I'm So Tired

Are you tired? Longing for rest? Alyson Pryor invites us into what we can have in true rest.

Elisa

I’m So Tired

by Alyson Pryor

My first personal retreat took place in a convent. The House of Prayer, a small, Spanish-style home tucked into a residential neighborhood, housed two nuns in their late eighties who lived there full-time, Sister Mary and Sister Margaret. Part of their ministry involved letting non-Catholic strangers like me rent a room for fifteen dollars a day. They would pat my hands and feed me lemon bars they’d made that morning with lemons from the tree out back.

After a lemon bar, or three, I retreated to my room to settle into my new surroundings. I took in the twin bed and matching nightstand, the small desk, and the crucifix on the wall. I had no idea what to do with myself. I was especially unclear on how much time should be “holy time” and how much was allowed to be “regular time.” I was not sure if, now that I had marked off this day as a “retreat,” all six hours and forty-five minutes that my kids were in school ought to be devoted to unceasing prayer.

I sat on the firm twin bed, wondering if I should take a nap or a hike, read, or pray. I regarded crucified Jesus on the wall across from me. My hands, usually occupied with writing, dishes, ferrying toddlers in and out of their car seats, weighed heavy and useless on my lap. My Bible, so often used for teaching preparation, suddenly felt foreign to me. My thoughts, unaccustomed to silence, clamored for attention. I felt a visceral pull toward my phone and all its distractions. Who was I when I was no longer useful? Who was I without my schedule, my children, my work, my things?

Retreating slammed me into the reality of how anchored I was in the thinginess of my life. It revealed how I saw myself primarily as one who gets things done—one who teaches, plans, executes, and produces. In aiming to leave thinginess behind and enter instead into the realm of sacred time, I found myself on God’s turf. I had no trinkets to distract me, no claim on how vital my role was in my own life, just the furious beauty of being face-to-face with God.

By the time lunch rolled around at the convent, I had accomplished very little, only reading a few pages in a book I’d brought before drifting off into a two-hour nap. When I woke, I noticed my body felt relaxed, having spent several hours without someone demanding I open a fruit snack or wipe their behind. But I also felt unsettled. I did not know what I was supposed to be doing or if I was retreating the right way. I regarded the crucified Jesus some more. He regarded me.

Once I got hungry enough, I roused myself from the bed and found a homegrown salad waiting for me in the fridge that Sister Margaret had shown me on my introductory tour. I went outside to sit in the sun for lunch. I was somehow still tired. Was this enough? I wondered. Enough to turn my face to the warm sun, to hear the chirp of a bird as it lifted itself from the small birdbath a few feet away, disturbed by my presence? Was it enough to just sit, breathe, and smell the lemon blossoms? Was I enough, sitting here useless, thoughtless, prayerless? I felt one question hit my soul’s bottom; Did God love me when I rested?

“I’m so tired,” I offered as a prayer. I pictured Jesus beside me, nodding solemnly. Yes, you are. “How do I fix it?” I asked, but the fading image was gone. Still, I felt the sturdy presence. Yes, yes you are. I felt a wave of desire, hunger, and thirst for rest and let myself feel it more thoroughly, more dangerously than I ever had before. The wave brought with it anger. Tears pricked at the back of my eyes. “God, why don’t you give me more rest? How am I supposed to teach and disciple and serve at church with all these demands at home? I can’t keep going. I’m so tired,” I said over and over and over.

My questions percolated, revealing an imaginary divide between secular and sacred time, of what was mine and what was God’s. These questions revealed my ability to quantify and elevate doing for God, things I deemed “ministry” or “service,” leaving me unable to spiritually quantify time spent watching the sunset, eating pizza, or painting my daughter’s nails. They revealed my transactions with a God who gifted me and wanted to use me— an exchange of goods and services—and how that was not at all the same as a relationship with a God who simply wanted to love me.

These questions also revealed my unease with rest: How do I do this? Why does this matter? What are the parameters? But maybe instead of asking how, why, and what questions, I ought to have asked who questions. Who is this God who wants rest for us? Who is this God who wants to love us in our uselessness? What does he do, or want to do in rest that he cannot accomplish in our frenzied activity?

We follow a Savior who offered us “life to the fullest” (Jn 10:10 CEB), but we cannot locate the abundant life on the shelf, put it in our cart, or find a way to purchase it. Absorbed in the thinginess of our lives, we reject holy time as irrelevant. Bound to the things of this world—our demands, our work, and our families— we reap the consequences of continual attachment to the finite.

If we let it, retreat exposes our beautiful uselessness, vulnerability, and inability to earn what we most need from God. Holy rest, like salvation, cannot be taken, only received.

Taken from Come Away and Rest by Alyson Pryor. Copyright (c) 2026 by Alyson Lindsay Pryor. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

Alyson Pryor is a trained marriage and family therapist and a certified spiritual director. She holds degrees in psychology from both the University of Southern California and Fuller Theological Seminary, as well as an MA in Spiritual Formation and Soul Care from Talbot Seminary. She currently serves as a staff spiritual director and adjunct faculty member at Biola University. Alyson is the author of Come Away and Rest: A Guide to Personal Spiritual Retreats. Connect with her at alysonpryor.com