But with worry — without faith — it is impossible to please Him.

Not hard. Not difficult. Not challenging.

Impossible.

When I realized the consequence of fear vs. faith — a life in which I will never please God — I knew I had to learn how to live differently. Here are five practical things I do to move from worry to trust.

I WORSHIP.

God says that for the spirit of heaviness, He gives us a garment of praise. This is not worship as concept, it’s worship as life, continually wrapping a robe of His glory around my naked mind and heart.

I worship best through singing or hearing others do the same. You may see God most clearly through nature, prayer, study or another path. But whatever the discipline, find it and use it to focus solely on Christ — His goodness, His love, His ways as better than yours.

Sometimes that flows freely; sometimes it doesn’t. That’s why Hebrews calls it a sacrifice of praise.

A sacrifice. Costly. Painful, sometimes. I kill off pieces of my heart at the altar — idols, distractions, pride — things that are likely causing my worry in the first place. Worship fuels the fire of their burning, an incense of love for my God.

I PRACTICE GRATITUDE.

“Don’t be anxious about anything,” Paul writes in Philippians 4. “Pray. Ask God. Be thankful.”

Pray and ask God? Easy, most days. Thankful is a battle choice. When worry wars for my heart, gratitude for His blessings, big and small, seen and unseen, is a shield. His faithfulness blunts the arrows of my fears.

I TALK BACK.

Out loud. My anxieties get a verbal beat-down from me on a regular basis. I quote scripture. I sing aloud. I believe, and therefore speak.

I say, No. That is not my God. He is Father. He is faithful. I am free.

I LEAN IN TO A MENTOR.

For me, that’s often my husband. Mike would be the first to tell you that he has not always gone immediately to trust. But in the last few years, the peace over my husband’s life has rooted down deep in the soil of God’s faithfulness, and rare is the moment when his heart is not at rest.

“It’s going to be okay, Kelly,” he says, soft and sure. “And even if it’s not okay, it will be okay.”

Trust. Faith. God’s hands over self-plans.

Soothing balm to a worry-chapped soul.

If you don’t have a husband, or yours doesn’t hope in the Lord, find a mentor who does. Crawl into their trust, into their stories of God’s faithfulness. Shade the seeds of your faith under their tree.

I PREACH THE GOSPEL TO MYSELF.

Worry grows its thorns from the idea that if I were better or stronger or more faithful or more godly or more prepared or more confident, I would be safer, more protected, better off.

That is not my Jesus. His strength is made perfect in my weakness, not my striving. He holds me fast. It is foolishness to think that who I am or what I do can add power to His hand.

What about you? Is worry your constant companion? How do you move beyond anxiety? How do you let God calm your fears?

The biggest way we avoid drift, however, is cultivating a shared mission. Even if tasks, kids, stress, church, crisis, family, people, time or trial threaten to stretch and pull us apart, shared mission binds us together.

For us, that mission is the gospel. If you’re a follower of Christ, you’ve signed up for that mission, too.

Fortunately, it’s the best kind of mission to have. It’s the one that says that the tasks, kids, stress, etc. part of the deal doesn’t define us. Jesus does. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Even us.

What do you do to avoid drift? In your relationships, your friendships, with your God?

……….

P.S. Unbeknownst to me, while I was planning a secret getaway to avoid drift, Mike was planning to preach on it. You can watch his message from yesterday here.

Hello, my name is Kelly, and hospitality is hard for me.

There, I said it: a secret and shameful admission, a gasp and horror coming from the Pastor’s wife.

I am an Introvert of Introverts. Peace and privacy are frankincense and myrrh to me; quiet nights the gold to my soul. Our calling to the Church already has me so far out of my comfort zone I’d need a wise-man’s star just to see it again, far off and clouded in the distance. And the expectations of my role! Too heavy, too much. I thought I knew the perfection that people wanted from me, and I knew I’d never be able to give it.

For a few years at the start of our church, though, I had no choice but invitation. We had no offices; our home was home base for the community of Grace. We held meetings here. Band practices. Trainings. Appointments. Counseling. Bible Studies.

A full-scale invasion of my soul.

When the doors to the church office opened, the doors to my house were bolted the same day. Thank God I was done with that. Thank God He no longer needed this place, my sanctuary, my 1,900 square-feet of haven.

My heart was another story.

I didn’t realize that closing the doors to my home slowly closed the doors to my life as well. I thought I was protecting my soul, but I was preserving it into something hard, shutting out opportunity and influence.

