R.I.C.E.

When people ask me what my ‘hobbies’ are, I’m a little bit at a loss—do I have any hobbies? It’s been so long since I had time for them. From July 2012 to July 2019 I was a full-time youth pastor and for the last 10 months of that I added part-time worship director to my role. I have three young children, one with special needs. We lived on a college campus in the men’s dorm where my husband served and led. Our entire lives were intertwined with work and family and ministry. I poured myself into the roles God had called me to and anointed me for and I’m glad I did. I was obedient and I did my best (most of the time). The simple reality is that after 7 years I was ready for some extended sabbath, some time for myself, some rest. My ministry time concluded with two youth camps and a funeral. The funeral was for one of my students who died suddenly while at senior high camp. It was tragic and traumatic; an unimaginable nightmare that no one gets to wake up from on this side of heaven. 

One weeks after his funeral, we moved out of our apartment and I went to junior high camp; my final week as a youth pastor. On July 12, we moved 2.5 hrs away and took up residence in the basement of generous relatives (the kind of generosity of heaven, not the generosity of buying somebody’s lunch; generosity that kindly opens up arms and says, ‘Yes, please, we are excited for your family of FIVE to move into our basement and take over part of our home without paying us a dime.' Mind blowing, right?). My husband began looking for work—that’s right, we moved without a plan, without jobs, without income. It couldn’t have looked more foolish, and I imagine I’ll share more about that in the future, but not today. 

As I prepared to leave the place we had called home for 8 years, I knew I was entering into a season of rest and healing. I wondered, however, if I would know how to intentionally engage with this season. How should I spend my time? Would healing require endless hours of prayer, fasting, and solitude? Well that wasn’t going to happen. I may have resigned from my full-time job, but I still have three young children.  Would I need to really dig deepand self-evaluate, asking hard questions and thinking through painful things? Would I need to pour peroxide into the emotional wounds of the past few years? Would I have to think through my life-experiences with doctoral levels of knowledge and understanding? I said to a friend, ‘I know God is inviting me into healing, but what if I miss it?’

I don’t remember how or when The Spirit brought the revelation to me, but I do remember the feeling and it felt just like that: a revelation. My eyes were opened. I breathed a little deeper; my lungs opening a bit more than they had in a while. Things got brighter, a tad bit clearer. Rest for healing is exactly what it sounds like: rest.  

Consider a physical wound. There is a time and place for the intentional and difficult work of physical therapy. The stretching and strengthening of a physical injury can be downright painful even though it is necessary, but just as important as this part is the protection of rest that the injury needs—like a sprained ankle. For a sprained ankle to really heal, you simply have to get off of your ankle.

R.I.C.E.

Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation

Get off the ankle. Ice it. Wrap it up. Prop that baby up on a pillow and let it be. 

This new insight into the next phase of my journey was welcomed with relief. What I needed most, and first, was not a 12-step plan for sorting through everything raging inside. Healing would come—the hard work of therapy, the questions, the reflecting and the sorting would come—but first, I needed some R.I.C.E.

So that’s what I’ve done for the last 6 weeks. 

I didn’t put pressure on the emotional joints that just needed to be left alone for a bit.

I applied cold compresses of comfort in the forms of good music and movies, great company and activities, a really good book, new exercise interests, and a little bit of shopping—things I rarely had time for before. 

And I propped up my soul on a pillow—literally and figuratively—without forcing it to press into the things it wasn’t ready for. I binge-watched a show on Netflix, I took my kids to Florida with my parents and didn’t post a single picture or tell anyone but close family and friends what I was doing, I avoided situations where I had to talk about the conflicting feelings of joy and sorrow, the weird crossroads of healing from the past and embarking on the adventure of an unknown future, and I did the things I wanted to do without feeling guilty about ‘wasting time’ or ‘being lazy’.

As I’ve treated my soul the way you treat a sprained ankle, by just taking the pressure off for a while, I’ve found it getting stronger. Each day it has a little more stamina to face the things it will eventually need to—the looming questions in my mind, the wrestling, the aches. 

And Jesus has been there with me in it all. The Spirit has been the refreshing pool on blistering hot days; gently inviting me into the water of healing, never rushing me past the period of rest that was necessary for my recovery. I don’t know how I didn’t realize it before. Sometimes we rush past the ‘rest’ period because we don’t want to be guilty of avoidance or weakness, but it might be possible that what our emotional muscles really need after deep wounds is for us to just get off of them for a little while. I don’t think it’s denial or neglect, it’s the reality of that strained tendon needing to do its natural thing of healing without all the pressure;  once that’s complete we can start easing our way back into putting our weight on it. 

Let’s be intentional about the hard steps of healing, but let’s also give ourselves permission to allow weary and strained emotional muscles to rest when they need to so that we’re strong enough for the hard parts.