So, I want to start this new little venture on T1:9 with a confession that feels slightly uncomfortable to type out loud, especially on a platform dedicated to holding fast to sound doctrine and encouraging the Church. It is seven-thirty on a Tuesday morning, the windscreen wipers are fighting a losing battle against the horizontal Yorkshire drizzle, and I am sitting in traffic listening to the audio Bible through the car speakers while simultaneously wondering if I remembered to reply to a client’s email from the afternoon before. By the time the voice in the dashboard has finished reading through an entire chapter of an epistle, I realise with a sinking feeling in my stomach that I have absorbed precisely none of it, and that my morning devotion has once again felt entirely perfunctory.
If you are a man in the middle seasons of life, balancing a marriage, children, a demanding career, and a genuine desire to serve your local church, I suspect that particular knot of guilt might be familiar to you. Our days are packed to the rafters with doing things for other people, whether that is solving problems in the workplace, ferrying family members around, or turning up early on a Sunday to make sure the service runs smoothly and the study notes are ready. We pour ourselves out all day long, genuinely wanting a deeper, richer walk with the Lord, only to collapse into a chair at ten o’clock at night with our eyelids feeling like lead weights, far too exhausted to string two coherent sentences together in prayer, let alone embark on a deep theological study.
In the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury opened his famous Proslogion by urging the believer to “flee, for a little while, your occupations; hide yourself, for a time, from your disturbing thoughts. Cast aside, now, your burdensome cares, and put away your toilsome business. Yield room for some little time to God; and rest for a little time in him.”
Those are wonderful words, and every time I read them my heart aches for that kind of quietness, yet Anselm himself immediately went on to confess the sheer difficulty of actually doing it when he wrote, “I strove toward God, and I stumbled on myself. I sought calm in privacy, and I found tribulation and grief, in my inmost thoughts.” When we try to shut the door of our minds at the end of a long working day, we very often stumble straight over our own exhaustion.
What follows is a quiet, creeping disheartening sense of sadness that we rarely speak about in the church or coffee gathering post-service for we men often look at our general fatigue and we interpret it as spiritual failure, convincing ourselves that we are letting God down and that a man who helps lead or serve others ought to be operating on a much higher plane of spiritual vitality.
Even my preaching hero Charles Spurgeon, a man who knew the weight of constant ministry better than most, spoke with remarkable candour to his students about the seasons when a serving man’s mind and spirit simply run dry, observing in Lectures to My Students that “good men are promised tribulation in this world, and ministers may expect a larger share than others, that they may learn sympathy with the Lord’s suffering people, and so may be fitting shepherds of an ailing flock.”
Yet because we are the ones people often look to for reliability, we rarely admit that we are ailing ourselves. We maintain a cheerful, competent facade over the post-service biscuits, nodding along when someone asks how our week has been, while inwardly aching for just one trusted spiritual friend or adviser with whom we could sit over a proper cup of coffee and speak with complete, unfiltered frankness. Centuries before Christ, the Roman statesman Cicero put his finger on the exhausting nature of living behind a polite mask when he wrote in his treatise De Amicitia (On Friendship) that in the company of a true friend you are free to lay your whole heart bare, whereas without such companionship life is stripped of its sweetness and surrounded by pretence. Later, the Christian writers of the early and medieval Church anchored this in the Gospel, recognising that two men walking together in honesty always have Christ walking between them as the third.
When we read Paul’s instructions to the early church, we find that our faith was never designed to be a solo endurance event performed behind a mask of stoic self-sufficiency. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2, ESV), which carries the rather obvious, practical implication that before anyone can help carry your burden, you actually have to let them see that you are carrying one in the first place. Similarly, when the writer to the Hebrews urges us to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another” (Hebrews 10:24-25, ESV), he is describing a robust, honest fellowship that goes far deeper than polite small talk about the weather or the church heating bill.
And when it comes to that heavy feeling that we are constantly letting God down because our evening prayers dissolve into sleep, there is a wonderful, grounding comfort to be found in Augustine’s famous prayer at the opening of his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Notice that the restlessness and the longing you feel in the car on the way to work is not proof that God has abandoned you or that you have abandoned or failed Him; rather, that very ache is the evidence that your heart still belongs to Him.
The great gift of the Book of Common Prayer and the historic liturgy is the reminder that our standing with God does not rest upon the intensity of our emotional energy at the end of a gruelling Thursday, but upon the finished work of Christ and the steady, objective grace of a Father who knows our frame. As the Psalmist gently reminds us, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13-14, ESV).
Our Heavenly Father is not standing over us with a clipboard marking down our tired eyes as a moral failing; He knows that we are dust, and He loves us in the middle of the traffic jam just as much as He does at the altar rail.
That is precisely why I am launching a new space here on the T1:9 website called Resonate. I don’t pretend to have a neat, three-step formula that will magically give you (or me!) four extra hours of energy every evening, nor am I setting myself up as a guru who has conquered the distractions of a busy life. Rather, I want Resonate to be the digital equivalent of that quiet corner table in a coffee shop, a place specifically for men who love the Lord, who spend their lives serving their families, their workplaces, and their churches, yet who often feel spiritually worn thin and isolated behind the role they play.
If any of what I have written here strikes a chord with your own week, I want you to know first of all that you are categorically not alone in the pew. My hope is that through these posts, and more importantly through the comments and conversations that follow them, we can begin to build a genuine brotherhood of honesty where the facade can finally be set down. Pull up a chair and leave a thought in the comments below if you are happy to share with the wider brotherhood, or if you would simply value a quiet, confidential chat with someone who understands the weight of the week, please do reach out to me directly by email or through the contact form over on the T1:9 homepage. You do not have to carry the load on your own.
Brother, have a great day.
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