Dethroning the Idol

After growing up at Willow Creek, Shauna Niequist has become an accomplished author and one of the church’s most beloved guest teachers. Her books are always insightful and beautifully written. Her latest work, Present Over Perfect, will release on August 9, 2016.  Here’s a sneak peak:

Busyness is an illness of the spirit.

—Eugene Peterson

I come from a long line of hard workers—sheet metal workers, farmers, people for whom work is an estimable thing, something to respect and be grateful for. I got my first summer job when I was eleven. I rode my bike two miles to the windsurfer shop down by the marina in South Haven, and while the owner and his friends—all in their twenties—slept off hangovers and ran out to the beach at a moment’s notice if the wind piped up, I decorated the shop’s window displays and rearranged the stickers and sunglasses.

And I went to one of those high schools where much was expected of us—AP classes and academic scholarships to good colleges, high test scores, loads of extracurriculars rounding out our applications. While I was in high school, I was also volunteering several days a week and a few nights at my church, too—devoted to the high school ministry, teaching Sunday school to grade school kids. And I worked at the Gap, and at Boloney’s, a much-loved deli near my high school.

In college, I was all over the map spiritually and couldn’t be bothered to attend chapel or church, but I took a full class load every semester, worked in the library, and worked at a summer camp that kept me running from morning till night, quite literally.

All that to say, I’ve been working all my life. Work has been a through line, one that I’m very thankful for, one that has taught me so much about the benefits of structure, discipline, skill, communication and responsibility.

But at some point, good clean work became something else: an impossible standard to meet, a frantic way of living, a practice of ignoring my body and my spirit in order to prove myself as the hardest of hard workers.

As I unravel the many things that brought me to this crisis point, one is undeniably my own belief that hard work can solve anything, that pushing through is always the right thing, that rest and slowness are for weak people, not for high-capacity people like me.

Oh, the things I did to my body and my spirit in order to maintain my reputation as a high-capacity person. Oh, the moments I missed with people I love because I was so very committed to being known as the strongest of the strong. Oh, the quiet moments alone with God I sacrificed in order to cross a few things off the to-do list I worshiped.

Productivity became my idol, the thing I loved and valued above all else. We all have these complicated tangles of belief and identity and narrative, and one of the early stories I told about myself is that my ability to get-it-done is what kept me around. I wasn’t beautiful. I didn’t have a special or delicate skill. But I could get stuff done, and it seemed to me that ability was my entrance into the rooms into which I wanted to be invited.

I couldn’t imagine a world of unconditional love or grace, where people simply enter into rooms because the door is open to everyone. The world that made sense to me was a world of earning and proving, and I was gutting it out just like everyone around me, frantically trying to prove my worth.

Over time, a couple things happened. I wish I could tell you that when my health suffered, I paid attention, listened to my body, changed course. I did not. I kept going when I was sick, when I was pregnant, when I was still bleeding from a miscarriage. I kept going when I had vertigo—seasick on dry land—when I couldn’t sleep past 3 a.m., when I threw up a couple times a week in stressful situations.

But what I eventually realized is that the return on investment was not what I’d imagined, and that the expectations were only greater and greater. When you devote yourself to being known as the most responsible person anyone knows, more and more people call on you to be that highly responsible person. That’s how it works. So the armload of things I was carrying became higher and higher, heavier and heavier, more and more precarious.

At the same time, I was more and more aware that I was miserable. Not all the time, of course, but sometimes, in those rare moments when I let myself really feel honestly, instead of filling in the right answers, I realized with great surprise that this way of living was not making me happy at all.

People called me tough. And capable. And they said I was someone they could count on. Those are all nice things. Kind of. But they’re not the same as loving, or kind or joyful. I was not those things.

I believed that work would save me, make me happy, solve my problems; that if I absolutely wore myself out, happiness would be waiting for me on the other side of all that work.

But it wasn’t.

On the other side was just more work. More expectations, more responsibility. I’d trained a whole group of people to know that I would never say no, I would never say “this is too much.” I would never ask for more time or space, I would never bow out. And so they kept asking, and I was everyone’s responsible girl.

And I was so depleted, I couldn’t even remember what whole felt like. I felt used up by the work, but of course it was I who was using the work, not the other way around. I was using it to avoid something, to evade something. I was using it to prevent myself from becoming acquainted with the self who sat hidden by all the accomplishment.

I wanted to get to know that person, make friends with her. I wanted to learn to beckon her out from behind the accomplishment, and, when the wind piped up, take her off to the sea.

Taken from Present Over Perfect by Shauna Niequist. Copyright © 2016 by Shauna Niequist. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com.