How to work from a place of belovedness
How to work and rest from a place of belovedness, what types of rest can save you from burnout and exhausting vacations, and how ridiculous songs like “You Make the Poops” can honor God.
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[0:00:04] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. I'm Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of Mere Christians? Those of us who aren't pastors or religious professionals, but who work as loan officers, roofers, and medical assistants? That's the question we explore every week. Today, I'm posing it to Justin McRoberts. He's a songwriter, musician, and author of a terrific new book called, Sacred Strides: The Journey to Belovedness in Work and Rest.
Justin and I sat down and had a terrific conversation about how practically to work and rest from a place of belovedness in Christ. We talked about what types of rest can save you from burnout and exhausting vacations. We even talked about how ridiculous songs, like Justin's You Make the Poops, can honor God. This is one of my favorite episodes I've recorded this year. You guys are going to love this conversation with Justin McRoberts.
[EPISODE]
[0:01:13] JR: Hey, Justin. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast, man.
[0:01:15] JM: Happy to be here, man. Thanks for having me.
[0:01:17] JR: I’m excited were getting a chance to hang. I've been a fan of yours from afar for a little bit. You've done a lot, professionally. I was rereading your bio. I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” What’s the short version of the Justin McRoberts story?
[0:01:28] JM: From a professional standpoint, Seth Godin says that art is anything you do that forces a connection between people. As my skill set has evolved, as my passions have changed, what I'm really up to has stayed the same. I do the best I can to form connections with people.
[0:01:47] JR: That's the true line.
[0:01:48] JM: That's the true line. It was music for a long time, and even doing it while I was playing music, I was telling a lot of stories. We became storytelling, which parlayed itself into some preaching, which parlayed itself into retreat leading and books and podcasts and whatever way I can find. It's like whatever way I can get to you, that's how I'm going to get to you. That's been the story.
[0:02:11] JR: It's like the medium doesn't matter. I'm here to tell stories and make connections between people.
[0:02:14] JM: Yeah. The medium is it matters. It just matters secondarily. I try not to get hung up on the specifics of the thing. I want to do it well. I think that's what I mean like whatever I can do well is what I want to be doing, like the medium matters and so far as like it needs to be beautiful, it needs to be executed because that's the way you love people, is you do your craft well. But the thing that matters in the core of all of it is the connection between myself and the folks that I'm trying to connect with and the connections I help them forge with other people on the other side of those conversations.
[0:02:47] JR: Very well said. Are you still writing songs?
[0:02:49] JM: On occasion. It comes up, I mean, I don't think it'll ever go away and it came up more recently because I've got a 13-year-old boy who is incredibly musically talented. He likes the craft of making music. I find myself back in the throes of it again. It's a distant personal passion buried back in there somewhere, but it does come up.
[0:03:12] JR: Did your son help you write the terrific song that's now on my kid's Spotify playlist, You Make the Poops?
[0:03:17] JM: Yes. As a matter of fact. My son, I'll confess this. He helped to hone the tail end of that, but it really was mostly mine. The song about poop really was mostly mine. Then later, I got to pawn it off on him because he's a kid, but yeah. I love it.
[0:03:36] JR: That's very good. But serious question, like you have a lot of songs that talk about God, explicitly. You got a lot that don't, that are just ridiculousness. How does ridiculous work? How does fun work, like You Make the Poops? How does that matter to God? How can a song like that honor God?
[0:03:53] JM: You know what I think God is honored by is the fullness of a human life. I don't think God is particularly interested in a, like specific shape or a specific expression or only a specific expression of humanity. I think God is honored by a full human life. One of the ways we know we're living a full life is the experience of joy. One of the ways we know that we are experiencing joy is that we are laughing.
Humor, far more than just a delivery tool, is a metric. A humor is a way we know we are alive and connected and aware of ourselves and our relationship with others. Humor as a way we can actually notice, I feel connected to you. I feel safe with you. I feel comfortable in this place. I know myself well enough to have altitude on myself. Humor is a way to measure whether or not I'm actually alive and enjoying my life. I think God is honored by a full human expression of life.
[0:04:48] JR: Yeah. I think God has a sense of humor. See the platypus. I think, listen, say what you will about the chosen, whether or not it's good art, debate both sides of that, but I do think they get the voice of Jesus.
[0:05:00] JM: Right.
[0:05:01] JR: I love that like Jesus has a sense of humor. There's a scene where he walks to the house and the owner of the house is like, “Be careful of that room. It's haunted.” Jesus is like, “I'll take that one.” Yeah, I could see Jesus saying that, right? Like humor is a metric. It's not just a delivery mechanism. Well, hey, talk about Sacred Strides, this new book from what I've read. Every page I've read so far has been lights out, profound. Why did you write this book?
