be crushed right now, because you grew up thinking that you were a very special little snowflake.

But the truth is, you are just as human and jacked up as the next person, and given a different set of circumstances we could all be in jail.

We aren’t alone in wanting to be special. This isn’t just our generation; our ego-induced striving is quite a theme actually, spanning humanity’s history since creation. Look back at the first humans: Why did Eve and Adam sin? Why did they eat the one thing God said not to eat? Because they wanted to be like God. They wanted to be special. Fast-forward to their kids, Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel. Why? Because he’s jealous of his brother. Next up, the first civilization of people build a big tower because they are trying to make a name for themselves.

This is a theme from the very beginning.

We fall right in line with all of history, all the humans. We want to be great and we want to be special. So we spend our whole lives trying to prove we’re more special than the next person and using God to do it sometimes. We want miracles in our lives, but we want them our way, on our time, in our strength, and for our glory. So we force our will for our lives and often do it in the name of God.

And He says, Nope, that’s not how I work. In fact, you become nothing so that I can become everything, and I will do great things through you.

We make God and pleasing Him so complicated. But soon after Jesus feeds the five thousand, people are asking Him, “What must we do to please God?”

You know what He says: The work of the kingdom is to believe in the One God has sent.⁴ You don’t need a special anointing. You already have one. You are a child of God and filled with His Spirit.

Do you want to know why we are so tired?

Because we don’t believe God. There is no remedy for your striving apart from finding your identity in Christ. He is your enough, and the degree to which you believe that is the degree to which you will stop striving, stop performing, stop trying to prove yourself.

I love this verse in Isaiah: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”⁵ It is in our letting go and in our trust that He rescues us. Yet we are striving and we are working so hard for God.

Guess what the person being rescued has to do? Trust the Rescuer and cooperate with the process. You and I don’t need to be the heroes who save the world. We just get to be part of the story of the greatest Hero of all time. Which is good news, because being the hero is a lot of pressure and a lot of dadgum work.

You can rest because you know God is the One rescuing you and others around you. If God has rescued us, who can possibly get to us or steal us from Him? We rest.

We are not God’s slaves. We are God’s kids, the ones He sent His Son to rescue. He adores us, and He wants to move into the darkness with us. He wants to feed the hungry people who are coming up the hill. But as long as we are striving and trying to do it ourselves and trying to round up enough of our own resources to take care of the problem, we will keep being tired and cranky and resentful.

The beautiful alternative is to believe that our God moves in miraculous ways. We get to sit back and pray to Him and break the bread we have been given and watch Him meet needs—in abundance. We can trust Him with our people and surrender to Him our ways and plans and glory. And we can love Him because He is awesome and be with Him because there is nowhere better on earth than to be with our good, loving Father.

We get to trade striving for rest. We get to trade striving for confidence—not confidence in ourselves but in the power of a sturdy, heroic God, eager to rescue.

Do you know what God often uses to help us see our own inadequacies?

Need.

I think of the inadequacy I felt when we met our Cooper in Rwanda. He had health issues and we didn’t speak his language and I’ve never felt more inadequate for a task. But he had no other parents in the world. He was in a third-world orphanage with a distended belly. I was in. I wasn’t adequate, but how could I walk away? I would become more aware of my need for God in the coming months than in all the years of my life prior.

That’s how we practice rest and trust: when we see a great need in front of us, we get over ourselves and fall on our knees, asking God to help us meet it. Oh, how we need to get over ourselves.

One reason I’ve never until now publicly shared about the eating disorder I struggled with as a young adult is that I still hate how self-consumed I became. I always was thinking about the next meal. I always was thinking about what I would or wouldn’t eat. I always was thinking about myself and how I was not enough. Part of the sickness of our fight with enoughness is that it shifts our eyes from need to us. It shifts our eyes from people to us. It shifts our eyes from God to us.

Healing began for me when the need of another human came into the struggle. While I knew there was a massive problem and many friends worried there was a problem, I became really good at not showing how obsessive I had become. While Zac likely noticed I was very conscious about what I ate, I don’t think he knew I had an eating disorder. The gift and freedom of God started when I found out that Zac and I were accidentally pregnant with our first child.

With a growing child inside me, I knew I needed to eat and to care for this baby. The transition of loving and caring for another human more than myself shifted my values and my priorities, took my eyes off myself. I wasn’t healed overnight, but it was the beginning of my healing physically and emotionally.

