“I was literally crying over the kitchen sink,” said author and speaker Tara Sun. “It was midnight and my husband was telling me to go to bed, and I said, ‘I can’t because if I don’t finish this, then everything is going to fall apart.’”
Tara Sun is the host of the podcast “Truth Talks With Tara,” as well as an author whose books include “Surrender Your Story” and her latest, “Overbooked and Overwhelmed: How To Keep Up With God When You’re Just Trying To Keep Up with Life.” Sun discussed “Overbooked and Overwhelmed” in an interview with ChurchLeaders, explaining key lessons God taught her about rest—lessons that are particularly relevant to people in ministry.
“I had this belief that if I rested, that if I just let it go, that everything was going to fall apart,” said Sun. “And so for a long time, the Lord had been kind of flashing these, what I like to call ‘yellow lights,’ in my life, saying, ‘Hey, there’s some things we need to address in your soul.’”
Tara Sun on God’s Heart for the ‘Overbooked and Overwhelmed’ Church Leader
“Overbooked and Overwhelmed” comes from Tara Sun’s own experience with being stretched to the max in her life, and it is full of wisdom from the Bible about what rest truly means. First, however, church leaders need to recognize that rest should be a priority in their lives.
It can be easy for ministry leaders to neglect their own souls because of their focus on caring for and serving others, Sun observed. “A lot of us, we have very good and right responsibilities,” she said, “people to take care of, work, ministry, and we want to serve people. We want to advance the kingdom.”
“But it’s really easy for us to tip to the other side of the scale where we start to do that out of pressure of letting people down,” Sun continued, “or trying to keep up with what the world thinks that we should do or accomplish.”
The consequences in her own life included that Sun became “so stressed out to even function. I was crying every day. I couldn’t even handle the smallest things,” she said. “It was very telling.” Yet, for many, it is only too easy to continue on the treadmill of distracted busyness done in the name of serving God and others.
“People say, ‘I’m just not good at [rest]. I’m just not good at it. I just can’t,’ right?” said Sun. “I used to say that. I actually hear it a lot from people in my own life.”
However, when we don’t rest well, not only do we have increased internal stress and strain in our relationships but we also “miss out on the heart of Jesus,” said Sun. “We miss out on getting to hear his voice.”
“What I realized in my life is when I am running so busy and distracted and I don’t stop to actually put Jesus first, I miss out on not only experiencing his character through prayer and through time with him and in the Word but also hearing from him,” she said, “actually hearing what he wants me to do in my life, hearing his wisdom, being convicted.”
Sun said that in seasons of life when she was the most busy and distracted, “I wasn’t following the conviction of the Holy Spirit.”
“I was not feeling like I knew what to do because I was not stopping to listen to him and let that conviction take root in my heart,” she said. “And that’s a really big thing that we miss out on.”
First and foremost, said Sun, rest is found in the presence of God—which is not where she has always looked for solace. “Because I was so exhausted, the easier thing for me,” she said, “was to look at social media or was to see what things I could achieve to make me feel better…but I realized they were all just really temporary fixes.”
Distracting ourselves from stress is enjoyable in the moment but cannot provide the peace that we need. “Really, we need to address the Lord and we need to sit in his presence to be refilled,” said Sun. “So I had to look at what I was filling my time with really. That’s kind of what the first step for me was.”
While part of resting well is choosing to fill our lives with fewer distractions, for many of us, our lives are still fairly full with responsibilities. Given that reality, Sun said that another aspect of wise rest is finding spare moments to seek the Lord. “When we have so much to do in a day, when we have so many other distractions, what we need to tether ourselves to is the presence of God,” said Sun.
Sun looks for “in-between moments,” such as when she is washing dishes, driving, or nursing her son, “to be still, to send up a breath prayer, a whisper prayer, to find those moments to actually be with the Lord.”
Watching a TV show or using social media are not inherently bad, but “not every moment needs to be given to scrolling. Not every moment needs to be given to binging a Netflix show,” said Sun. She uses spare moments in her day to pray, read the Bible, listen to a worship song, or even write down something she’s grateful for. This practice has helped Sun to have peace and “respite away from the crazy.”
Sun acknowledged that there are different seasons of life, and it will be easier to rest during some periods of our lives than it will be during others. “There are going to be seasons where you are running around like crazy; there’s God’s grace for you in that,” said Sun. “There’s a lot of different things in ministry that just come up. But I think when we anchor ourselves in this foundational truth, that helps us to approach the crazier seasons with a little more grace.”
Other insights Sun offered into the nature of rest included that our approach to it reveals where we are finding our identities, there is a communal aspect to resting well, and the reason why we say no to certain commitments should be because we have said yes to others. Her book also offers practical tips for resting well, such as reframing how we are defining productivity and being strategic about how we make our to-do lists.
At the end of the interview, Sun offered encouragement specifically to church leaders. “Something that church leaders can understand very, very deeply is that there is a weariness from pouring out,” she said. “There is a weariness from having a lot on your plate. And it’s really easy then, when we feel that way, to kind of shirk back, to feel a little apathetic, to just kind of go with the flow.”
It can be easy for church leaders to think, “I’m already so tired. How does God expect me to give more effort to my relationship with him when I’m already so tired of doing things?”
Calling to mind Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, who returned to his father “in humility” and “covered in pig slop,” Sun said, “The Father receives you with open arms. And like we’re told in Scripture, he is the living water. He is the one that we abide in—John 15—that gives us fruit, that revives our soul.”
“And so just for the person listening that feels like they don’t have much left,” said Sun, “God doesn’t ask you to give what you don’t have. So just come to him with your weariness and know that his promises of being your living water to revive your soul are true.”
© ChurchLeaders