[0:05:26] JM: Almost everything I do at this point in my life specifically, I do because, it's been in me for a long time. These are stories and reflections I have been in and in conversation with for honestly going on 17, 18 years. I've been in these conversations about the relationship between work and rest with people I coach or with people I was pastoring or with friends for a whole long time. The moment seemed ripe, post-pandemic. A whole lot of rethink was going down. A whole lot of like I used to do this and now everything's changed and what am I going to do?
The conversation I wanted to have with folks on the other side of the big rethink, whether they're doing church work, whether they're doing, they're running a business, whether they're trying to figure out from the ground up, what am I going to do with my life? I wanted to move past just what am I going to do or how I'm into like why do you want to do it? What's in there? What's actually driving you to want to build a business? What's driving you to want to start this entrepreneurship? What's driving you to want to rebuild the thing that fell apart?
I think at the core of it, we're not just trying to build stuff. We're not even just trying to make a living or even make a name for ourselves. I think at the core of our work lives, the question on the table is like, is there a place for me in the world? Am I loved? Am I experiencing myself as a beloved person on the planet? I think the thing we're chasing when we work is actually belovedness. That was actually the impetus.
instead of it being a book about rest or even really a book about work rest rhythms, at the core of the book is this mantra of sorts, that my natural posture isn't rest and my natural posture isn't work. My natural posture is belovedness. My work and my rest both flow from my belovedness and then return me to it. I wanted to frame the conversation differently so that we weren't just rehashing the same old conversation. We weren't just running over the same old road and hoping you do it differently. Instead, we were slowing down to pay attention to the road in front of us and saying, “Why do I do what I do? Why do I want to do what I do? What's actually driving me?” Then help us move forward from there.
[0:07:26] JR: You just like breeze past one of the most profound sentences that have ever been spoken on the podcast. I'm want to part there for a second, because I feel like we could do an entire episode on this. I pulled up a line for the book. Here it is. “My natural posture is not work, nor is my natural posture rest. My natural posture is belovedness and both work and rest spring from my belovedness and return it to me.” We're going to break this down, but first, what do you mean when you say your natural posture is belovedness? I think some listeners are like, “What the heck is this guy talking about?”
[0:08:00] JM: Exactly. They should definitely read the book, because it's there. The thing I'm chasing, so Parker Palmer, who's a voice in my life, has mattered a whole lot, suggests that – he doesn't use words like work and rest so much as he'll talk about things like action and contemplations, just different language for the same conversation. What Palmer says is that action and contemplation are both ways we are getting to a sense of full aliveness, that both action and contemplation spring from the same place, which is my relentless desire to be fully alive.
When I pick a job, let's start with work because I think that's where a lot of us in this realm are starting. This is a place where we talk about what am I doing? Well, what I can have, and you and I both know this, I can have exactly the job I want. That I could design a job for myself. You and I live in the same space here, where it's like, I've designed my job for me. No one designed these things for me. I designed my job for myself. There are days when I feel deeply connected with what I do and deeply connected with the world in and through what I do, deeply connected with God in through what I do.
There are also days when I don't. The difference between those days is not whether or not I feel like I'm in touch with the job, whether or not I'm in touch with like my place in the world of the job. In other words, when I pick a job, what I'm really pursuing is a sense of being fully alive. What makes a job really worth it in the long run and from the perspective of actually deep soul-level human experience, what makes work feel great is that I'm connected, I feel fully alive in it. That's what actually makes it worth it. I flip that word when I talk about belovedness because I think the framework for being fully alive is being connected with God. I think that's the thing. When we talk about being fully alive, am I connected with God in and through what I do? Belovedness is the way I like to talk about that.
[0:09:42] JR: Yeah. Because I think a lot of people here are fully alive. It's like, “Do whatever you want, follow your passions, follow your dreams, do whatever makes you happy.” You're talking about something different here.
[0:09:50] JM: Yes, I am. I'm not against following your passions. I think your passions will lead you to certain places. Then your passions will change, which is fascinating, isn't it? We'll get to a place, we'll follow our passions, we'll get to where we think we're going to be supposed to be. Then we're standing in that place and things start to change. I'm not as fully satisfied. Our passion are the glimpses we have into full aliveness. They're decent guides, but they're terrible trainers.
They'll get us to a certain place, but once we're in that certain place, discipline has to pick up and another form of self-examination, like yeah, follow your passions. Then once you get there, do some thinking, and some rebuilding, and some reexamination. Then, by the way, your passions will change and certainly follow them again. Let's see where this whole thing takes us to. Your passions are these glimpses into this deep desire we have to live completely and fully alive, connected to ourselves, connected to the people around us, connected to God. They're guides with it. They're not the whole thing.
