I’m tired. Is anyone else tired?
Over the past number of years, I’ve been critically and painfully deconstructing the faith I inherited, and for just over a year now, I’ve been documenting my theological unspooling on The Faithful Citizen. But life hasn’t politely paused for these spiritual reckonings. In the past year alone, I’ve changed jobs, packed up my family to move to a new city, and welcomed a second child into the world. Between the late nights of disrupted sleep, the moving boxes, and the heavy lifting of untangling my faith, I’m experiencing a level of exhaustion that outmatches anything I’ve felt previously.
Yet whenever I try to close my notepad, step away from the theological commentaries, and be in my fatigue, an aggressive, all-too-familiar voice whispers in the back of my mind, demanding that I keep producing. It insists I need to write the next essay or reflection, figure out the next theological nuance, and finalize answers to the questions still haunting my reconstruction. My body and soul scream for a break, but my conditioning demands a deliverable.
This internal conflict isn’t just a personal quirk, nor is it a lack of discipline. It’s the ghost of toxic conditioning demanding its due.
For those of us stepping out from under high-control institutions, we must recognize a hard, historical truth about our spiritual trauma: theology never exists in a vacuum. The systems the Church built to explain God inevitably became the systems used to govern us. For years or even decades, we were marinated in a Protestant/Evangelical Work Ethic that quietly and systematically taught us to measure our inherent self-worth by our output.
And because theology always seeps into the broader society, this religious conditioning perfectly mirrors the secular “Hustle Culture” that currently dominates our modern world. They’re not competing ideologies, but the toxic fruit falling from the same tree. Both systems demand endless production and view rest as a moral failure or a sign of weakness. Whether we’re hustling for our supposed salvation in the pews or for our economic survival in the workplace, the underlying message is identical: our ultimate value is fundamentally tied to what we can produce.
Diligence is certainly a good thing, but when the Church elevated it to an ultimate good, it crafted a brutal idol. For many of us in the Wilderness of our deconstruction, we’ve carried this idol out into the desert with us, and if we don’t actively name and dismantle it, the very conditioning that exhausted us in the pews will push us until we break in the Wilderness.
In many of the rigid, religious spaces we grew up in, our earliest encounters with Scripture weren’t always about grace or divine love, but often about labour. For many of us, Sunday School was where we were first introduced to the Evangelical Work Ethic, armed with a curated selection of verses meant to enforce compliance and perpetual motion.
From a young age, Sunday School Teachers, church elders, and even parents turned to the Book of Proverbs and sternly instructed us to “Consider the ant, you sluggard” (Proverbs 6:6-11). What was likely an ancient, practical piece of agrarian wisdom about preparation was handed to us as a relentless standard of productivity. We were taught that if we weren’t constantly gathering, building, and working like the ant, we were actively falling short of God’s design.
The pulpit deepened this conditioning through vivid, mocking imagery of the “sluggard.” We heard the warnings of Proverbs 19:24, depicting a person so profoundly lazy they bury their hand in the dish but are too tired to bring it back to their mouth. We were warned about the sluggard who refuses to plow in the autumn and is left begging at the harvest (Proverbs 20:4). We were ridiculed through the caricature of the man who makes up absurd excuses, claiming, “There is a lion in the road!” to avoid going outside to work (Proverbs 26:13), or the lazy man who simply turns on his bed like a heavy door swinging on its hinges (Proverbs 26:14).
The underlying lesson was insidious: fatigue, setting a boundary, or simply needing to stop was framed as a severe moral failing, not a natural human limitation. Rest was treated with deep suspicion and, if we were caught sitting still, other than during the Sunday sermon, we were making room for the devil.
But perhaps the most devastating weapon in this theological arsenal was a grossly decontextualized reading of 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”
In its original context, the Apostle Paul addressed a specific communal crisis in the early church, where certain individuals exploited the community’s collective generosity, abandoning their responsibilities while idly waiting for Christ’s imminent return. It was a pastoral call to mutual care, urging everyone to contribute to the survival of the marginalized community.
However, as we’ve explored other topics, we’ve realized that modern Western theology has a nasty habit of stripping verses of their communal ethic, and this one is no different. 2 Thessalonians 3:10 was twisted into a cudgel to baptize a hyper-individualistic, capitalist hustle. It was used from pulpits and political podiums alike to justify ignoring the poor, punishing the exhausted, and maintaining a societal status quo where human worth was directly, and cruelly, tied to economic and physical output.
