DAY 5: Discovering Balance

I did a podcast episode a few years back about seasons. There are indeed seasons of extreme focus, discipline, and hard work. Other seasons are made for rest, replenishment, and refreshment. For optimal health, we must create a lifestyle where those seasons overlap. In fact, they cease to become seasons and eventually become one and the same because they depend on each other. Work evokes the rest. That rest then empowers more work. Self-care without productivity to drive it becomes futile.

Some of you will see the word "rest" and think you just saw a four-letter word, and you did. I am talking about the cursing, profane type four-letter word, though. This is because rest in our society, particularly American society, is so underrated and somewhat looked down upon. Even God rested according to Genesis 2, and surely you don’t believe yourself to be better than Him.

Without self-care and the rest and reset it brings, how can you have the energy, the time, or the space to live in your calling and be all that God has called you to be?

How can you explore your purpose in Christ when you fill your life up with everything but him?

How can you reach and impact the people He’s placed in your path if your heart is clogged with the cares of life and your intentions are never reset and attuned to His will?

When you don’t rest or seek recovery in the form of self-care, you operate in pride. Your self-reliance can be self-destructive. And if you let pride become a stronghold, you miss so much of the life and the purpose God has for you.

You let God know in slight, subtle ways that He is not in control of your life and its outcomes - you are. Allowing God to be your refuge and your peace is the greatest form of self-care. Accepting the fact that the ways of the world are not the ways of God is a key factor in grasping the concept of self-care.

To hustle and grind, to risk sleep and solitude, to ignore imbalance as if it were normal sounds crazy, but that’s actually what we do. The craziness, the busyness, the chaos, the loudness - it's cool but it's not God.

If you are to be all that God has called you to be, you must have clarity of mind. While in the process of seeking and pursuing clarity, you realize the despair you've been in and how you may have been masking it as normal.

Answer these questions and reflect on your answers:

1. In what ways can you surrender control to God's sovereignty in your self-care journey?
2. Reflect on moments when you have felt closest to God. How can you integrate those experiences into your self-care routine?
3. What practices can you incorporate to nurture your physical health as a reflection of honoring God's temple?

Affirm and declare these statements:

• As I honor my body, mind, and spirit, I honor God.
• I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
• I embrace grace for myself and extend grace to others.

Pray in petition to God to pursue His will and way.