Unfinished Faith: Relearning God.

Week 21:

The bit where I introduce:

(This is a devotion I need to hear often.)

How busy are you right now?

I think modern life trains us to hurry. Constant notifications, responsibilities, expectations from others, endless information. We move from one thing to the next, and many of us carry an invisible load.

A load that tells us to keep up, keep producing, keep holding everything together.

Have you ever felt physically present but internally exhausted?

This week’s focus Martha shows us how easily we can become so consumed with managing life that we forget to simply sit.

Martha is deeply relatable because her anxiety grows out of care. She wants to serve well. But somewhere along the way, devotion becomes striving and that is the difference.

The bit where I refer to the bible: and ask a few rhetorical questions:

Luke 10:38–42 is our passage this week (though I encourage you to read all of Luke 10).

When I read this story, there is always the temptation to contrast Mary and Martha as though one is right and the other wrong. We can easily fall into an either/or mindset: Mary representing worship and Martha representing service.

If you identify more with Martha, you may recognise the preoccupation with service, hospitality, and daily responsibilities. Martha becomes characterised by anxiety, comparison, and allowing the urgency of the world to crowd out spiritual intimacy. Have we, at times, been guilty of this?

If you identify more with Mary, there is the prioritising of God’s presence over the pressure of productivity. She sits at Jesus’ feet, aligning her heart with Him and receiving His reminder that “only one thing is needed.”

But Martha eventually voices what anxiety often whispers inside us:
“Lord, don’t you care?”

Beneath that cry is frustration, exhaustion, and perhaps even the fear of being left alone to carry everything.

I’ve heard well-meaning Christians, and even sermons from the pulpit, suggest that anxiety is simply a lack of faith. That if we trusted God enough, we would always remain calm and steady.

The difficulty with this thinking is that it can leave people hiding their distress behind Christian language and forced composure.

In counselling, I sometimes reflect on how anxiety itself is part of the reality of living as frail human beings in a fractured world.

It can look like over-functioning, irritability, perfectionism, or feeling responsible for everyone else’s wellbeing while neglecting your own soul.

Anxiety can narrow our vision until fear and responsibility begin to eclipse our awareness of God’s presence.

How often do we live this way? Carrying responsibilities, we were never meant to hold alone, measuring our worth by how much we can carry without collapsing.

 I think for me personally the most profound act of trust is not pretending to be unaffected, peaceful, or fearless.

It is being honest with Him instead of hiding behind composure.

And yet, as we read on, Jesus’ response as always, tender:

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed or indeed only one.”

He does not shame her for serving. I do not believe service was ever the problem. In other words, Martha’s problem is not that she served. It is that her service became spiritually dislocated. Martha’s striving had displaced her peace.

She had become so busy doing for Jesus that she was no longer simply being with Him.

Throughout Scripture, God continually reminds His people that peace is found in His presence.

Remember: Shalom, the biblical word for peace, in the bible peace carries the idea of wholeness, settledness and being held securely by God.

Jesus gently invites Martha and us back to the “one thing needed.”

Not performance, but Presence.

His Presence.
Him.

The bit where you get to think about stuff: Questions for the week.

What “many things” are currently crowding your inner world?

Have you been doing things for God while neglecting time with Him?

Where in your life might Jesus be speaking your name as tenderly as He did Martha’s?