An Invitation to Retreat

It is impossible to overstate the level of exhaustion many of us are experiencing these days and how dangerous it is. Christian busyness layered on top of the stresses of life in our culture, along with the more subtle sources of exhaustion that are harder to identify, means we are all at risk of drifting into dangerous levels of exhaustion before we even know it!

There are reasons why we end up as tired as we are, and one of the keys to being able to enter into retreat in a restorative way is to note the sources of our exhaustion. Then we can ask God, “What are we going to do about that?” and listen for what God has to say.

WHY ARE WE SO TIRED?

The following are some common sources of our exhaustion.

We are functioning out of an inordinate sense of ought and should.

Many of us feel that we should be willing to be exhausted in the service of God and others, and that this is normal. We have unreasonable expectations that we should be a never-ending fountain of love, goodwill, and service at all times and in all places. We feel guilty when we are ill, tired, grieving, or confused. Not knowing what to do with these human aspects of ourselves, we try to shove them down and keep them under the surface. In the process, unhealed emotion and exhaustion gets buried alive. But these buried dynamics will eventually make themselves known in more destructive ways than if we had simply acknowledged them and dealt with them honestly and openly.

We find it difficult or even humiliating to receive help from others.

Remember the apostle Peter, who found it so difficult to let Jesus wash his feet even though he had seen Jesus allow Mary to wash Jesus’ own feet the previous week? What is really going on there? This resistance to allowing others to serve us is often rooted in our perception of ourselves as servants of others—including Jesus—and this is the identity we are most comfortable with.

We might also notice that serving others is one way of maintaining control of our interactions.  Most of us would rather wash someone else’s feet than have our own feet washed. Allowing someone to serve us in this way puts them in touch with a very human and maybe even less-than-perfect aspect of ourselves; it puts them in control of the interaction, which is uncomfortable, to say the least!

We might be living more as a performer than as the person God created us to be.

Functioning out of oughts and shoulds results in a performance mentality in which we become increasingly disconnected from our authentic self. Oughts and shoulds come from someone else, so when we are doing things because we think we should, we are reacting and responding to something outside ourselves. Authentic desire, on the other hand, comes from within and is a part of who we are.

It takes more energy to perform than to be the person God created us to be. When you are functioning out of your essential, created self, you can actually accomplish a lot without being overly tired. But when you are performing, even the smallest tasks can wear you out.

When our sense of self-worth is derived from our performance, it is difficult to stop performing. A good question to promote self-awareness is to ask, When was the last time I let someone help me or serve me in a way that put me in a vulnerable position? What was that like?

We may have few, or no, boundaries on our service and availability to others.

We always feel we should do more because there is always more to do. The result can be a nonstop pace of life that, at its best, is tied to genuine passion for what we do. But we can also reach a point where our genuine gifts and passions wear us out because it’s so exciting we don’t know when to stop. Eventually we crash against the wall of human limitation.

This seems to be what Jesus was trying to convey to His disciples in Mark 6:31. By calling them to “come away and rest a while” in the midst of so much human need, Jesus was guiding them into a healthy and sustainable lifestyle by helping them establish boundaries and rhythms around their availability to others. He did not want them to wear themselves out to the point where they would be no good to anyone.

We are carrying the great burden of unhealed wounds: sadness, unresolved tension, toxicity in one or more of our relationships.

Many of us have never been taught how to grieve our hurts and losses, what to do with unresolved tension, how to identify and extricate ourselves from toxic relationships, or how to shift unhealthy patterns. Some of us aren’t even sure we’re allowed to do this, and so we soldier on, trying to manage it all and keep it under wraps. The truth is that our effort to manage all that is unresolved within us is draining our life energy.

The practice of retreat provides the needed time and space to be with the difficult, hurting places of our lives. It provides the context in which we can release emotion in God’s presence, and allow God to comfort us as only He can. When we don’t allow God access for attending to the wounds of our lives, we get weary from holding it in, and eventually we will begin to disintegrate.

We may be experiencing information overload.

There is no end to the amount of information available to us, but there is a limit to how much time and energy we can expend on taking it in. Our minds are exhausted from trying to gather and make sense of all the information coming at us, and our hearts are exhausted from the emotion that is stirred up by the heartbreak of what is going on in our world. At some point we simply have to take a break from it all. To stay on a Spirit-guided path, we need to ask, Am I going to keep gathering information, or am I going to take the next step on my spiritual journey?

We may be mired in our own willfulness.

Willfulness describes our attempts to impose our own ideas on others, and control everything around us. It might manifest itself in our determined efforts to force something into reality that just isn’t happening and a refusal to accept reality as it is.

The result of this willful lack of acceptance is that we hold ourselves back from what actually is happening, separating ourselves and resisting what is rather than giving ourselves to the gift of now.

On retreat we may be able to acknowledge willfulness as a source of our exhaustion and notice all the ways it is wearing us down. We may then be ready to enter into the opposite of willfulness, which is willingness—to accept and to enter into what is happening spiritually.

In the safety of a retreat environment, we can ask ourselves, What would it look like and feel like to choose willingness instead?

When God Waits for Us

Isaiah 30 contains a chilling portrait of a willful people who look a lot like us. Rather than trusting God for their basic needs and saying yes to His invitations, they are a willful people returning to the place of their former bondage, looking to old sources for safety, security, and survival. In the midst of all that seduction, God makes this counterintuitive statement: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and trust shall be your strength” (Is. 30:15). But still they run the other way, refusing God’s rest—refusing the only solution to all they are facing. So what does God do? God does the only thing He can do: God waits. For them and for us. The LORD longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion (Is. 30:18).

Practicing retreat is one way to turn from our willfulness and say yes to God’s invitation to rest—an invitation that is always there for us. It is an opportunity to rest, not just physically but also to attend to the sources of our exhaustion, allowing God to lead us into the kind of rest that corresponds specifically to those sources.

Thomas Merton asserts:

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act we can perform.

Retreat as a spiritual practice is not a vacation; it is not a day at the spa or on the golf course. It is coming home to ourselves in God’s presence and resting there. God is waiting for us, continuing to hold out to us the invitation to rest. The only question is, will we say yes or will we keep running the other way?

~ By Ruth Haley Barton. Taken from Inivitation to Retreat by Ruth Haley Barton. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, www.ivpress.com