How to Find Side Doors into Wonder When You're Tired
For all who feel flat, weary, drained, sad, complicated, or perplexed
Is this season landing like a thud? Not so much wonder as waiting or weariness?
If you’re in a position or context of leadership, sometimes there’s a strange vortex of pressure: to radiate certain emotions or responses; to lead people in a season that may not feel like it matches your tired body and soul; to create worship “experiences” or craft sermons that will inspire, while you may be in a moment when Charlie Brown himself seems like a chipper ray of sunshine compared to where your soul is.
In 2011, I wrote in “Receiving Christmas” about learning what I already knew: Christmas is different for pastors.
“It’s hard to feel Not Your Best or Not Your Holiest at Christmas, when you love the season and deeply want to create space for others to worship. Silly human instinct, really, to want to dress up to visit the Manger.
Most of us don’t overly love ‘Little Drummer Boy,’ but I do, because sometimes I’m keenly aware that all I have to offer the Baby is the ability to bang loudly on a potentially annoying instrument.
No bank account of gold, no Neiman Marcus myrrh, just myself, rhythm, playing in thanks for God With Us. Here’s my rhythm, Lord. My excitement at your birth. It’s all I have.”
But I continued: “Advent is to be received, not performed. Childbirth is both acting – there’s a reason it’s called labor – and receiving – you’re receiving this child, this experience, whatever it entails. Jesus’ Incarnation was not initiated by humans: that is one of the most important implications of the Virgin Birth. Jesus came, unexpected, uninvited, uncreated.”
What might God hope you will receive this Advent, this Christmas?
Receiving is important. It’s not your job to ensure your congregation has a meaningful worship experience: you’ve never been able to do that anyway.
You can steward, set the table, prepare, but the outcomes? Those have always been out of your hands. You can order food, answer the door for the delivery driver, and carry it to the table - but it’s God who feeds, and all of us need to be fed.
1. Find Wonder by Letting Yourself Receive
The first way to find a side-door into wonder is to accept that you can’t create some things, you can only find them and receive them - like the shepherds on the hillside, like the shepherds sent into town to look for a newborn.
Can you let go of the drive to manage outcomes, to perform, to create, to ensure - long enough to make friends with limits, welcome good-enough, and rest in Belovedness?
This year, how do you picture yourself approaching a feed trough full of Divine newborn?
Are you like a kid? Do you have scraped knees, runny nose, unkempt hair after being pushed or bullied?
Is your armor up so tightly you practically clank when you walk?
Are your eyes pressed tightly as you breathe through another panic attack, grasping the edge of swaddling cloths to center your senses?
Wonder starts only after we allow our hearts to need to receive Jesus.
God didn’t arrive on our planet like an armed superhero. God came quietly, like a whisper in Elijah’s cave, so that we weren’t too easily startled; so that we weren’t spooked; so that we wouldn’t run; so that we would quietly edge near, and peek, and relax.
If you’ve been running on autopilot, force-close. Laptop down. Phone in another room.
What might God hope you will allow yourself to receive?
Maybe it’s rest, or help, or friendship; maybe it’s sleep, or a prescription, or a recovery meeting; maybe it’s connection, or play, or laughter.
Stop long enough to ask God what gift God might want to give you in the next month.
2. Find Wonder by Checking Your Dashboard
Oh friends. So many pastors in the U.S. have lingering effects of COVID infection - from being unable to smell fragrances, to fatigue, to depression, to immune dysfunction, to unexpected health issues with heart or lungs.
The thing is, many physicians are burnt-out, too, and advocating for yourself takes energy and time.
Try to be gentle with yourself if your body isn’t cooperating - and that includes neuroinflammation that can affect mood, focus, brain fog. If you have POTS/dysautonomic symptoms, paying attention to your body through the day is so helpful.
If you need an antidepressant or vitamin D or steroid or whatever - that’s okay.
Sometimes the shine seems to wear off the ornament because your system or neurotransmitters or sleep apnea or hormones are out of whack.
Sometimes the wonder-meter plummets because you’ve gotten used to caffeinating your way through four or five hours of sleep for way too long.
Or, like I discovered, because live Christmas trees actually make you really sick for several weeks every December (I miss them but I enjoy lack-of-bronchitis more).
Don’t be too important, too vital, to eat and sleep and make yourself see a doctor when you need to.
3. Find Wonder by Doing It Just Slightly Differently
Small linchpins can work - well, wonders. Here are some ways to find wonder when you’re tired - that don’t require a lot of money or creativity on your part.
If you’re able, listen to Scripture instead of reading it. I heartily recommend listening to the morning text, reflection, and prayers from the ecumenical, globally-shaped Lectio 365 app. For BBC fans, you can listen to David Suchet read the Gospel of John (though it’s strange hearing “Poirot” without the French accent). Or, for what it’s worth, the Hallow app is featuring “Advent with C.S. Lewis,” “guided by Liam Neeson and Jonathan Roumie.” One day as I ran errands, I listened to David Suchet reading the Gospel of John and was surprised at how differently I absorbed parts of the narrative simply by listening to it in a large chunk - even as concentration waxed and waned.
Absorb Scripture through a different version than you usually use, whether First Nations or the First Testament or for Protestants reading a bit of the Apocrypha - something to jostle your auto-pilot mode; or reflect on images of stained glass windows or icons instead (pre-literate Bible stories, after all).
Give yourself the indulgence of getting lost in another world - through a movie, book, or show that has no obvious connection to faith, no promising potential as a mine for sermon illustrations. If you’re artsy, try to steal a couple hours at a museum: just for you.
Fiction is important for our souls. Art matters. Music matters. Symbolism and story do a lot of heavy lifting when we’re grappling with complexity - symbols can carry so many meanings at once. That can be helpful when you’re feeling 4,000 different ways at once.
(I love
“Eschatological Vibes” Advent playlist - it includes multiple styles of music and is perfect for everyone who’s longing for something, carrying a blend of joy and grief, yearning and hope, sorrow and stillness.)Sneak into someone else’s church service: a tradition other than yours. Find early morning Episcopalian Eucharist, or a Catholic mass, or a service of another language or culture than your own. Every pastor, every leader, benefits from two things: being anonymous, and being the one in the pew.
Everyone’s creative, just in different ways. Notice what you enjoy at this stage of life, in this season, and take satisfaction in it. Cheap salt dough ornaments? Painting wooden crafts? Handwriting something? Organizing gift purchases in a spreadsheet?
Practicing making tiny miniatures with YouTube tutorials? Rearranging furniture with intuitive spatial intelligence? Making heaps of curling ribbon curls?
If it’s become obligation, be free to let it go. If it brings you joy, don’t let it become a casualty. Why become so grown-up you miss out on simple, childlike joy in doing something that’s fun for you? Don’t explain yourself, just - play.
Notice the world that you have. Not the one you wish you had - the one around you today. Limit your exposure to Hard Things. If snow looks pretty on the shrubs, take three minutes to take 16 terrible pictures and one nice one. Ground yourself in color and temperature, texture and smell, shape and sound. Look for things in your favorite color; let your shoulders loosen when you see them; zoom in; take a picture.
Receive, Beloved-by-God.
Christmas is for you, too, in whatever small bites you can bear.