When we hang out on the Internet instead of in our neighborhoods, when we look through magazines instead of into people’s eyes, when we dwell on our own problems instead of the problems in our communities, we will always feel inadequate and shut down. We begin to feel like there are so many people doing cool things that we are not needed. But in the real world none of those cool people live on your street, none of them are loving your neighbors. God wants to do that through you.

So take the first step toward the dream God put in you. Take that first, risky, shaky step in obedience. When you do and God comes through, you’ll laugh and want to take another one. Call the neighbor you’ve been wanting to love better, sign up for the art class in your community, tell your friend about the small-business idea you have been toying with, e-mail the adoption agency. Take one step.

YOU HAVE HIM AND HE HAS YOU

Seeing need and knowing only God can meet it causes us to run full of confidence, which means we can rest rather than strive. When Jesus promises us rest, He almost always is talking about soul rest. It’s why most of the ways we try to rest actually make our insides more chaotic. TV, sleep, Facebook—all fall short because nothing but Jesus can bring rest to the chaos inside us. Through finding our identity in Him, confidence streams into our souls and empowers us to move creatively and intentionally through this life and somehow rest and enjoy it as we go about epic, eternal, world-changing, supernatural work!

Our confidence comes from believing God can do anything, then stepping back and letting Him.

We are trying to do the work of God without God.

Let’s start doing things with God instead of for God.

Today He is saying, Just ask Me. You are for Me? You are building My kingdom? Just ask. I am for you. You don’t need to worry.

Do you know that God has never not delivered? Goodness, He is good and always gives us enough. But usually it is our day’s portion, our daily bread with a little thrown on top for good measure and to grow our faith. Tomorrow, the crowds will be hungry again. Each day brings new needs, new challenges, new problems, and every day He opens warehouses of bread. There is more than enough, but God wants us to keep coming to Him for it.

Coop has been home now for long enough to quit wondering and worrying if we are going to send him back to Africa, though that came up quite a bit in the beginning. Now he lies in bed and worries about things like his lacrosse game tomorrow.

He worries about whether his team will lose. He worries that he won’t play well.

As he worries aloud before we pray together, you know what is running through my head? I have you.

He worries he won’t have all his gear for the game. And I tell him…

You know what? Every piece of that gear is going to be there ready for you. You know why? Because I have you.

Then he worries he will lose some of his gear.

You know what, buddy? Your name is on every piece of that gear. You know why? Because I have you.

Then he worries no one will be there to cheer for him.

Hey, you know what? I’m going to sit and watch you, and I’m gonna cheer for you. Dad will be there and your sisters and your brother. And guess what? We are going to get Sonic afterward, whether you win or lose. Because I have you.

Because I love you. I adore you and I am going to take care of you.

We are all so afraid there won’t be enough, but we have a God who has us. When the disciples woke Jesus in the midst of the storm they feared would take their lives, guess what He did? He didn’t chastise them; He told the storm to stop. He has us.

Sometimes the streams of living water Jesus promised us are calm and refresh us as we sit with Jesus. Sometimes the water is rushing and becomes a resource to give away to a thirsty world. The thing about Christ is that you know His streams will never run dry.

I pray you would catch a glimpse of a God who adores you, who wants to be in the mess with you, who will never leave you, who is for you, who has all you need, even—no, especially—on the very worst days. I pray that you would rest by the water and because of the water. I pray that you wouldn’t just rest in your eternal provision as a part of God’s family but you would rest in the everyday provision He is already dishing out everywhere you look.

He has you. He may even take you out for Sonic after the game.

Imagine what could happen if you actually rested in the provision and goodness of God. Just like I have Cooper and I am meeting his needs, God has us and has incredible plans for our lives. What a waste if we get to heaven and realize all these years here could have been spent trusting God’s abundance rather than fearing He wouldn’t provide.

STEP INTO THE STREAM

• On a scale from 1 to 10, how worried are you today?

• Name what you are most worried about right now.

WADE IN DEEPER

Dream a little. What would you do if nothing was holding you back?

• Tell one person about the dream.

• Commit to pray for the dream.

• Identify and take one step toward that dream.

QUENCH YOUR THIRST

Invite a woman who loves Jesus and is older than you to lunch. During your conversation, ask her these questions:

• How have you seen Jesus be faithful in your life?

• When has God provided in abundance even though you doubted He could?

• What is one thing you would tell your younger self?

THE OVERFLOW

Next time you are with a good friend, invite her to share a dream with you. Ask, “What would you do for God or others if nothing was holding you back?”

Then help that person take one step toward that dream.