[0:10:52] JR: Yeah. They're not the whole thing, because there's been lots of research. I talk about this in an old book of mine called Master of One, that shows that following your passions isn't the best path to finding vocational joy. The way you find sustainable passion and joy in the work is doing work that primarily serves others with excellence. It's mastering the craft, which is what you were talking about a few minutes ago, right? Like that's how we find sustainable joy for ourselves is by seeking to serve first rather than be served in the image of Christ, right?
[0:11:20] JM: Yes. That's part of what happened. We'll get to the place where we think we're going to be, or think it's supposed to be, we're doing that job, we've created the thing, and we'll find ourselves maybe slightly disappointed or a little bit disconnected, because it's never the job itself that actually is satisfying. Again, I’ll go back to Seth Godin. It's the connection that we have. What makes it art, what makes it beautiful, what makes it good is the connection, what the thing we're doing, forges between ourselves and the folks we're working with.
[0:11:46] JR: Yeah. I think if you can rest in the belovedness of God, rest in your status as a beloved child of God, then the what we do becomes a whole lot less important because regardless of circumstances, I can find a lot more joy in the work, because I'm experiencing that belovedness, right? But like this isn't something you get, “one time” and then move past. So like, how do you as you do the work, work you love, but the work that's going to be frustrating, how do you remind yourself of the belovedness of the father on a regular basis as you do the work?
[0:12:24] JM: That's great. I'll say a couple of things. One is I think like in the context of a life of belovedness or a full aliveness, whichever language you want to use, the work takes on a different importance. One of the things that goes away is anxiousness. Oftentimes when it comes to doing important work, we tend to live with this anxiousness, we’re anxious about the work or about its effectiveness. One of the ways I measure significance in my immaturity is I have that sense of, I've got to nail this thing.
There’s a story in the book that I'll just tell, my dad who was my initial model for what doing work looked like. I loved watching my dad get ready for work. He was up at five, a white V-neck, the suit and tie, old spice, like went to work, left at 6:30 in the morning. That didn't seem until like 7:15 – he worked. I loved his work ethic. I liked that he put the hours in. I still that about people. You and I totally resonate here. I love watching folks apply themselves to something and giving like hours and passion. I love that.
Well, what I didn't know as a child, five years old, when I was watching my dad get ready. I didn't really know exactly what was driving him. Come along 12-years-old. Again, this is a story in the book, he invites me to set up this office for him, this new business venture. I'm on the floor at 12-years-old, because there's no furniture in the office. I'm applying stamps to these envelopes and I'm doing it poorly. My father comes over and sees that all these stamps are all contact crooked on these envelopes and he gets really, really, really upset.
My dad didn't get angry very much. He was a passionate person, but anger wasn't a key feature in our relationship or in my experience of him, but he was really clearly angry. What I think as a kid at 12 is that he's mad at me for doing a bad job. That wasn't entirely untrue, but the thing underneath it was this, he was terrified. He was scared that – and I get this now as a professional, he was scared that if this didn't go well, these envelopes showed up and they were sloppy that he would lose out on a relationship. If he missed out on this relationship, that's a business connection he might have and that that connection falls through, then this one does, and now the business venture isn't going to work and then life's going to fall apart.
There was this anxiousness that was part of the metric for importance of work in my dad's life that he was driven by a little bit of a fear and an anxiousness that he had to do this thing and had to do it well, otherwise things would fall apart. That happens in all kinds of facets of work, including hyper-religious work. You and I both know pastors who feel that way all the time. Do they put hours and hours and hours into putting the sermon together? Yes. Do they do it because they love it? Probably, up to a certain point.
Do they also do it, because there is this anxiousness driving them that you have to get this thing down, you have to pin this, otherwise maybe God's going to be disappointed, or your church is going to fall apart, or their souls on the line. One of the things that happens when we actually function from a place of belovedness in our work is that anxiousness starts to go away. I function from one, the primary knowledge that God is actually going to do what God said. God's going to do, which is to hold the world together.
[0:15:39] JR: God doesn't need you to do anything.
[0:15:40] JM: No, and he invited you into this work. Yes, because you've got incredible skills, but he invited you into this work because you're loved.
[0:15:47] JR: He wants to be with –
[0:15:48] JM: Because he wants to be with you. The counterbalance to that story is in the years later towards the tail end of my father's life. I'm not exposing anything you should be exposing. I lost my dad to depression and suicide when I was in my mid-20s, because all that anxiousness eventually caught up with him, which by the goes back to the earlier question, like why write this book? Yeah, because I watched that happen. He's going on 54. I think, at the time, I'm like 20, 24-ish at the time. My dad, we went running together. That was one of the things we liked to do, but I didn't start running with my dad because I wanted to get in shape. I wanted to be with my dad. That's it. That's a thing he did that he loved. I would go running with my dad.
