“My Soul is Tired” Maybe what we need is not rest, but reordering

This video is incisive and deeply persuasive—I kept thinking, “Why, yes, that’s true.”

«WHEN THE SOUL IS TIRED

There is a kind of exhaustion sleep cannot touch.

You can rest your body and still wake up inwardly crowded. Not broken enough to stop functioning. Just too scattered to pray, too numb to feel deeply, too full of noise to notice God.

That is one of the quiet tragedies of our age. Not always unbelief, but overstimulation. A soul fed with fragments, urgency, comparison, and constant distraction until silence itself begins to feel threatening.

Orthodoxy has always known that attention is not neutral. What you repeatedly give your mind to begins to shape what you love. And what you love begins to shape who you become.

This is why prayer matters so much. Not as one more task, but as return. The soul does not heal by staying busy enough to avoid itself. It heals by turning back to Christ again and again, even tired, even dry, even restless.

Sometimes the soul is not asking for escape.

It is asking for reordering.»

About Frederica Mathewes-Green

Frederica Mathewes-Green is a wide-ranging author who has published 11 books and 800 essays, in such diverse publications as the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Smithsonian, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a regular commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), a columnist for the Religion News Service, Beliefnet.com, and Christianity Today, and a podcaster for Ancient Faith Radio. (She was also a consultant for Veggie Tales.) She has published 11 books, and has appeared as a speaker over 600 times, at places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Wellesley, Cornell, Calvin, Baylor, and Westmont, and received a Doctor of Letters (honorary) from King University. She has been interviewed over 700 times, on venues like PrimeTime Live, the 700 Club, NPR, PBS, Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. She lives with her husband, the Rev. Gregory Mathewes-Green, in Johnson City, TN. Their three children are grown and married, and they have fifteen grandchildren.

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