When I was a kid, I dreamed of growing up, living in a city, and having a life of my own outside the confines of my parents’ house. I daydreamed about going to work, going out to lunch, having an apartment just like Kathleen Kelly’s in You’ve Got Mail, and making new friends. I figured my evenings would be filled with singing around the piano with turtleneck-wearing friends and visiting the farmer’s market for fresh pretzels and tulips.

Of course, once I finished college and went to grad school, I realized that the life I longed for was going to take some intentionality! Dreamy dinner parties don’t just happen, so I started to put together the building blocks of my life in my mid-twenties.

First, I got a job. This took up 50 hours a week, sometimes more, and it gave me rhythms. I was a bit overworked, but that’s part of being young, or so I figured. So I filled my days with work, my nights with friends or errands, and my weekends with exploring the different cities I called home — Austin, Nashville, Fayetteville, and Boston’s north shore. There was so much to do! So much to explore!

It didn’t take long for me to realize that when you add small group at church and serving on the worship team and having dinner with friends and joining the gym and becoming part of the town Horseshoe club (really), you start to say things like, “next week will be better!” or “I’ll finally have some space later this month.”

The spontaneity dries up, and the calendar gets booked further and further out. This may be part of growing up, but for me, it felt like a train had left the station and it would be very difficult to stop. Of course, as I looked to my left and my right, it seemed like everyone else was bragging on their busy, so I tried my best to just keep up the pace.

I know that there are people who avoid pain by being busy. But for me? I was really enjoying the life I was living. I had good intentions to build a bigger and bigger community, and that’s a good thing. After all, we’re called as Christians to pursue relationship with God and one another.

Still, a lot of a good thing isn’t always the best thing.

As many of you know, the last year gave me a run for my money. I found myself facing a nightmare on a daily basis as I watched my beloved little brother Thomas forget what was true. He struggled with addiction, and we all watched from a distance as it cost him his life. I felt every text and call and bad dream and fearsome daydream of his destructive spiral, on top of the already full life I’d built.

And when I got the call that he was gone, a moment that feels like it was just yesterday, even though it was six months ago (though is there a difference this early in grief?), my calendar couldn’t contain the same weight. His death demanded that I pause.

I was engaged when Thomas died and got married a few weeks ago, so there was never a moment to fully exhale. But as soon as I got back from a mini-honeymoon with my husband, I looked at my calendar with cross-country flights planned for next month and felt the Lord gently say, “Let’s stay put.”

I made my argument for why I needed to go on the trip, why I needed to prioritize my family (a good thing!) back in California, and why I should just keep the pace. But then I realized that my days can’t be lived out at breakneck speed when my heart is broken.

For so long, I felt like life was about the next big thing. The next good thing. But maybe, just maybe, slowing down isn’t a step backward, but the next step. I quietly slowed my roll like a train coming into the station, reaching the speed at which a conductor can walk alongside. The slow hiss of the brakes releasing and the train stopping felt like sudden relief, and also left my heart so tender.

I think that if I’d continued to push forward with every single commitment, I wouldn’t have slowed enough to notice how much I miss my brother. I wouldn’t have noticed the sky at dusk or the way that making a meal instead of grabbing something to go between meetings would be a sweet sort of pace.

One afternoon, as we settled into our apartment, my husband, a very good slower-downer, said to me, “I am changing the light bulbs.” I’ve always had standard, warm lights, but he wanted to lower the wattage to just 15W, making our apartment so cozy that I started falling asleep on the couch by 9 pm.

No longer full of excuses to burn the midnight oil, I have seen how tired I’ve been for so long.

Jesus, in a quote that we often mention, calls to us and says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28 NIV).

I’ve often considered how to hand God things, but hadn’t considered until recently how our burdens are exchanged for rest. As I’ve offloaded my calendar, I’ve gotten increasingly tired — and it is giving way to rest.

I don’t know what this next season of life looks like, but the invitation to recover has been the most welcome thing to someone who used to boast in her resilience and ability to bounce back. It seems to me that setting down burdens doesn’t mean that the good things we’ve carried are bad, it means that we can only carry so much. And when we’re grieving or recovering from anything, our capacity has to shift – and that’s not a bad thing.

It might just be the best thing for us.

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