Jess Michael

“Burnout. Languishing. Exhaustion. These terms were helpful, and certainly part of the malaise that I and many around me were experiencing. Yet none of these terms, alone, is enough to sum up my experience. And to me, the popular solutions offered for my sense of weariness often felt shallow or futile. Experts and friends suggested increased exercise, prioritizing self-care, more vitamin B12 or D, mood teas, or vacations—all worthy suggestions, but none of them probed deeply enough. I felt like the Psalmist, wandering through a wasteland crying, “My soul thirsts…my flesh faints…in a dry and weary land where there is no water,”[6] and some think-piece writer would pop up from a gopher hole and yell, “But have you tried finding a better work-life balance?”
― Tish Harrison Warren, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience

“Acacia trees have taproots that plunge down as deep as one hundred feet to find water underground. The drier it is, the deeper their roots grow. Then there are resurrection plants, which seem to entirely wither and die, only to spring back to life as soon as they meet with any moisture. Botanists have seen some resurrection plants revive after they appeared to be dead for over a century. All it took was a trickle. To survive in these arid lands, plants have to become doggedly and creatively resilient. And that is what I hope grows in me in seasons that seem spiritually and emotionally dry.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience

“She said that spiritual growth and artmaking alike are usually not found in a sudden insight, like a burst of a flame, but in “the steady laying on of the logs”—in the long, sometimes monotonous tending of a fire—a fire that sputters, dwindles, burns out, and then, at times unexpectedly, flickers back to life.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience

“One of the gifts of aridity is that, in desolation, our naïve, unexamined ideas about God, and about what God’s love ought to look like, are dashed against the rocks of reality so that a truer, more enduring trust might be built from the wreckage.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience