Rest can feel like an undeserved “luxury” for many of us — but what if it’s actually a gift from God to help us resist the “pharaohs” of our age that plague us with constant striving and endless productivity? 

Sheila Wise Rowe, a counselor, spiritual director and author of “Healing Leadership Trauma,” joins this episode of Today’s Conversation podcast to explore the transformational power of rest — and why God’s rhythms for our lives are so different from the world’s relentless demands. 

While our culture tends to measure value by output, the gospel offers a rich vision of rest as a practice that nurtures emotional, spiritual and communal flourishing. In this conversation, NAE President Walter Kim and Sheila Wise Rowe discuss: 

  • Why rest is central to the gospel; 
  • How to recognize signs of emotional and spiritual overdrive; 
  • Rhythms of rest woven throughout Scripture; and
  • How God’s design for rest frees us.

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Read a Portion of the Transcript

Walter: I've heard you give this presentation on trauma and some of the signs of that that I found really helpful. You used language of fight or flight or freeze or fawn. These are the things that, you know, we might do in reaction to trauma. Is there a similar thing of recognition when we are in spiritual or emotional overdrive or burnout? Like what are some of the signs?

Sheila: I think looking at looking at relationships, that's the key part. One is looking at the state of your relationship with God, your state of relationship with other people. And that may be the people that you're working alongside in a secular job or in the church. Like, what is the state of the relationships and taking that moment to really pause and to really pray and to listen: Lord, examine the state of my heart, the state of my relationship with others.

And I think that too often we don't take the time to do that, to just pause and to listen. And we often will then, because we don't really pray and listen, we put our own label on what that is, what it is that we're seeing, what is somebody else's behavior. And when we're in this overdrive, it's really hard to stop. We have to be intentional about it. If not, there are ways in which we even like rewire or teach our brain, like this stress, the cortisol, all of it, like that's normal behavior. And so we begin to believe on some level, like this is normal. And so the notion of stopping and resting is a very difficult thing to do. And so, it's really taking those steps and moments of intentionality.

Sheila Wise Rowe

Sheila Wise Rowe is a counselor, spiritual director, author and speaker. She is passionate about matters of faith and emotional healing, and advocates for the dignity, rights and healing of abuse and racial trauma survivors, and racial conciliation. She has counseled and taught counseling in Massachusetts, and Paris, France, and for a decade ministered to homeless and abused women and children in Johannesburg, South Africa. Wise Rowe is a member of the Community Ethics Committee of Harvard Medical School, a policy-review resource for its teaching hospitals. She is the author of “Healing Leadership Trauma: Finding Emotional Health and Helping Others” (along with her husband, Nicholas Rowe), “Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience” and “Young, Gifted, and Black: A Journey of Lament and Celebration.” Wise Rowe holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology from Cambridge College.

Walter Kim

Walter Kim became the president of the National Association of Evangelicals in January 2020. He previously served as a pastor at Boston’s historic Park Street Church and at churches in Vancouver, Canada and Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as a campus chaplain at Yale University. He preaches, writes and engages in collaborative leadership to connect the Bible to the intellectual and cultural issues of the day. He regularly teaches in conferences and classrooms; addresses faith concerns with elected officials and public institutions; and provides theological and cultural commentary to leading news outlets. He serves on the boards of Christianity Today and World Relief and consults with a wide range of organizations. Kim received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, his M.Div. from Regent College in Vancouver, and his B.A. from Northwestern University.