the sinister side of self-care.

Hoo, buddy.  Self care.  Topic of the masses, am I right?  I feel like I can't throw a rock these days without hitting fourteen people who are doling out some kind of advice about taking care of ourselves as moms, and another thousand people crowded around those people, nodding along sagely.  It's starting to get annoying - for one thing, all I wanted to do was throw a rock, and now I'm faced with addressing all these knuckleheads.  Can't a person just innocently throw a rock around anymore?

There's so much to say on this, so I'm going to have to just keep things short and sweet: the world will always speak to us in half-truths, and if we're not discerning, Bible-saturated women, we won't know where the truth stops and the lies begin.  We will eat whatever garbage they feed us as long as it tastes like the chocolate of truth.

So, to clarify, here's the true part of the push for self-care: we absolutely must, as Christian women and Christian moms, be taking care of ourselves.  We cannot neglect this.  Our bodies, minds, and spirits need to be nurtured, and the nurturing of any person - be it our husbands, our children, or ourselves - takes great amounts of time, attention, and intentionality.  I'll get more into this later this week.

Now, for the teensy little problem of the lies.  The problem is that the world assumes we are not taking care of ourselves.  The problem is that the world sees our capacity for nurture as a limited resource, and when we give care to others, we are by default draining and robbing from ourselves.  The problem is that the world prescribes and demands a regimen of self-care that actually deepens our needs, rather than filling them.

I'll make this easy: this is lying to you.

Let's address these lies one at a time:

The lie: assuming we are not already caring for ourselves.

First, we see that the Bible explicitly says, "For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church."  (Eph 5:29) Or, to state it in the positive, "For everyone always loves his own flesh..."  According to the Bible, every single one of us is caring for ourselves in the way that Christ cares for the church: sacrificially, whole-heartedly, affectionately, single-mindedly.  We are our own top priority.  Already.  Without exception.  We don't need to be encouraged or taught or trained to do this.  In fact, the Bible would insist that what we really need to be trained to do is to love others as much as we already love ourselves. (Luke 6:31)

Now, we'll dig deeper into this in just a minute, but we need to understand that, while our methods of caring for ourselves might be completely missing the mark, our goals and our efforts are all naturally aimed at "ME FIRST!"  While we may need to be trained to think Biblically about what caring for ourselves should realistically look like, we don't need to be convinced to care for ourselves, and no one is currently neglecting their attempts toward that end.


The lie: we should drink from the bucket of our own service, energy, and love before ladling anything out to others, or we will become drained.  

What's especially insidious about this particular lie is that it, by default, sets up a false reality of competition: my resources go to either me, or others.  This gets especially dark in the realm of family: essentially, it is me against my kids.  When I buy this lie, it becomes so much easier to believe that I am a whole, complete person, defined apart from my family and my role as a mother - and further, I'm drained by my obligation to care for my family, and my only way back to my 'true self' is to keep the distinction between myself and everyone else clear in my mind: "We are not an inherent and inseparable unit; I was not made for this.  These adorable little parasites bleed me dry of my 'true self,' which I am only able to find and nurture when I hardline the distinction between who I am ("glorious, individual ME!!") and what I do (mother as a verb, wamp wamp)."

The truth is that, in serving others through the capability and capacity of the Holy Spirit, we actually find our true purpose, our deepest earthly fulfillment, and our life's work.  I am not a self apart from the fact that I am a mother; in fact, mothering makes me more truly 'me.'  I cannot seek to find myself in some fake reality that doesn't accommodate the fact that I am a mother; I don't just do motherhood.  I cannot care for my truest self if I am not caring for those that God has given me - in fact, I do myself harm if my definition of self-care is somehow exclusive of actively caring for them.

The Bible tells us that our lives are found in losing them.  (Matt 16:25)  The Bible says that if our goal is to be first, our strategy must be to place ourselves last in the line for a drink from the bucket - to become "the servant of all."  (Mark 9:35)  Sure, we can still stand in the line!  But we subjugate our 'me first!' tendencies to the priority of serving others by taking our place at the end of the line.  In fact, I really can't think of a single place in the Bible where the admonition is to look out for Number One before serving Number Two.  God is ALL ABOUT Number Two.

And do you know why we can orient our lives this way?  Because he also promises that he will give us what we need to meet the needs of others and ourselves.  That he will care for us and meet our needs, even if we take our eyes off ourselves and our own scrabbling for a hot second.  We are not giving up our access to fulfillment when we concern ourselves with the care of others; it is one of the main ways God shows us how capable he is to meet our deepest needs, without our help, and more fully than we can do on our own.


The lie: that the meeting of our deepest needs for care and nourishment can be found through avenues of entitlement and escapism.

Often, the world's answer to our need for nourishment come in one of these two forms.

Entitlement often takes the form of gross self-indulgence.  It looks different for every person, but spending resources (time, money, energy) on low-tier priorities seems to be a major element of this.  Demanding appreciation, indulging in self-pity, and/or developing an inflated sense of martyrdom are also manifestations. (Self-centeredness is always self-worship, even if it looks like self-abasement.)

Entitlement robs from us, and actually intensifies our need for true care and nourishment, because nothing earthside can ever be enough to fill the hole.  It can't be.  If we're expecting, for instance, a weekend away with our girlfriends to fix the exhaustion we feel as moms, two days at a hotel will do nothing other than highlight how much we hate coming home to washing our own sheets and cooking our own food and making our own beds.  If we expect the fruit of self-indulgence to fill some deep hole in our deepest selves, we're to be pitied, because it can't do anything other than highlight how big that hole is, and we walk away hungrier than we were before.

Escapism is another form of commonly accepted "self-care" that is actually deeply harming.  Running away, physically or mentally, from our lives and our responsibilities through complaining ("just venting!"), relationally checking out, laziness, making excuses, refusing to accept and implement godly counsel from others, or spending hours on social media (to name a few strategies) won't fix our problems, either.  If we're not people who learn to 'bear up under' the weight of burdens, learning to become completely dependent on God's provision to enable us to endure and thrive, our problems seem to just follow us.  Life never actually gets easier or more enjoyable, no matter how far we run, because we're the kind of people who don't actually know how to tackle difficulty or joyfully embrace the cost of an abundant life.



SO.  There is a very, very broadbrush view of the lies you are being asked to swallow when you throw in your lot with the Pinterest board fodder telling you to take care of yourself.  Pinterest has a lot to say about how to care for yourself, much of which is founded upon the lies I mentioned and others.  However, the Bible also has a lot to say about how to take care of yourself, all of which is founded on truth and God's love for you and his genuine care for your truest well-being.  So, to not just leave you with a big old list of the garbage you shouldn't be eating, tomorrow or Thursday I'll be back with truth about the glorious manna you should be consuming and nourishing yourself with - things you can do that will provide actual restorative comfort and care to your deepest, truest self.