Maybe you can relate to this scenario…

Led by a desire to go deeper with God, you commit to a spiritual practice — perhaps a daily prayer time, weekly fasting, or an intentional sabbath. Initially the practice is life-giving and rich. Then the novelty wanes, but perhaps you stick with it long enough that it becomes a habit. Then life throws a curveball: a change of seasons, an illness. Or maybe you stop the practice for no reason at all.

Many of us have been there. When this happens, our feelings toward God and ourselves can be revealing.

Here’s a real-world example from a podcast listener who had been fasting consistently until summer disrupted her rhythms. Now she’s wrestling with how to re-engage the practice:

“Whenever it’s been a while since I’ve fasted, I start thinking about it frequently, even every day or every meal and fretting about whether it’s a good time or not.”

I should note that she opened her email with some important context:

“I struggle a lot in my day-to-day life with decision fatigue, second-guessing myself, and fears about not being ​‘good enough.’”

I can relate. The desire to make right decisions and a fear of falling short of God’s best are common to many earnest Christians. For those prone to performance, spiritual practices should have some kind of warning label: ​“Withdrawal effects may include guilt, shame, and obsessive thinking.”

So what can we do? Do we throw out spiritual practices or only do them when we feel like it? No. After all, they’re called disciplines for a reason: they require intentionality. But, but, but…. the fruit should be freedom. ​“Rigidity is the first sign,” writes Richard Foster, ​“that discipline has gone to seed.”

And some of us are predisposed to rigidity because of our upbringing, our God-narratives, and our self-narratives. Because of this, for spiritual practices to be a means of God’s grace, our hearts and neural pathways must be saturated with the knowledge of God’s goodness and our worth to God.

As James Catford says on the podcast, our significance must come from the acceptance of God — acceptance we didn’t earn and therefore cannot lose. And Richella Parham added:

“God’s way is to understand that you are already deeply loved. You are already of inestimable value. You are God’s image bearer. You are God’s beloved child. If we start from there, then we can use disciplines not to try to prove ourselves acceptable but because we are accepted — we actually just want to grow into that.”