Last night I was standing at my counter cutting luggage tags.
That is all I was doing. Small scissors, a stack of tags, an ordinary Friday night.
And somewhere in the middle of it, it hit me all at once.
Thirty hotels. Five different ways of getting from one place to the next. Thirty-one days away from home.
Coordinated by a woman who, at twenty-six, was not entirely sure how to apply for a job online.
I stood there holding the scissors and could not quite hold the size of it.
Then I opened my phone.
Your letters had started coming in. People writing back. Telling me what season they are in. Telling me things they have not said out loud to anyone. And on Facebook I found out that people are actually reading these.
That was the part that undid me. Not the logistics. Being seen doing it.
So I am going to be honest with you, because that is the whole point of this series.
I am emotionally overwhelmed today and I need to retreat.
I am not scared to say that anymore.
And here is the part that matters. I know exactly what to do about it, because I have not always.
Read First
Mark 6:30 through 32
Three verses, and not what you think they are about.
You can stop moving and still never rest
For a long time I thought rest meant not moving.
Sit down. Take the day off. Go to bed early. Cancel the plans.
But you can stop moving and never actually rest.
Your body can be sitting still while your mind runs a marathon. You can take the day off and spend the entire day feeling guilty about the day off. You can be on vacation and still be answering emails, checking notifications, making lists, thinking about what has to happen next.
You can lie down and still be working.
I know because I have done every bit of it.
For years I thought being able to go, go, go was a strength. I liked getting things done. There was something satisfying about looking at a day and being able to say, look at everything I accomplished.
Then my body changed the rules.
What nobody warns you about
When I got sick, rest stopped being optional.
I did not handle that gracefully.
There was grief in it, and it took me years to call it grief. Grief in having to cancel. Grief in having to choose what got my energy and what did not. Grief in learning that my body was going to say no before my mind was anywhere close to ready.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes when your body can no longer keep up with the life your mind still believes you should be able to live.
For a long time I saw the need for rest as something my body had taken from me.
I am not sure that is what happened.
When exactly are we supposed to rest?
I used to think rest was what happened after the work was finished.
But the work is never finished, is it?
There is always another email. Another project. Another person who needs something.
So if rest only comes after everything is done, when exactly are we supposed to rest?
That question is what changed it for me.
Rest is not really about stopping activity. It is about stopping the need to prove I have done enough.
That part is much harder. Especially in a culture that celebrates busy. We praise the person who can handle more and push through more.
And somewhere in all of that, I learned to measure a good day by how much I accomplished.
For me, that was not laziness. I had spent so many years attaching usefulness to worth that stillness did not feel natural.
If you have ever felt guilty lying down, or restless the moment the house goes quiet, maybe it is worth asking what you have attached to being useful. I had spent years believing a good day was one I could prove I had used well.
Which brings me to a verse you already know.
Be still, and know that I am God.
It is one of the most quoted lines in Scripture and I think most of us have it backward, myself included.
The Hebrew behind be still is raphah. It does not mean be quiet or feel peaceful. It means to let go. To sink down. To drop your hands. Some translations render it cease striving.
And look at where it sits. Psalm 46 is a war psalm. Mountains falling into the sea. Nations in uproar. The earth giving way. This is not spoken to somebody having a slow morning with a candle lit.
It is spoken into chaos, to people in the middle of a fight.
So the verse we quote at tired women to get them to calm down is actually telling them something else entirely.
Stop fighting. Put your hands down.
You are not the one holding this together.
Camino History
Many Camino injuries are overuse injuries, the kind that often begin with a quiet signal somebody keeps walking through.
Sometimes the problem is not fitness. It is determination without enough recovery.
Tendinitis. Shin splints. Stress reactions. Blisters that become harder to manage because somebody kept walking on them. The pattern is familiar. Doing too much too soon, then ignoring the first quiet signal.
Many experienced pilgrims build rest days in on purpose, before they need them. It is much easier to choose a pause early than to have your body choose one for you later.
And there is a particular kind of guilt that shows up on one.
Everyone you have been walking with leaves in the morning. You watch them go. Your pack sits in the corner. You feel like you are losing.
You are not losing.
You are the reason you will finish.
Here is what nobody tells you about rest days out there. They are where a lot of the actual pilgrimage happens. You sit in a plaza for four hours with nothing to do. You go into a church in the middle of the afternoon because it is open. You have the conversation you would never have had while walking.
The medieval Camino was built with rest in it.
A network of pilgrim hospitals lined the route, founded by monasteries, confraternities, monarchs, and ordinary people who had walked it themselves. Some were single rooms. Some were enormous. Burgos and Leon still have the buildings.
They existed because everyone involved understood something we have somehow forgotten.
People were going to break down. Not the weak ones. All of them. The road was long, the bodies were human, and the infrastructure was designed around the certainty that pilgrims would need to stop.
Rest was never the exception on this road. It was in the plan from the beginning.
Scripture Study
Mark 6:30 through 32
The apostles come back to Jesus and report everything they have done and taught. Because so many people were coming and going that they had no chance even to eat, he tells them to come away with him to a quiet place and get some rest. So they leave by boat for a solitary place.
Look at the reason he gives.
It is not spiritual. It is that they had not eaten.
These are men who have just come back from doing exactly what he sent them to do. They are full of stories. This is the high point. And his response is not to send them out again.
