Burnout Break: Day Five
Stillness in the Sound: We Grow Back | Wren and the Daughters of the Bear
It has been a tumultuous week, as much as it has been restorative.
This is what I am sitting with today. That it has been a hard week, and it has also been an incredibly beneficial week. We don’t have to be so afraid of the hard times. This is a truth God has been etching on my heart. Through the wilderness, through the fires, my faith has grown in ways I never imagined.
When I was in high school and my early twenties, I chased after God the way I was taught. I read my Bible, I prayed, I immersed myself in Christian music, youth group and later Bible college. As a young wife and mom (by age 20), I pressed into God like never before. I sought to be a godly wife. A good mother. The model of Christian values and faith. I can remember times where my faith would falter, where my motivation died off and I felt nothing. And when I tried to engage in the disciplines of Bible reading, prayer, journaling, and all the things we tell ourselves a good Christian looks like, I can remember feeling like I would never find peace. That I would always strive and strive and strive, and never fully get it. Never truly understand what it looked like to have a relationship with God. I clung to this and it became ingrained in me that if I was not performing these daily disciplines that I was somehow less than or failing in following God.
I would spend so much time praying that I could be a better wife, a more compassionate woman, a gentle mother. And each day it seemed I was failing. I couldn’t quite grasp it. I would go through cycles where I would engage in prayer and studying Scripture, followed by periods of burnout from these very practices. And in those moments of faith burnout, I would contemplate the future and wonder if I would ever get it right. I couldn’t see a future where I didn’t always struggle with these disciplines. I thought I must just be bad at being a Christian. Bad at taking all the right steps. Back then, I didn’t understand that faith could change and look different for me than it did for the person right next to me. I thought the only right way to live was to always be reading the Bible, always praying, and always making good decisions rooted in Truth.
But what I failed to realize during that time was that faith isn’t something you can shape and mold and then put in a box and store it on a shelf. It was as if I had this belief that if I didn’t read my Bible every single day, and if I didn’t spend significant amounts of time in prayer every single day, and if I didn’t make the right choices at every opportunity that I hadn’t quite attained grace. I hadn’t earned it. I hadn’t proven that I deserved the love Christ offered. No one told me that the faith my parents instilled in me would one day be mine to hold. That at some point, I could take that faith out and hold it. That I could look at it with curiosity and wonder, and that if I truly looked at it, held it in my hands I would see and feel it undulate beneath my trembling hands. I didn’t know that it could shift and change and envelop me. I thought it was this physical object that never changed, and if I was struggling or failing, that it wasn’t because I didn’t have enough faith—it was because I had a wrong understanding of what it means to know God. To walk with Him.
Music has always been my closest companion. Lyrics, words, quotes. All of these open something inside of me. I don’t just listen to music. It is something that is alive and breathing and living inside of me. There is always a song inside of me. Sometimes it’s weird and crazy like Baby Beluga a few weeks ago, or Bad Liar by Imagine Dragons yesterday. There is always a song.
Related in ways I will expound on further, I have always had a very complicated relationship with prayer. When I grew up, I was taught how to pray. Each night I would list off all of my relatives in a very specific order and I would pray for each person and ask God to “take care of them.” If I forgot someone, I felt immense shame. And like I had done something wrong. So rather than just add them in, which felt lazy, I started over. It became an obsession for me. I believed that if I left a name out, the only way God could truly hear my prayer was if I started over. That isn’t how I was taught to pray so much as I was given a model to follow, and then my brain interpreted it in such a way that I felt sinful or ashamed if I didn’t get it right the first time. I had to perfect it. This is the earliest incident I can remember where I felt like I had to be perfect or it didn’t count.
I internalize a lot. I don’t know any other way to live or process life. It all goes inward. Some people lash out at others when they are upset. And while I certainly am guilty of this, I save my harshest words and criticism for myself. For a very long time, I believed the voice in my head shaming me and telling me I would never get it right was my own voice. It has taken a lot of unraveling to learn whose voice that really is and that it is not always healthy or kind. I still hear that voice, though it is not as loud as it always was. But now, most of the time, I can recognize that it is neither my voice nor the voice of God. The voice of God doesn’t shame. He doesn’t make me feel small or less than. He doesn’t tell me that I cannot be saved, or that I am too far gone. He doesn’t lay down the law with a list of rules I have broken. So if I am hearing anything like that, I have learned that the voice cannot be trusted.
So on the one hand, we have music which is deeply tied to my being, to who I am deep inside, and on the other, we have a complicated relationship with prayer. And the collision of those two was something that broke my world wide open. I can’t remember when it was—it was around or before 2020. I had been craving music that went beneath the surface, that pulled at the heart, and tore me open, in all the right ways. In 2020, a dear friend began to disciple me, though I am not certain he knew he was doing this at the time. He would send songs to me. And they weren’t your typical Christian songs heard on the radio. I had become bored with contemporary Christian music. It felt so…basic. There was a cry deep inside of me to go deep, to seek God in new and more profound ways. And in that season, my friend Shawn began sending me songs. Worship songs. Some of them were 9-10 minutes long. One can take a look at the time and deem it too long. And therefore, dismiss it without taking the time to slow down and hear what is being said. But I was in a season of seeking, and I was hungry for more of God. These songs set me on a path to search out more and more songs and artists that seemed to write and sing with an intensity I was craving. And once I stepped off the ledge into passionate and profound worship songs, I couldn’t go back.
