Asleep On A Pillow In The Stern

If they stop, somebody is left.

That is the whole architecture and it is not dramatic and it is not self important. There are people who depend on what they do. Not in a heroic way: in the ordinary way that people depend on the person who does the thing. If the thing does not get done, they are the ones it lands on.

So stopping is not rest. Stopping is a transfer.

They have been running on this for years and it works, in the sense that everything gets done, and the cost has been arriving slowly and diffusely and is now genuinely large.

And here is what makes it hard to address. Every argument for resting sounds, from inside, like an argument for letting somebody down. Look after yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup. All of it translates, on arrival, to: it is acceptable for them to bear it instead of you.

And they will not accept that. It is the one thing they will not do.

So the tiredness accumulates, and every offer of relief gets refused on moral grounds, and the person offering usually gives up eventually.

You may know that architecture. Not workaholism. A structure in which your own rest is somebody else's cost, and no way to get out of it that does not feel like a betrayal.

He was asleep in the actual storm

Here is a scene, and I want you to notice where He was and what was happening.

And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish?Mark 4:37-38

The boat was filling. That is not a mild sea. And He was asleep in the stern on a cushion.

And look at what they accuse Him of. Not laziness. Not tiredness. They say: carest thou not.

That is the exact charge you have been making against yourself for years. They looked at somebody resting in the middle of a real situation and read it as indifference, and they were completely wrong, and He was not indifferent, and He was still asleep.

You are able to rest without that being indifference, and Christ demonstrated the two are not the same thing. Mark 4:38 has Him asleep in a boat that was actually filling and answering an accusation of not caring, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates resting from abandoning in a person who has fused them.

Now let me name the fusion, because it is doing all the damage.

Somewhere you joined two things: not doing, and not caring. They are joined so tightly that you cannot experience one without the other, and so every rest arrives as a small betrayal, and you refuse it before you have thought about it.

They were joined in the boat too. The disciples made exactly that inference. It was wrong there and it is wrong in your house.

You are not abandoning anybody by sleeping, and the accusation is one Christ Himself had aimed at Him. The written word puts Him asleep in the stern with the water coming in, and the Holy Spirit is not the source of the charge you have been making against yourself.

The honest half. Some of what you carry is genuinely load bearing and stopping does have real costs for real people. I am not going to pretend the structure is imaginary, and I am not going to hand you an instruction about hours or boundaries, because I cannot see who depends on you or what it would actually cost.

And your tiredness is not indiscipline. Nobody gets to that level of tired by being lazy.

There is a part only you can do, and it is deliberately one notch rather than a change. You stop one thing early, on purpose, while it is still wanted. Not everything. One. So that you find out what actually happens, which is almost always less than the architecture predicts.