On this last run, we took together. Again, this is a story in the book, like we like got two miles into this four-and-a-half-mile runway plan, and he just couldn't go anymore. His knee was hurting. There are all kinds of things going on with his body. As we're walking back, he's trying to hide his face from me, because he's, he's crying and he's apologizing. I'm sorry, I can't keep up. I'm sorry, I can't keep up. I'm sorry, I can't keep up.
I could not have articulated it at the time but I can now. I didn't care that he couldn't keep up. I just wanted to be with my dad. That's it. That's why I was there. I moved around to the side of his body, where his knee was starting to fall apart. I picked up his wrist and threw it over my shoulders. We walked that last mile, which was at least as satisfying a moment as doing the whole jog because the ball game wasn't like getting the jog done. The ball game was being together.
Now, I tell that story, not because I'm trying to forge some like emotional connection with a reader like, “Oh, we can trust Justin now.” I think that's the heart of the father in and through all facets of life, but very specifically work. Why were you invited to do the work you were invited to do? Is it because it's important work? Yes, that's not untrue. Is it because you are shaped a certain way and you have a certain skill set and these things are going to be really good for other people? Yes, that is also certainly true. The thing that underpins all of it is that you are invited into work by God who is holding all things together so that you would be connected to God. Period. Everything else is true. It's just secondarily true.
[0:18:01] JR: I love this term that Keller used to use. You're talking about the work beneath the work.
[0:18:06] JM: Yes.
[0:18:07] JR: Right.
[0:18:07] JM: Exactly, right.
[0:18:08] JR: All of us, it's like those motives are mixed. We talk about the pastor. We talk about the Mere Christian listening. Listen, they believe that their work, and it is, it's a means of glorifying God and loving neighbor itself. Praise the Lord. Great motivation, right? There is also an ugly side to the work, beneath the work. There's also less than God-honoring motivations of fear, of anxiousness, of performance, right, like you coach people to free them from the work beneath their work today, like what do those conversations look like? I don't know if you can even go there, but like if you could coach your dad today, your dad's a client, what would you recommend he do to free himself in the work beneath his work?
[0:18:50] JM: Man, honestly, a lot of these conversations, specifically around fear, they have to happen after failure. In other words, when we or what we would call failure like we want to have these conversations really early with folks in their 20s, but the truth of the matter is like you really have to like do an important thing and then watch it fall apart in order to really have the conversation, because these are not cognitive academic conversations. They're formative conversations. Formation happens, not just in your brain. It does happen in your brain. It happens in your guts. It happens in your spirit. It happens in your body.
These have to be things that we actually have to try, and then fail, and then actually stop. This is where rest comes in. Actually stop, and pay attention to what just happened, and not just the metrics, because we should pay attention to the metrics, but also pay attention to how we feel and who we are in retrospect. I wrote the book in this way where there's a relationship between work and rest. One of the things that rest does is it does not just like give us a break from the awfulness of having to do work.
Actually, rest provides a space in which we can evaluate the goodness of work. We can evaluate ourselves in work. On the other side of a failure, most of these conversations of what we call a failure, I try to walk people through and I would walk my dad through like, “Hey, as M&H travel was falling apart, let's talk about what was actually going on. You were terrified. You were barking at your kid in an office. I know that's not who you want to be. Let's talk about that moment. What's going on in your brain?”
What I try to do is I try to march through those moments as best I can, really slowly and provide the space necessary in a posture of rest that we can evaluate who we are when we're doing our work because while we're doing it, I don't have time. I don't have time to just evaluate myself like every 15 minutes while I'm actually doing the job. What I need to do is I need to take more regular space in between projects or the tail ender projects. On the other side of successes and failures to look back and say, “Who have I been, while I have been doing this?”
[0:20:49] JR: Hey, so I want to circle back. You're talking about rest and you use this term reflection over and over and over again. That's a very different lens to see rest through. I mean, the world defines rest as like exhausting vacations at Disney World, right? Like you're –
[0:21:05] JM: Totally.
[0:21:07] JR: How are you defining rest? Because clearly, we're reflecting on our work as a big piece of this for you, right?
[0:21:12] JM: Yeah. I came into the practice of rest like a lot of folks do, which is like I was tired. I didn't choose rest. It chose me. It caught up with me and I was burned out, which is to say like it's a practice that if I don't do my body, my soul, my psychology will just stop me. If I don't stop, eventually, my circumstances, my psychology, I'm just going to end up stopping anyways. That's one.