The Church effectively baptized the hustle and, by combining these scriptures, proclaimed a theology in which busyness was synonymous with godliness. We were taught to hustle for our salvation in the sanctuary and for our survival in the world, leaving hardly any room for the sacred, restorative grace of rest.
The Evangelical Work Ethic was exhausting enough on its own, but it became infinitely more destructive in the environment where it was placed in an apocalyptic pressure cooker. We were subjected to a manufactured urgency that turned every moment into a spiritual crisis.
Sermons frequently reminded us to “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). We were taught to view our lives entirely through the lens of the imminent end times, constantly warned that there is “but a step between me and death” (1 Samuel 20:3). The clock was always about to run out, the rapture was always just around the corner, and the eternal souls of our neighbours hung precariously in the balance. Under this eschatological framework, time was a rapidly depleting resource we constantly failed to maximize, never a divine gift to be savoured.
This spiritual panic mirrors the secular demands of Hustle Culture. Where the church warned us that “the end is near,” society hammered home the mantras that “time is money” and “sleep is for the weak.” Both systems use the clock as a tyrant to maintain control and drive relentless production. Whether the looming threat was eternal damnation or economic ruin, the underlying threat remained: if you stop moving, you’ll lose everything.
This environment created what we might call the trauma of the pause. If we’re conditioned to believe that our constant output is the only thing standing between humanity and hell—or between our family and failure—taking a break feels like a severe dereliction of duty. It’s why, even now, when I’m rocking my newborn to sleep, reading my toddler a bedtime story, or trying to find a quiet moment amidst the rush of the day, a sudden, sharp guilt still gnaws at me. The conditioning whispers: How can you justify being when there’s so much spiritual and physical work left to do? When you’ve been convinced the world is always burning, taking a moment to catch your breath feels deeply, almost unforgivably selfish.
The tragedy of this manufactured urgency is that it destroyed our capacity to be present. We were trained to live entirely in the future—always bracing for the end, always preparing for the next spiritual battle, always optimizing the next task. In doing so, we were robbed of the ability to inhabit the beautiful, messy, ordinary present.
We existed in a perpetual state of spiritual and economic fight-or-flight, convinced that pausing meant slipping out of God’s will. We were conditioned to be so obsessed with saving the future that we sacrificed our present peace, laying our weary bodies on the altar of productivity and calling it devotion.
The most dangerous part of leaving a toxic system is the illusion that physical distance equals internal freedom. We step out of the rigid, high-control structures of our inherited faith and into the expanse of the Wilderness, breathing a sigh of relief, believing we’ve left the heavy burdens behind. But if we’re not deeply vigilant, we end up dragging this merged monster—the Evangelical Work Ethic and Hustle Culture—into the desert with us.
Without realizing it, we begin to treat our deconstruction as just another project to be conquered, optimized, and managed, not as a delicate, sacred unspooling of our soul.
We keep our “spiritual disciplines” but swap out our rigid daily devotionals for a syllabus of more progressive theology books and deconstruction podcasts, feeling the same crushing guilt if we fall behind on our reading. We approach our repentance and reconstruction as a checklist of intellectual milestones we must hit to prove we’re truly “healing.” We treat the Wilderness like a theological escape room, convinced that if we hustle hard enough, read enough, and untangle enough verses, we’ll unlock the door and finally be free.
I know this trap intimately because I’ve been caught in it. As I balance a new job, a new city, and a newborn, I still find myself battling the exhausting, relentless drive and perceived need to figure everything out right now. I feel an artificial deadline to finish a perfectly reconstructed, beautifully inclusive theological framework as soon as possible and the artificial pressure to hit “publish” on the next essay and episode, terrified that if I pause to survive this chaotic season of life, I’ll disappoint those who engage and relate with this work, and my own spiritual growth will stagnate.
This is the tragic irony: we’re applying the same merciless, production-obsessed work ethic to our healing that caused our religious trauma in the first place, trying to hustle our way out of the hustle.
But here’s the truth we must anchor ourselves to when the panic sets in: Deconstruction isn’t a loss of salvation, and it’s certainly not a corporate deliverable.
There’s absolutely no timeline for this process. God isn’t growing frustrated and waiting impatiently for us to finalize our theological worldview. If we take a month—or a year—to exist, God doesn’t love us any less, and we’re not falling behind. Healing can’t be optimized, and grace can’t be scheduled.
