You did not have a falling out. Nothing happened.
Summer came, attendance got loose, and you missed one Sunday. Then two. And somewhere in there you noticed something that scared you a little.
You felt better.
Not spiritually better. Just lighter. Like something you had been holding with both arms had been set down, and you had not realised how heavy it was until it was on the floor.
Now September is coming and you are trying to figure out how to walk back in.
I want to say something to you carefully, because I think you have been afraid of it. You did not lose your faith. You ran out. Those are not the same thing and only one of them is a crisis.
How it happened
You said yes. That is the whole beginning of it.
You said yes because you are capable and you love your church and somebody needed help. Then you said yes again, because you had said yes before and that is who you were now.
And after a while, nobody asked how you were. They asked whether you could.
That does something to a woman over years. Slowly, quietly, being loved and being needed become the same experience, until you cannot tell them apart. And then one season you cannot carry it, and you find out you have no idea who you are in that building if you are not the one carrying it.
So you stayed home. And it felt like relief and guilt at the same time, which is its own particular kind of exhausting.
What I think you were taught that was not quite true
We got service right and we got rest wrong.
You were told to have a servant’s heart, and you did. Nobody told you that a servant’s heart still lives inside a body with limits, and that pretending otherwise is not obedience. It is just endurance with a religious word on it.
Rest is not the reward for finishing. God rested on the seventh day and He was not tired. Rest was in the design before the work was.
You were not disobeying when you stayed home in July. You were doing something your body had been asking you to do for about four years.
What coming back could look like
Not the way you left it.
Go back without a role. Sit down. Do not sign anything. Do not arrive early. Let someone else stack the chairs. It will feel wrong for about three weeks and then it will feel like worship, possibly for the first time in a long time.
Tell one person the truth. Not the whole church. One woman. “I stopped coming because I was exhausted, not because I stopped believing.” You will find out very quickly that you were never the only one.
Let no be a complete sentence. You do not owe an explanation, a substitute, or an apology. If that feels impossible, that is worth paying attention to, because it means somewhere you learned that your welcome was conditional.
What is actually true
You are not a bad Christian woman for being tired.
You are a woman who was faithful in a structure that quietly ran on her, and who finally could not, and who is now afraid that the running out says something about her soul.
It does not. It says something about the load.
Lovey, you were loved before the first yes. You will be loved after the last one.
Where to start
I built a free assessment that names which of six patterns you carry and which of five stages you are in. About four minutes. It is not a quiz. It is a diagnosis of what you have been holding, and for a lot of women it is the first time anyone has said it plainly.
Take The Glue Woman™ Assessment
If you lead a women’s ministry, this one was written for you.