Yeah, reflection. The relationship between work and rest, instead of it being like rest is the space between work projects, or rest is like the remedy for the difficulty of work. One of my guides coming into the practice of rest is was an author named Mark Buchanan. He talked about the Sabbath in a book called, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring the Sabbath. What does it mean to Sabbath? It means to, and this is his mantra, it means to cease from what is necessary, embrace that which gives life, and then do whatever you want, which is a reflective question. It's a question that leads me to ask like what is it I'm doing? Where is the line between obligatory behaviors in my life and joyful behaviors in my life?
His thing is like, this is what Sabbath is, like you stop and you pay attention to your own life. I'd never thought about like that. I never thought about stopping to pay attention to my life. I was just trying to, and you just said, I was trying to get away, like I'm going to get away from my life. What I didn't know when I was doing that was like, I was condemning the life I was living by saying it's something I need to get away from. As supposed to, like what if I was pausing more regularly to receive the goodness of my own life?
That sounds a little bit more like what a loving God might be actually up to is I've given you this incredible wonderful life. You're not seeing me in it as often as I would like you to, which is part of why you're experiencing so much anxiousness. It’s part of why when you rest, you're not really resting, you're just you're working to get away. I want you to be fully alive and feel very loved in your life.
Let's stop more regularly to pay attention to how good things actually are so that when you rest, you're not just trying to get away. When you rest, you're not just trying to recover. When you rest, you're receiving me and you're receiving my goodness. Reflection is a way I talk about that posture of receiving the goodness of God as it exists in our lives, instead of trying to chase it in some tiny crevice of our lives between work projects.
[0:23:27] JR: Okay. What does that look like, practically, to receive the goodness of God? Make this a little bit more concrete. What does it look like for you, Justin?
[0:23:34] JM: Yeah. Reflect is the ball game. It looks like stopping and practicing what I call the Examen. It's from my religious tradition. We'll talk about the work of examen and remembering. It begins with regularity. I have to do this more regularly. You know folks, they’ll have all kinds of debates around when the Sabbath needs to happen. Can it be a Friday? Can it be a Saturday? I think as so long as it's regular and there aren't huge gaps in between it, I don't think it matters all that much.
[0:24:00] JR: I don't think God cares at all.
[0:24:02] JM: No. But what I think God does care about is can I stop regularly enough, so that I can actually hear and see?
[0:24:08] JR: I don't think he cares about the way and I think he cares that we accept his good gift of rest.
[0:24:12] JM: 100%. In order to do that, like the most things, like I have to do it with some form of discipline and practice. It begins with regularity. It begins with reflection stopping regularly enough and then stop to remember. It looks like looking back over my week and I can do that with a calendar. I can do it with a journal. This is like I work with folks all the time, like what works for you. Some people like to journal. Some folks do not like to journal. Some folks get all kinds of sweaty and anxious when they look at their calendar. Some folks don't. We just figure out what works for you.
I want you to be able to look back over the course of the last week, two weeks, month, and let your life catch up with you. It's, by the way, the work your soul is doing anyways. It's part of why we feel anxious, it’s part of why we have these nodes of joy, is because our soul is holding on to these moments of significance and lives in memory. So, like if I just provide the space and do it regularly, some of those old, really ground-in patterns of how I live and how I see my life will like, I’ll start to dissociate from them, which is good. I'll be able to look over the calendar and be like, “Gosh, honestly.” I walked out of that meeting. I am so deeply thankful for this team of people I get to work with. That's what I was feeling when I walked out. I just didn't have the room to actually give thanks in the moment because I was moving on to another meeting, but I really was.
I mean, Janet showed up and she had that thing that she was absolutely pin that. Thank God for Jay, who came, I mean, who brings donuts like this, but they did like I'm just so thankful for this team. That's part of what I mean. It’s like, let's stop regularly because we're having these incredible experiences. We're having these wonderful relationships all the time. My life is more often than – I think this is just true because God is this good – my life is far more often way better than I give God credit for. I want to stop and look back over the course of the last few days and actually take in and enjoy the life I have.
I think that's the primary discipline for most of us when it comes to the practice of the rest right now is looking back over the course of days and seeing where goodness showed up, attributing that to God holding our lives together. Then on the other side of that, we can talk about like what a practice of rest might look like, but if I'm trying to rest from a life that I think is primarily bad, I think my rest is going to be really problematic.
[0:26:29] JR: This is really good. I know you don't want to be prescriptive because this reflection can look different from listener to listener, but for you, do you have a journal out and you're looking back at your calendar over the last seven days every Sabbath and are just journaling these reflections? Is that what this looks like for you?