If we sprint through this deeply complex, lifelong journey trying to beat a clock that doesn’t exist, we won’t find enlightenment; we’ll burn out in the Wilderness. We must stop treating our spiritual reconstruction as a race. The goal isn’t to produce a perfect theology; it’s to survive, heal, and encounter a God who doesn’t demand a timesheet.
When we reach the end of ourselves—when spiritual and physical exhaustion finally overwhelm our compulsion to keep producing—there’s profound comfort in knowing we’re not the first to collapse in the desert.
In 1 Kings 19, we find the prophet Elijah completely hollowed out. He’s just survived an epic, spiritually gruelling confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. It was the pinnacle of his prophetic career, a moment of intense labour and divine vindication. But immediately following, the adrenaline crashes. The empire, in the form of Queen Jezebel, issues a death warrant, and Elijah breaks. He flees for his life, running directly into the wilderness.
He travels a day’s journey into the desert, finds a solitary broom tree, and collapses beneath it. He’s terrified, depressed, and utterly burned out. He prays that he might die, telling God, “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life.” Elijah is experiencing the deepest, darkest form of spiritual exhaustion. He has nothing left to give, no more theological arguments to make, and no desire to keep fighting. He wants the demands to stop.
It’s here, under the meagre shade of the broom tree, that we see the true character of God in stark, beautiful contrast to the Evangelical Work Ethic we were taught.
Notice what God doesn’t do. He doesn’t appear in a whirlwind to quote Proverbs at him. Nor does He point to the ant and call Elijah a sluggard. God doesn’t even remind him that “there is but a step between him and death,” nor lecture him about the ticking clock of the apocalypse. There’s no guilt trip, no demand for quick repentance, and no five-step productivity hack to get his ministry back on track.
Instead, God provides Elijah with a nap and a warm meal.
An angel touches him gently and says, “Get up and eat.” Elijah wakes to find freshly baked bread over hot coals and a jar of water. He eats, drinks, and then does the most holy thing a deeply exhausted person can do: he goes right back to sleep. The angel returns a second time, not to scold Elijah for his lack of productivity, but to offer more nourishment, saying softly, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”
This is the reassuring theology we witness under the broom tree. It’s the breathtaking realization that when the journey is truly too much for us, God’s immediate response isn’t to demand more output, but to provide deep, restorative rest. God honours the physical and emotional limits of the human body. True rest, we discover here, is a divine gift and a fundamental human necessity, not a conditional reward for a certain level of productivity.
In a religious system and a secular culture that violently demand our endless output, stepping away is a crucial act of spiritual resistance. When we close the theological books, silence the podcast, and choose to take a nap instead of producing; when we sit in the stillness of a quiet room, refusing to optimize the afternoon—we’re actively rebelling against the machinery of empire; tearing down the idol of the hustle, reclaiming our sacred humanity, and trusting a God who meets us with bread and water in the Wilderness.
For those of you reading this and feeling the familiar, weighty ache of spiritual and physical burnout, you have divine permission to stop. Whether you’re rocking a newborn in the middle of the night, staring exhausted at a living room full of unpacked boxes, or simply sitting in silence because your mind can’t untangle one more toxic doctrine—you’re allowed to take a break. You don’t have to figure out your entire theology by the end of the day, and you’re allowed to be tired.
The Wilderness is a sacred sanctuary for unlearning. If we’re going to survive the deconstruction of our past, the repentance of our complicity, and the slow, beautiful work of spiritual reconstruction, we must radically shift our cadence. Set a sustainable pace for the journey is long—mine is sixteen years and counting—and far too much for us if we try to sprint.
Lay down the heavy, crushing yoke of Hustle Culture and reject the manufactured urgency of an Evangelical Work Ethic that demands you justify your existence through your output. You don’t have to earn your place in the desert; there’s enough room for everybody, and you certainly don’t have to hustle for your healing.
May you find the courage when needed to close the book, step away from the work, and breathe. May you learn to sit in the shade of the broom tree without apologizing for your fatigue. And in the quiet of the Wilderness, may you lean fully into the unconditional grace of a Heavenly Father who isn’t holding a stopwatch, but looked at the vastness of the cosmos He created, saw that it was good, and chose to rest.
