When we begin with curiosity, an infinite world of discovery and exploration becomes available to us. But if we don’t have a strong desire to know or learn something, we could spend all the time in the world reading about it, being taught about it, experiencing it, yet never understand it. It would never reach us in our interior worlds and never be the catalyst for the growth and transformation we’re hoping for.
Even before we are at the limits of our strength, our charge is not to let go of him.
A weary mind is a mind that raises itself as the authority. The ultimate decider of good and right, should and shouldn’t. Some minds may be able to bear up under that burden longer, or subscribe to the idea of the hive mind to reach balanced conclusions, but all will fall eventually. The burden of trying is too much. Because our minds were never made to be God’s mind. The mind of Christ (which is God’s mind) is the one that can bear all information across all time and beyond and come to the right conclusions without faltering or breaking. His mind is never weary and always able and always good.
The work of spiritual investment is taking what is not right to the one who can make it right. It’s not about bringing guilt and shame, but about being exposed before him, finding that place perfectly safe and perfectly good. And the comfort of knowing that he will not just smooth our egos or tell us it’s fine when it’s not fine. He sits with our soul and he guides, and he has hard conversations with us, and gives us his power to be healed.
To begin a helpful conversation about being heart-weary, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that a weary heart is real, difficult, and even debilitating. I see you. I know what it feels like. To challenge an already weary heart is a tall order. It can seem like asking too much. Yet, it is what we’re going to lean into in this post. Because it is good for us, and moving through it will lighten the burden we are trying to carry and restore our weary hearts to brightness and vitality.
We live in a western culture in which hustle is holy and progress is prized. But if we have determined that spiritual investment matters to us, then we are challenged in these verses to re-claim our time for good use according to God’s standards of good.
We will explore how our obligations affect the time we are able to give to spiritual investment. If you feel like your time isn’t your own, there’s not enough time to do all the things you need to do, or that the idea of adding one more thing to your to-do list might just break you, this post is for you.
Regarding time and spiritual investment, let’s begin with expectations. We can have a lot of assumptions about what time spent in spiritual investment can look like. If you’ve grown up in a religious setting, you may have been taught that a proper period of time spent in spiritual investment consists of at least an hour devoutly sitting in a quiet corner, reading your Bible, and praying off of note cards for all the illnesses and traveling mercies of the ladies in your women’s bible study group. That is certainly one way to invest spiritually. But it is not the only way. And it may not even be the best way for you.