[0:26:47] JM: What it looks like for me is actually look at my calendar. I used to work with a journal more regularly. Part of what I figured out about my journaling process is I don't snag moments in enough detail to remember well with my journal. I have a truck load of details in my calendar. So, like when I'm doing reflective work, I will look at my calendar. For example, I was like I was just in Colorado. I had a Thursday night event and a Friday night event. I had a Saturday morning event, a Saturday night event, and then I did a thing on Sunday morning and I did a thing on Sunday afternoon. Way too many things to actually like, it was just a whole ton.
What I will do tomorrow when I have more of an actual space, because tomorrow is going to be more like my Sabbath day and actuality is I'm going to look at this calendar and remember the names of the people I was with. I'm going to remember the events and just take him, like that was an incredible – and it was. It was a great weekend. I know there was. But I'm going to actually look at the calendar and then remember these things and give thanks. I have to use my calendar because that's where my better details are.
[0:27:47] JR: Yeah. I know. That's good. That makes sense. Let's talk about the friend a couple months ago about this. We're talking about Sabbath and he's like, “Well, I already keep my laptop turned off on the weekends. I already don't go into the office on Saturday.” How is Sabbath different? You're hitting on one thing. This practice of examen, E-X-A-M-E-N. If you guys are interested in looking up that liturgical practice, this practice of reflection, that's different, like what else makes Sabbath rest in your eyes different from worldly rest and leisure?
[0:28:22] JM: One of the primary differences for me goes back to that Mark Buchanan book in which he said, “Cease from what is necessary and embrace that which gives life.”
[0:28:29] JR: Yeah. Kevin DeYoung says, “It's an island of get-to in a sea of have-to.”
[0:28:33] JM: Yes. That's 100% true. I recognize as a highly responsible caring adult that I'm really committed to doing what I'm supposed to do. That's a really good part of who I am. I had not until I started practicing Sabbath in that way, many years ago now. I really wasn't paying attention to like the joy and the experience of joy. Well, like it was a byproduct. It was this payoff. If I did my job well, then maybe I could experience some joy but it wasn't like a – I didn't know myself in that way. One of the things that makes that Sabbath different for me is there are things that I do that are just flat out, like really, really life giving. I get to make a list of those things and do them. I will –
[0:29:14] JR: Regardless of how well you performed at work, this is a picture of grace.
[0:29:18] JM: Yes. I received the actual grace of my life. It's a great way I said.
[0:29:21] JR: Yeah. It's like I've never thought about it this way, but that's exactly what this is. It’s like, no, Sabbath, regardless of how I performed, I can rest in the father's goodness and the grace that he has shown me and enjoy the good gifts that he has brought me.
[0:29:32] JM: You know, I've got these friends. I'm not one of them. I do like mountain bikes and I’ve got these friends who take like six-hour mountain bikes, not every time, but mountain bike rides. Not every time they Sabbath, but they love it. It's a thing that they will regularly do when they've got their Sabbath days. One of them is a fireman. Did it go super well that during the week? Well, that's a tough metric as a fireman to like – did you have a great week as a fireman? Like some weeks are like – was it a good week or was it a bad week? It's all same. Regardless, on his day, like he's going to get out on this bike, he's going to go for four hours. He receives that. He receives the goodness of his own body, that he's got a body that can still do this. Regardless of how the week went. He still gets to connect with God and be in nature and get outside and exercise, like it is exactly that. It's an experience and a practice of grace. You are loved and you get to live fully alive, regardless of your performance.
[0:30:22] JR: Yeah. That's good. That's really good. I've found that after I began to truly Sabbath. I mean, this must be, I don't know, six, seven years ago. I have felt much less of a need for “vacations.” I've probably taken less time off, totally off in the last six, seven years than I did the six, seven years prior, but I'm way more rested. I just don't feel the need for vacations because I'm in the sacred stride. I'm in the rhythm of true rest, not vacation rest, which frankly is exhausting. Every single week. Have you found that to be true for you?
[0:31:02] JM: Yeah. I write really specifically about vacation. I frame of this way. First, yes, like when I get away now. I don't do it as often as is culturally prescribed for the exact same reason you don't. I don't need it in the same way. I think dependence, and this is straight from the book, I think a dependence on vacations does two things. One, I think it exposes a kind of animosity that we have towards one, our jobs. Two, our regular lives. In fact, I know far too many people who will “get away” on vacation and then come back to their regular lives and have resentment for the regular life because they wish they lived on the beach in Maui. They wish to live in Thailand or wherever they go to vacation, they have, in essence. They've diminished the quality and depth and goodness of the life they're actually living.
