Tension lives at the heart of the Christian personal growth space. As a certified health and life coach, I listen to a lot of personal growth and self-care content on YouTube and other platforms. As a Christian, I often struggle with the advice. It seems like, as humans, we struggle with the line between taking care of ourselves and being immensely selfish. Christianity doesn’t give us an out from that dilemma; all it does is move the goalposts of our selflessness. So how do we reconcile self-care, which is obviously a good thing, with being a selfless servant of Christ and others?
I wish I had a tidy answer, but instead, what you’re going to read is just my rambling attempt to figure it out. I belong to a life coaching group, and sometimes the ideas that are shared feel amazingly aligned, incredibly uplifting. Ideas like taking care of your body so that you can continue to pursue the things that matter the most to you light me up inside. But ideas like placing an impassable boundary around sections of your life and time, and reserving your energy for only what furthers your personal ambitions rub me the wrong way. There is an inherent friction between self-care and living the Christian life as Jesus asked us to live it.
I think there is often a selfishness in advice about taking care of ourselves because we assume that the things that fill us up are things that benefit only us. Then we feel like taking care of ourselves must be selfish and that we will need to do selfish things to take care of ourselves, which sounds like the same thing twice, but really isn’t.
Let’s look, as is good Christian practice, at how Jesus lived. Jesus did not constantly put himself at the beck and call of the crowds. In every scripture where he went to be alone with God, when he came back, people were looking for him. Sometimes they even came and found him before he returned. Was He being selfish? Obviously not, because we know that he was sinless. He was refreshing himself in the Lord. Here are a few Scriptures that show His pattern.
“But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” Luke 5:16 (NIV)
“Before daybreak the next morning, Jesus got up and went out to an isolated place to pray.” Mark 1:35 (NLT)
“As soon as Jesus heard the news [the death of John the Baptist], he left in a boat to a remote area to be alone.” Matthew 14:13 (NLT)
How often do we feel like prayer is refreshing? When I think, “I just need a break“ am I thinking I need to go pray? If I’m honest, not usually. I usually treat praying like a task to check off my list, and my personal self-care time as though it has nothing to do with God. That’s where the tension lies.
When I begin to see the pattern in Scripture- that being in the presence of God is refreshing, is a balm for my soul, is the thing that I need rather than binge-watching Netflix or reading a good book- that’s when I will lose the tensions surrounding being a Christian who proudly practices self-care.
The Word of God gives us a guidebook for refreshing our souls.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.” Psalm 23:1-3 (NIV)
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me… and you will find rest for your souls.” Matthew 11:28-30 (NIV)
“The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.” Psalm 19:7 (NIV)
“I [God] will refresh the weary and satisfy the faint.” Jeremiah 31:25 (NIV)
Turns out, Jesus set boundaries too. Maybe the difference between Christlike boundaries and selfishness is less about where we put them and more about what we do once we’ve erected them. May we never forget that our rest doesn’t come from temporal or man-made things; it comes from the Lord. The Maker of my body and soul knows best what both need.
I wrote the first draft of this on voice notes while training for a 5k I’m running in November. Finding my rest in the Lord won’t mean I don’t read, or work out, or get a massage, or even watch TV. I think it really just means that in all of it, my heart will be turned toward Him instead of toward myself.
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