The God who called us to practice hospitality has not given up on me, though. He’s been turning the locks and cracking the doors open; fresh air is rushing in to my home and head again. In it, I’m learning that my ideals of perfection must give way to purpose.

It started with the neighbors, really — brief conversations that led me to growing friendships and back to my mission. The girl down the street loves yoga and meditation and the teachings of Buddha. The kind lady to my right, a Catholic hospice worker who does worship graphics for her church and needs advice. The elderly man around the corner is lonely, a drunk, a failed lover. I stand with them on driveways and offer them what I have, what I know, what I’ve seen. God fills me up in the pouring.

And then the children came in, the playmates of my boys, traipsing through the living room (with or without my kids) to get a drink of water or a sandwich or a cookie from the jar. Two of them recently lost the solid ground of their parents’ marriage; I watch them take deep breaths inside these doors. Another, a teenager, has never thought of church, of God, of a friendship with the Kingdom. He came to a student event with my eldest a few weeks back.

This past fall, we started a Grace Community in our home, once again inviting people to share bread and the gospel around the family table, continuing the story of millions of believers over thousands of years.

I sat with this community under the stars on my patio this week, listening to one of them spill out words and tears of how God was using our church to redeem her from a life of addiction and rejection and fear. And I realized afresh that I’d been getting it all wrong. Hospitality isn’t about some unreachable ideal. It shows us, more clearly than anything does, that none of us can reach the Ideal, that we need each other, that we need grace. It is, in itself, the language of invitation and hope and gospel.

Practice hospitality, God said. Not perfect hospitality. I’m trying to remember that.

P.S. I recently had the privilege of writing a testimony about our church planting experience in encourage pastors and their wives, it’s posted today over at Stories of Sifted. Thanks, Exponential, for letting me share.

I have been thinking so much lately about how our culture and the Church have turned wifehood and motherhood into such a heavy burden. The goal of a great family has become an idol by which we can bring glory to ourselves rather than a path by which we can bring glory to God. This idol, like all others, demands to be worshipped through our time, our priorities, our sleepless, guilty, over-thinking nights. God did not intend it.

I’ll write more of my thoughts on this someday, but fortunately others are writing them, too. Here’s a quote from Richard Pratt, in his article “What Does God Want for Families?” on theresurgence.com:

Do your best to be the kind of spouse, parent, or child God wants you to be, but never take your eyes off of the One who actually holds your family’s future. If things are going well in your home right now, don’t be fooled into thinking that somehow you have made it that way. Look again: your home is broken beneath the surface and able to disintegrate in a moment. So, give God the thanks he deserves and earnestly pray for his continuing mercy in the future. But if things are not going well in your home, don’t give up on the hope of redemption. God delights in showing his amazing saving power through people who have nothing left. Whatever the condition of your family may be, turn to the One who holds the future in his hands and ask him to honor himself through your broken home.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Both are still responses of self. With pretense, I pretend to be someone I’m not; with authenticity, I pretend who I am is good enough.

For the follower of Jesus, there is a third option — an only option — and it is transformation.

That is the work of surrender and Spirit.

Spiritual housekeeping works the same way. Our tendency is to put on a good face, to keep the tablecloth clean for the company. But the more willing we are to share our sins, the easier it is for people to confess their own and find healing in community.

We don’t realize that God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness not only for ourselves, but for those around us. We don’t see that the gospel at work in us is the gift people need, and not our pretense that things are fine, together, finished.

We don’t believe they need Jesus, not us. And so our try-harder stands in the way.

If we did, we would consciously, deliberately offer our sinful imperfection to God to use on behalf of our friends. We would spill the wine, pouring Christ’s blood and redemption out on souls in need of grace.

Right now,* we’re about halfway through Leading Little Ones to God by Marian M. Schoolland. This gem of a book is more than a devotional, it’s comprehensive theology at a kids’-eye level. I actually think it follows the chapter structure of one of Mike’s texts in seminary, which is good because it’s written in second grade English even this wife can understand, but it helps her converse coherently with a husband who says things in passing like “Hey honey, can you download Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology to my Kindle app because I might have five minutes between appointments tonight and I want to look up a few points on trinitarian perichoresis.”

You see how it goes around here.

