You Have Named a Tangled Season
"Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." Matthew 11:28
You just told the truth that most women in ministry never say out loud: that your mind will not stop, that you are carrying too much, and that even prayer has started to feel like one more task you are failing at. That confession is not a weakness. It is the first honest breath you have taken in a long while, and it is welcome here.
Where You Are
The Jungle is the season of too much. Too many needs, too many tabs open in your mind, too many people whose crises arrive before your own coffee does. Your body knows this season even better than your calendar does. There is the wired alertness that will not switch off when your head finally reaches the pillow, the jaw you find clenched in the car, the shoulders that live somewhere near your ears, the way a phone buzzing across the room sends something electric through your chest before you even know who it is. Your thoughts move in loops rather than lines: rehearsing conversations, anticipating needs, auditing your own performance while you are still mid-sentence. And here is the truth no one has told you: none of that is a spiritual failure. That is a nervous system that has been standing guard for years, because no one else was standing guard for you. A body that faithful does not need to be scolded. It needs to be taught, slowly and kindly, that the watch has ended for tonight.
With Yourself, With the Lord, With Others
With yourself, the Jungle makes you a taskmaster. Even your rest becomes strategic, evaluated for whether it worked. The invitation of this season is to trade self-management for self-compassion, to notice the vigilant one inside you and thank her for her years of service instead of despising her. With the Lord, vigilance is the great thief of intimacy: it is nearly impossible to rest in Someone while you are also scanning the perimeter. So in this season He is not asking you for more input, more study, or more discipline. He is asking you to come down out of the watchtower and be held, which will feel at first like doing nothing, and will in fact be the deepest work you have done in years. And with others, the tangled season isolates you precisely because you seem so capable; no one thinks to hold space for the woman who is holding everything. Within this covenant you do not have to seem capable. You may arrive tangled, sit in a gathering without producing anything, and let the room hold you for once.
How This Season Is Tended
The Jungle is not cleared by effort; effort is what planted it. It is tended through the body, one small regulating practice at a time, because a nervous system learns safety through repetition, not information. The Regulate movement of the Five R's is not a step you graduate past. For this season it is the whole assignment: breath that lengthens, ground under your feet, the nearness of God made physical. Choose the smallest faithful thing and do it daily, at the same time, and let it be genuinely small, because a woman in the Jungle who takes on a full practice regimen has only planted more jungle. The tangle did not grow in a week and it will not clear in one. But it will clear.
Begin Here
First, open your Audio Library and go to the grounding and regulation practices. Choose the shortest one. Once a day, same time each day, and nothing else added yet. Second, your VIM guide for this season, Held Here: Rooted, is at the link below; it is written for the woman who has learned to survive by holding everything together, and it will help you name what resists rest without judgment. Third, come to Group Spiritual Direction on the first Wednesday and give yourself full permission to only listen. In this room, presence is participation.
May your shoulders learn to come down, may your watch be handed to the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps, and may you discover that even here, between grief and glory, you are already held.