Vacation as a practice because of the way we do it, it can be really damaging. The way I set it up is that I talk about this anecdotal story, I was flying to Germany to do a few things with the US military and different bases and and posts in Germany. I've been this is my second time heading out there. The first time, if you've traveled internationally, like jet lag can honestly be a thing. It's an 11-hour flight. I'm going to do it right this time. This is the story I tell, and you can tell me saying that I didn't. The way I'm going to do it right is I'm going to stay up all night the night before, and I sleep on the plane. Then when I get off, it'll be like 10:30, 10:15, 10:30 in the morning Frankfurt time, I will sleep through the night, I'll be awake. Idiot.
I stay up all night, and I do the thing I do exactly what I plan on doing. I sleep the entire flight, but because I slept on a plane for 11 hours, I'll crumple up again to see when I get off the – when I step off the plane, I pick up my backpack, 55-pound travel pack, my back goes out. For two and a half days, I can't stand up straight. I can barely get out of a chair. When I roll out of bed, I've got on, like all floors, and then get to a wall and make myself – it was awful.
Then I get to this chiropractor and on an army base in Germany. Boy, is that a setup? I mean, it took about a second. That's like a punchline of a joke. I was with the chiropractor in Germany on an army base, snap crack on pop. What she says, she says, “You slept wrong.” Boy, what a phrase, like not all forms of rest are good for you, just because you do it. It's a thing because your soul needs it. This is the problem of sin. Anything you need to do is a thing you're going to have to learn to do well. That's the problem of sin. Anything your body, soul, your brain, anything that's actually good for you, like every dark machinery in the world wants to keep you from doing it. What on earth makes you think it's going to be natural and easy? We can rest poorly. Vacation is the way we rest poorly.
In the book, I say, I need a vacation. I think people say. I've heard movies, etc. Consider how many people come back from a long-awaited vacation and immediately wish they had a few days of vacation to recover from their vacation or maybe they have jokingly suggested, that they need a separate vacation from the work it took to make the vacation happen. If my soul doesn't know what it feels to rest, then time away can very easily become another form of work. I just won't use the time well because I won't know how to.
We dive into vacation out of this fever pitch of a life, and we quite literally maintain the same postures, same attitudes, and same pace. We just think we're doing it differently because we've got a Mai Tai in our hands. What we do is we come back to our regular lives with a distorted view of ourselves of our own souls and a life we're living. I think vacations can be really, really problematic.
[0:34:51] JR: Yeah. That's really good. It's really good. I'm so grateful for voices like yours who are resurrecting this ancient idea of Sabbath and resting well, but I am also concerned that there's a risk of swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, right? Because when we look at the scriptures, like God worked six days and rested one. Jesus worked hard. His family said he was “out of his mind” busy, right? When he talks about our burden being light, Matthew 11. I always come back to this passage. He's offering his followers rest for their souls, not necessarily rest for their bodies. It's the soul rest. It's the belovedness that's important. I want you to riff off of this for a moment. Do you think it's possible that our generation swings this pendulum too far in the direction of rest?
[0:35:40] JM: Yeah. I think it's one of the things rest among many other things. Rest, self-care, like all these things are good. This is how we do things culturally on the grand scale is we overcorrect. We always do, like we quite literally always overcorrect. I think that's a fine step, which then comes into, it comes back to the practice of Examen. Cool, like we're all talking about trauma now. We are all talking about triggers now. We are all talking about self-care now. We are all talking about embodiment now. All these things are great conversations to have.
Cumulatively, they can lead to really important reevaluations of how we're living, but none of them, none of them places you want to land. We are in the place right now, culturally, a full-blown over-correction that everything comes with a trigger warning. I don't think that's necessarily bad, but I do want to talk about why, like what is it we're chasing? We were chasing or wanting is a sense of being safe in the world. Well, then let's make that the actual discipline and not labeling putting up the trigger warning on everything.
Same thing with rest. There are far too many folks I knew living in their late 20s, early 30s, who have a deep fear. This is what's happening. Have a deep fear of work. I don't think and this is another order correction. I don't think, because they're all lazy. Maybe some of them are. Maybe that is your nephew. Maybe your nephew really is that lazy guy. He honestly is addicted to that video game. That might be true. I think there's a fear here that one, I don't want to do significant work and then watch it fail and then watch my soul crumble the way I saw my dad do. I totally get that.
So, let's talk about that. We're in a moment of over-correction. You're scared to death of living like your parents. Understand that. Let's do the same thing, but do it differently instead of just divorce ourselves from doing it at all, and/or they're afraid that they won't be able to find meaningful work, so they're not going to even try. I totally understand that. Let's talk about self-knowledge because this isn't about not doing work. This is about learning yourself, which is part of the practice of work. I think you're 100% right. We are right now in, like we are in the over-correction.