When it comes to education at the Adkins’ house, we’ve done it all: home school, private school, public school, online school. But no matter where the kids are during the day, we know their understanding of the Most Important Thing takes shape during their nights with us, as our actions and words sculpt their knowledge of God and of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Taking 10-15 minutes a few times a week seems a small price to pay to help that along.

We aren’t perfect. We fall down hard and often in this task. But we pray — and I’ll do the same for you — that His favor will keep us from being even a small stumbling block to His great grace for our children.

* Some previous books we’ve used? The Jesus Storybook Bible and Zondervan’s Family Reading Bible. Up next: Jesus Calling: 365 Devotions for Kids.

It was hard to choose what hit me hardest this week on the web. Strong contenders were this essay about respecting your husband from Grace Driscoll, and this amazing quote from C.S. Lewis, but in the end, it was this excerpt from Pastor Tim Keller:

Anger is the result of love. It is energy for defense of something you love when it is threatened. If you don’t love something at all, you are not angry when it is threatened. If you love something a little, you get a little angry when it is threatened. If something you love is an ‘ultimate concern,’ if it is something that gives you meaning in life, then when it is threatened you will get uncontrollably angry. When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, is is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger.

Our anger leads us straight to our idols. I love Tim Keller, and I’m so looking so forward to hearing him speak at the The Gospel Coalition Conference for Women here in Orlando in June. If you want to come along with me, let me know — just leave a comment or contact me using the form link at the top of the page.

In ministry, I have watched this burnout — a lonely walk of stress, exhaustion, self-righteousness, anger, and eventually, isolation — claim the hearts of dozens of people, and sometimes my own as well.

There is a wicked, prideful, selfish part of my heart that shoves this emptiness off my own shoulders onto the people and places around me.

But burnout is the child of self-reliance, the offspring of my choices and responses rather than my circumstances. When I let my innate thirst for God go too long without a drink of Living Water, I should not be surprised when I crumple in flame and ash.

There is a better Way. Here are five ways I stay away from the end of my rope:

1. I remember my salvation. My first act as Christian was realizing the inability of my own heart to meet my own needs, yet I keep looking to that heart for strength I’ve already admitted it does not have.

I burn out when I have lost touch with the truth that it is God who saves me, not once, but always. He rescues me in each day, each moment, each choice, each step.

When I look to my needs, my talent, my schedule, my family, my idols, my ministry, and my loves for hope, God is too kind to let them save me in the moment yet slay me for a lifetime.

2. I listen to the right friends. If I’m feeling dead and dry, it’s too easy find others who are as well. They validate my feelings. They back up my stories. They make me feel better about my decisions to unplug instead of press in to the life God has for me.

The better choice? I find someone who’s living and loving and serving in joy. I explore what she’s doing, how she’s sustaining, and how she’s praying. I follow her lead.

3. I schedule rest. God’s concept of Sabbath rest is so much more than taking a day off. It’s about trust — a concrete choice I make to say my own strength is not enough, my own work will never finish the job, my own striving will never satisfy my life.

You don’t have time to take a rest, you say?

Of course you don’t. That is the point. The life of Sabbath is the life of faith, intentionally carving out spaces you don’t have in the resources you do have — time, money, sustainance, strength, power — and trusting His Spirit to be strength for you.

Sabbath rest is an act of holy worship. It says, “I will never be enough, God. You are.”

4. I stay plugged in. I am startled at my own heart when it believes that it can sustain a missional life without being connected to the Mission. Without time in prayer and study, I flounder; with it, I discover the riches and mercy of an infinite God who is small enough to meet me each morning. I’m reminded that all my moments pass through His hands first. And I stay in the knowledge of grace and its outflowing sister, love, the only motive that will last.

5. I ask for help. I realize that Jesus died not for me, but for the Church, the community of believers who would do His work in His world. There’s a reason we were called together. To avoid burnout, I must crucify the pride that whispers you should be able to handle this so I can fully know the power of His Spirit through the others who bear His name.

That’s what helps me. What about you? Burned out before? How did you get there? How did you move beyond it?

From marriages to kids, work to calling, we believe that success outweighs sacrifice — that the effects of our prayers mean more than the kneeling.

But God wants trust more than triumph.

Sometimes He grants us both. And in those days of mercy, we must humble our hearts with the knowledge that even the best of our outcomes must be demolished and rebuilt and perfected in the end.

Win or loss, failure or fulfillment, in the last day the new heaven and earth will come down, and our Lord will dwell with men, and the One who sits on the Throne will say “Behold, I make all things new.”