When Doing Becomes Draining
As we enter the final stretch of 2025, I’ve been noticing a familiar tug in my own soul, a mix of weariness, tenderness, and the sense that something in me is shifting with the season. This month’s reflection began with a simple poem about the grief we carry, and it opened a space in me to wonder why this season often feels heavy. Maybe you’ve felt it too.
As I stand at the edge of another year, I notice how the colors outside my window are slipping quietly toward rest. The garden doesn’t struggle with the season, it simply lets go – unlike me, who wrestles every step of the way. Leaves fall, stems dry, the bright shades of Autumn settle into muted browns and golds. Every gardener knows this is the season of putting things to bed. Not as an ending, but as a tender act of trust: it is time to stop now… and that’s holy, too.
I’ve been sitting with a simple poem, The Knapsack, by author Ruth Haley Barton that speaks of carrying grief like weight on the shoulders, and the slow, grace-filled work of unpacking what’s too heavy to keep hauling. It names something so many of us feel but rarely say out loud: that loss has mass… and that God invites us not to run from it, but to sit with it long enough to learn its shape.
The Knapsack
I’m not good at grieving my losses and moving on. I carry them in a knapsack hanging heavy on my chest. Doesn’t everyone see me stoop beneath the weight?“
Don’t you ever get to put it down?” someone asks.
“No,” I reply, “it is with me always, more present on most days than God himself.”
Grief gets added every day or so it seems.
“Oh, it’s ok,” I say, “It’s just one more grief to tuck into my knapsack.”
I’ve learned how to walk with heaviness around my neck.?I know how to enter rooms, back straight, smile bright,?as though nothing was hanging there.?But today I am tired. The weight of accumulated grief is more than I can carry.?
Where does one go to unpack grief?
To take out each loss and hold it in your hand, to wonder where it goes and then put it in its place.
I don’t cry about my grief anymore, although there are always tears behind my eyes. The tears are stuck inside now – like stones in a graveyard they have settled heavy into the landscape of my life. I’ve heard that depression is the refusal to mourn. I don’t know how to mourn in a way that helps. I don’t know how.
God, if you would show me – I would do it.
If you would take me to a place where I could truly mourn, I would walk in – I think. I would walk into that graveyard and lay myself down on the grave of each and every dead thing and let my tears fall into the earth. And then I would get up and walk out into my life.
Perhaps, you’re not carrying grief, but another kind of pain such as defeat, disappointment, fear, or guilt. Perhaps, like me, it’s not one big thing but an accumulation of things that never seem to stop coming.
There’s a strange companionship between this poem and the season I’m in…and it’s been very difficult to talk about.
It’s easy for others to misread this season of heaviness. People may whisper words like depression, burnout, loss of faith, or apathy, as if naming them explains the experience. But sometimes what we’re feeling is even hard for us to explain. It’s a subtle, cumulative weight, the slow settling of grief, loss, and fatigue that simply asks to be acknowledged. This season has been one to simply step into the invitation; God’s invitation to pause and sit with the unknown and unnamed.
This time of year is often packed with busyness, service, and preparing for the holidays, showing up for one more meeting, one more task, one more obligation – while something deep within quietly whispers, I’m tired. Many of us equate faithfulness with “doing,” even when the doing begins to drain rather than nourish.
But what happens when doing becomes draining?
When our calendars preach one message and our souls ache for another!
This is where The Knapsack meets the garden: both remind us that we’re allowed to stop pretending we’re weightless.
We’re allowed to notice the ache.
We’re allowed to admit that serving can sometimes feel like pouring from a well that’s running low.
And strangely, beautifully, God meets us here, too.
November prepares us with an invitation. It asks us to name the weight we carry. It reconciles the two stages of the purgative life – the inward and outward balance of living and participating in the life of Christ.
For now, I teeter in and out of this outward phase – listening for what God is trying to say in the rustle of the last leaves, helping me simply name this weight I carry, this tiredness in my soul. And here is the truth I keep returning to: noticing it, naming it, giving it space, is sacred work in itself. It is in this act of acknowledgment, without hurry, without judgment, that we begin to release what is heavy, and make room for God’s quiet transformation.
Inside this attentiveness, for me, lies a space that can be cold and scary. It allows us to enter the deeper rhythm of God’s invitation: to lay down, to mourn, to rest, and to trust that the hidden work is happening beneath the surface, even when we cannot yet see it…or hear it. I cry with the author as she pleads, “God if you would show me how, I would do it.”. Help me notice it. Help me name it. Help me sit and simply hold it. And please God, let me hear from you.
When Silence Feels Dark
As I continue this series exploring the natural patterns within our faith journey, I see it aligning beautifully with Advent, the close of the year, the quiet of winter, and the sacred rhythm of waiting. When the hustle of the season settles, and the glimmering lights are put away, we’re invited to walk with God – into the darker season – when the path blurs and familiar patterns fade. Tradition calls this Stage IV: the Wall; others describe it as the dark night.
I see it through the eyes of a gardener (and a place I’m learning to navigate) a time when the garden sleeps so deeply it appears that nothing is happening… yet beneath the soil, God is quietly at work, preparing new life. In these spaces of silence and stillness, our noticing, naming, and simply holding the heaviness of our souls becomes a holy, patient work of presence, allowing God’s hidden life to grow in us even when the darkness feels long.
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