What I'm wanting to do is I'm wanting to get a hold of some of these conversations and not even on the grand cultural scale, because I don't think that's the way it happens. I want to talk to folks in small groups and talk to folks individually and be like, “What is it you're afraid of, specifically when it comes to work? Because I don't think you want to live a life of leisure. I do think you want to live a life of purpose and you're scared to death to try because you're thinking you're going to blow it.” What I'm going to say is, you're not going to do it right out the gate because there isn't a doing it right. There is a doing it over the course of time, so that you would become the person who can do it. That's the job. That's the work. It's possible. I get being scared. Let's just not live there.
[0:38:25] JR: That's so good, man. Hey, three questions. We wrap up every podcast with. Number one, which books do you find yourself gifting most frequently? If we pulled up in your Amazon order history, what are you buying over and over again for people?
[0:38:37] JM: I give folks a John O’Donohue poems a lot, because I think poetry invites us into a different way of seeing and poetry invites us to slow down. You have to slow down, pay attention in order to read poetry. I've had John O’Donohue poems out a lot. I give away that Mark Buchanan book really, really often, because it's such – this is why I didn't write a book on Sabbath keeping, it's because I would rather point at great books on Sabbath keeping.
This is a book about the relationship between work and rest and how they lead to our belovedness. That's a great book on Sabbath keeping. I hand that one out a ton. Then for folks who are trying to dig really deep into practices of prayer and reflection. I'll hand out either Henry Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, or I'll hand out New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton.
[0:39:23] JR: Yeah. That's good. That's really good. By the way, have you read Mark Buchanan's book, God Walk?
[0:39:28] JM: you know, I actually have not.
[0:39:29] JR: Yeah. It's like a pretty new book. It's good. It's really good.
[0:39:32] JM: That's great. I'll check it out.
[0:39:33] JR: It's like about the spiritual day. He basically argues that every major religion has a corresponding physical practice and for Christianity, it's walking.
[0:39:44] JM: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
[0:39:44] JR: Walking at the speed of a three mile per hour, God. It's really good.
[0:39:47] JM: The speed of God is three miles an hour, which is the everyday walk he does. I've heard of that anecdote. Now, I know it's – that's great.
[0:39:53] JR: Yeah. Hey, who would you want to hear on this podcast talking about how their faith shapes the work they do in the world?
[0:40:00] JM: Oh, man. One of my favorite people to work with is I don't know if you had had a chance to talk to Scott Erickson much.
[0:40:05] JR: I have not. No.
[0:40:06] JM: You guys would really click and Scott's awareness of his internal processes as he works is really, really profound. He does the thing we're talking about in which, he's aware of his sadness. He’s aware of his depressive patterns. He and I are working on a project right now about the intersection of spiritual practice and mental health. I'd love to hear Scott on this program. I think that'd be great.
[0:40:26] JR: Also, the book you did on prayer, the Prayer: Forty Days of Practice is like beautiful illustrate thing was phenomenal. I was like a super fan.
[0:40:33] JM: We did that one, then we do a follow up and that we are now doing a third one, which is we're calling, In the Low. It's a book on depression and prayer.
[0:40:42] JR: Hey, before we sign off, you're talking to a global audience of Mere Christians, very diverse, vocationally, Justin. Some of them are songwriters like yourself, some are entrepreneurs, some are marketers and crafts women, whatever. What they share is a desire to do great work for the glory of God and the good of others. What's one thing you want to leave them with before we sign off?
[0:41:02] JM: What you do matters, because who you are in it matters. What makes your work worth it long term is that in and through the work you've given the world, God has given the world the gift of you and you are where God reveals his best self. I'm so thankful you do what you do.
[0:41:22] JR: What you do matters, because who you are in the work matters is so good. Justin, I want to commend you for the extraordinary work you do for the glory of God and the good of others, for reminding us of the belovedness of every child of God and for showing us how that belovedness can lead us to deeper rest and better, more restful, more life-giving, more full work. Guys, what I've read of this book has been phenomenal. I'm definitely going to finish it. The book's called, Sacred Strides, and you can learn more about Justin at justinmcroberts.com. Justin, thanks for hanging with us today.
[0:41:54] JM: My pleasure, man. Thank you.
[OUTRO]
[0:41:56] JR: Man, I hope you guys enjoyed that as much as I did. Hey, if you're enjoying the Mere Christians Podcast, do me a favor. Go leave a review of the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to the show. Hey, thank you guys so much for tuning in this week. I'll see you next time.
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