The same thing happened to me with authors—I went from loving Ted Dekker books in my twenties to finding writers like Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, and I couldn’t tolerate Dekker any longer. Don’t get me wrong. Dekker is a good writer, but there was a superficial feel in his writing for me after I found depth in characters and stories that Jordan and Sanderson offered. I could no longer go back because I knew there was something richer out there.
All of this to say that I spent my twenties and thirties wrestling with prayer and checking off all of the boxes that I thought were required to be loved by God on a day by day basis. When my life unraveled and my marriage crumbled at 33, I had to start over from scratch. Unfortunately, I was still shackled by a belief that I was failing at spiritual disciplines. The one thing that shifted dramatically was that I no longer believed that I had to earn the love of God. In 2012, in a moment of clarity and understanding, I accepted the truth of the Cross. I believed, truly madly deeply, that God loved me with a fierceness I had never known. He chose me. He wanted me. Not for what I could offer Him. Not so that He could watch me check spiritual disciplines off of a list. He loved me because He loved me. He wanted me because He created me and I was His precious child. This was the foundation where my faith finally began to take root.
Up to that point, it isn’t that I didn’t have faith. I was a Christian. I believed in God. I trusted in the Bible. But I hadn’t understood any of it. I had such a limited view of God and what following Him required. I believed because I was taught to believe. I trusted because I was afraid if I didn’t, I would go to hell. At the end of every day, I thought I had to evaluate my performance and if I didn’t measure up in any way, I thought I wasn’t worthy of the sacrifice Christ provided. At 33, God began to unravel all of this. I fell apart in all the best ways, and it allowed God to begin to teach me what following Him really looked like. And what I learned at that time is that it doesn’t look the same for everyone. There may be some people who can spend hours at a time praying continually. He showed me that I wasn’t bad at following Him simply because my prayer life didn’t look like that. I can remember sometime around 2020 when I had a lightbulb moment where prayer was concerned.
For years, I had listened to music as if my life depended on it. I didn’t just listen. I basked in it. I took in the words, felt the melody in my soul, watched as the harmonies filled up my heart and overflowed. Tears would often stream down my face as I felt God. You hear people talk about how we can believe God is here even when we can’t feel Him. But I feel Him. Through music. Through worship. It shocked me to my core when I went to Kris one day and told Him that I wondered if the way I interacted with music could be prayer. He seemed to already intuitively know that the way that I worshipped God through music was in fact prayer. I can still feel the wonder that filled me then, when I began to see that my prayer life wasn’t empty. It wasn’t non-existent. Music was the key that unlocked my prayer life. It was the place where I could literally, physically, tangibly feel the presence of God. When I began to view my worship sessions as prayer, it shifted everything for me. I wasn’t failing to pray. I was failing to realize that prayer didn’t have to look the same for everyone.
That truth shifted how I viewed my relationship with God. No longer was I feeling like a failure if I didn’t check off a box at the end of the day. Faith was this changing, shifting thing, and it was very personal to me. Kris’ relationship with God will never look the way mine does. Not because either of us are doing anything wrong, but because we are uniquely designed creations of an amazing artist. Each human has a different set of DNA. While we can share similarities with others, we are—at our core—different from anyone else out there. So, why then, would we expect our faith to look like the person next to us? Faith is personal. It is intimate. It is something that exists only between us and the One we worship.
All of that history—the wrestling, the unraveling, the discovering of God's voice in the music—is the ground I am standing on today. It is me processing my life in real-time as it is actively being rewritten. And it is the exact reason why, when I sat down to share a completely different song today, my heart and mind were hijacked by something else.
I was planning to share a song called Victory Hands Rising by Deola Rae. As I listened to it today and pondered it, the next song to play came on and immediately stopped me in my tracks. I still cling to Victory Hands Rising and encourage you to listen to it. It is one of my anthems during this season I am in. Today’s Stillness in the Sound song is called We Grow Back by Wren and the Daughters of the Bear. And I want to preface this by saying that it is NOT a Christian song. She mentions gods and some of her other music may be centered on mysticism. I am open-minded and I believe that some songs have truth in them, even if the person writing them doesn’t understand where the truth really lies. So I can hear a song and pull a Biblical or spiritual message out of it, even if that wasn’t the artist’s intention. But if this is a stumbling block for you, please do not take it in. If you do not want to support an artist that is preaching an overall message that isn’t in line with Scripture, I want to be sensitive to that. You have permission to skip over this one. I’ll link the song at the end and you can decide if it is something that your spirit will allow.
I’m going to breakdown the lyrics and how they spoke to me.