It is to tell them to go somewhere quiet and eat something.
Now look at the timing, because that is the part that undoes me.
The crowd has not gone home. The work is not finished. There are still people coming and going. He tells them to rest in the middle of the demand, not after it.
If you have been waiting for a natural break before you stop, they did not get one either.
They got in the boat anyway.
Dig Deeper
Read the next few verses, because this is where it gets honest.
The crowd sees them leaving. They run around the lake on foot and get there first. When Jesus steps off the boat, the quiet place is full of people.
The rest gets interrupted.
He has compassion on them and teaches them anyway, and then feeds five thousand of them.
So the rest day did not work.
And he still told them to take it.
I keep coming back to that, because most of us treat an interrupted rest as proof that resting was pointless. The plan fell apart, so why bother trying.
This passage says otherwise. Attempted rest that gets interrupted is not the same thing as never attempting it. The instruction was still right. The boat still left the shore.
One more thing. He does not tell them to rest so they can work harder afterward. There is no productivity clause anywhere in it.
He tells them to rest because they are tired and they have not eaten. That is the entire reason, and apparently it was enough of one.
What today looks like
So here is what I am doing with an overwhelmed Saturday, nine days out, with a list that is not finished.
I am starting at a new cafe I have been wanting to try. Good coffee, somewhere I have never sat before.
Then I am walking the mall for the last few things I need. Slowly. Not as an errand to survive.
And I am ending the day taking Thor and Chanel for a walk.
That is the whole plan. That is the retreat.
It is not dramatic and it is not a spa and it is not a week off. It is a Saturday I gave myself on purpose, because I noticed something before it took me down.
Ten years ago I would have pushed through this. I would have finished the list, answered everything, kept moving, and been sick a week before the plane.
So when people ask how I get everything done, the real answer is that I let people help me and I stop before I run out. I could not tell you the exact day that changed. I know it is the reason I am still standing.
Carrying everything has not made you holy.
It has made you exhausted.Silent to Spoken: A Woman's Journey Through the Pause
Have I slowed down enough to experience rest?
Yes.
This is the one thing in these eighteen days I am not still figuring out.
I slow down to notice the birds. I take the coffee date. I text the friend instead of adding her to a list of people I will get back to.
I do not post when I am exhausted. I will not hold my rest hostage to an algorithm, or to what anyone else is doing, or to a schedule I invented.
Rest has given me more of my life back. Not more output. More life.
What if one day never comes
Almost everyone I know is waiting for one day. One day when things calm down. One day when the list is finished. One day when they finally have permission to breathe.
But what if one day never comes?
I would rather live. Key word, live. Love. Laugh.
One of my favorite things in the world is sitting and watching the world go on around me. Listening to the sounds of it. Smelling it. Letting it in instead of moving past it.
That is what I am protecting. Not productivity. That.
Which brings me to Spain
I have two intentional rest days built into this trip. Not emergency ones. Planned, before I have taken a step, in the middle of a route I built around a body that has its own terms.
Most people would not call my Camino traditional.
I grieved that. I want to be honest about it, because it would be easy to pretend I made peace with it instantly.
I am genuinely happy for anyone who can do it the other way.
And I am celebrating that I am setting out on a midlife adventure with rest built into it on purpose.
There is a lot I still carry. You have read seven letters of it.
This is the one thing I do not.
I do not carry guilt about resting when my body needs it. Not anymore.
I can be still and still be safe.Silent to Spoken: A Woman's Journey Through the Pause
Reflection
Write honestly or do not write at all. Nobody is reading this but you.
- When I picture a rest day, what do I actually see?
- When did I last stop moving and genuinely rest at the same time?
- What am I still trying to prove, and who am I proving it to?
- What would change if I stopped measuring a good day by how much I accomplished?
- What am I carrying that somebody else would help me with if I asked?
Prayer
Father,
I have treated rest like something I have to earn, and I have never quite earned it.
Quiet the voice that says I am falling behind. Quiet the one that calls it laziness when it is really just my body telling the truth.
Teach me that stopping is not quitting, and that You have never once measured my days the way I measure them.
Help me be still long enough to receive what You have been trying to give me.
And where I need help, give me the humility to ask for it.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
Camino Challenge
When you think of a rest day, what do you actually picture?
Be honest with yourself here. Is it silence, without your phone? Or is it lying on the couch scrolling, which is not rest and we both know it.
Even on the seventh day, there was rest. It was built into the design before anybody was tired.
All the way through Scripture, people retreat. Jesus withdrew. Elijah went to a cave. Moses went up a mountain. David hid in one.
So today, figure out what your retreat is.
Not what it should be. What it actually is, for you. Mine today is a new cafe, a slow walk through a mall, and two dogs at the end of the day.
Write it down. Then, if you do not currently take a rest day at all, write one boundary this week that would make one possible.
Not a plan. A boundary.
A plan is something you hope to do.
A boundary is something you defend.
Tomorrow We'll Walk…
Most pilgrims put in headphones for the first few days. Almost all of them take them out eventually.
Tomorrow we walk in silence, and we sit with a prophet who had just won the greatest public victory of his life and was hiding in a cave asking to die.
There was a wind that tore the mountains apart. Then an earthquake. Then fire.
God was in none of them.
What is your retreat? Write me back below. I read every one, and yesterday I read all of them twice.
Don't quit in the quiet.
Sharing love,
~ Jenn