The forest doesn’t ask permission to return after the fire
The river doesn’t stop remembering the shape of its desire
The green pushes up through concrete
Trees split the stone in two
Maybe that’s why I’m still standing
I am nature too
The things that tried to bury me became the ground beneath my feet
The things that should have finished me taught me how to speak
What stood out to me in this first verse was the fact that we are nature. We are creations of God, just like the trees, just like the rivers. And we are unique creatures, because we are made in the image of God. We have a mind and a heart and a soul and a spirit. So to think about myself as a creation of God, like the trees or the river, reminds me that He made me. He knit me together, in my mother’s womb, and he lovingly instilled me with a mind that can pull truth out of anything. I see Him all around me and it permeates everything. Even when I’m watching a show that has nothing to do with God, I see Him, and I hear Him, and sometimes even, I feel His presence surrounding me.
I carry pain
I carry worry
I carry every chapter of the story
And every wild thing knows that when day gives way to black
We grow back
We grow back
I’m not a debate kind of person. In fact, I hate it. So we could debate the theology—or lack thereof—in parts of this song, but we aren’t going to. Feel free, on your own, to take issue with it, but I’m simply writing what I see and what I hear God speaking to me through this.
I have carried pain and worry. I have worn them like a cloak. For so long, I begged God to take my physical pain away. I spent an entire year chasing after peace, longing to surrender my anxiety and worries. And after that year of searching, I grew exponentially. And amazingly, I still have so far to go. So while it is a daily battle of surrendering and putting the flesh to death in terms of worry, I do still carry it. But I don’t carry it like a millstone around my neck, where it weighs me down and prevents me from moving forward. I carry it, like a battle scar. Like a testimony to anyone else who knows this struggle well. Every chapter that has been written up to this point in my life is carried in my soul and in my body. It isn’t something to be ashamed of.
Revelation 12:11: “They have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; and they did not love their lives so as to shy away from death.”
Nature is cyclical. I have native plants growing outside on my deck. My deck has exposure to full sun, all day long. The shade moves in around 4PM, and once darkness falls, my plants know what to do. They are native to the area, meaning that they are meant to thrive in this area, in the weather conditions Missouri brings. And as with any plant cycle, they need sun, and they need shade. They need darkness. It is oftentimes in this darkness that plants grow stronger. Their roots go deep and spread, strengthening the plants. They use this time to store up energy that they will need when the sun returns and bakes them in gold. God designed it this way. And if God cares for the lilies with such tenderness, how could He not also intend the same for us?
Matthew 6:28-29: “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”
Sometimes we need the darkness to grow. Sometimes it is only by exposing ourselves to the pain that we can unearth what doesn’t belong and let our roots go deep, searching for safety and nutrients that can only be found underneath the heat of the day.
Somethings break and stay broken
That’s just honest, that’s just true
The branch won’t reattach itself no matter what you do
But life keeps making homes from ruins
Life keeps finding ways to start
And sometimes what grows back is stronger because it learned to grow through dark
The things that tried to bury me became the ground beneath my feet
The things that should have finished me taught me how to speak
I love this message about how a branch can break off and cannot be reattached no matter how hard we try, no matter how desperately we want it to. Sometimes we get wounded in ways that change us. And no amount of wishing or hoping or striving can stitch the wound back together so that it is perfect once more. That’s not how life works. Life keeps moving. Weeds grow up from the concrete. Life forms and pushes through the most rocky of soils. And even though the branch that was cut off cannot be reattached and restored to its former glory, new life will still grow from the broken place. And often, because it was broken in darkness and the healing begins in darkness, what grows—though it may look different than it did before—will be stronger and sometimes healthier than what existed before.
John 15:1-5: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.”
Sometimes the breaking is necessary. Sometimes what is broken off is causing us harm or keeping us stuck in old pathways.
Some losses taught me boundaries
Some fires burned it back
Some grief became compassion
Some anger became truth
Some wounds became the reason I protect the ones I do
And if the world keeps burning
And if the sky goes black
I’ll do what living things do
I’ll grow back
I’ll do what living things do. I’ll grow back.
I love this line. It feels like my own personal anthem right now. I am in a place of darkness where I can’t see more than the one step in front of me. It’s hard and it’s scary to be in that place. But I am reminded that I am a living, breathing, child of the One True God and I will grow back.
That specific line—some wounds became the reason I protect the ones I do—is the crux of my own calling. A deep ache drove me to write an entire book centered on the story of Moana. Through that film, God showed me that my deepest wounds gave me eyes to see, and the responsibility to dive into the ocean after, other hearts that have been silenced, shattered, or stolen. It is a journey of transforming the pain in my story into a rescue mission for others.
If you want to explore everything God taught me about chasing after those stolen hearts, you can find that deeper journey in my book, Voyage With Purpose: A Wayfinder’s Journey.
I hope that you can find some of the same comfort and truth that I was able to pull from this song. God designed our bodies and our minds to heal. To grow. Every day is a new day to allow our minds to be transformed more into the image of the Creator who knows us, loves us, sees us, and wants only the best for us.
Jamie