Scared of Rest

You don't have to check your calendar, okay? You might be wondering, it's 2026.

Why is Jess talking about rest again? Two years ago, I had a book come out called Tired of Being Tired.

And that book was all about resting.

It was about our physical, emotional, spiritual, mental fatigue, and how we could obey God, grab hold of our abundant lives and actually rest.

Not because the goal was to be rested women, but because we want to live fully awake.

I spent the better part of two years talking about rest, and I had an incredible time doing it.

In this new series, Showing Up Scared, we are talking about all kinds of fears that women wrestle with.

Every single episode you're going to hear is going to be identifying something we're scared of.

We're going to talk about being scared of AI.

We're going to talk about being scared of theology.

We're going to talk about being scared of being rejected.

We are going to talk about being scared of failure and even being scared of success.

But today we are kicking it off and throwing it back all at once.

And we're talking about being scared to rest.

Here's the deal.

Most of us already know that we are called to rest, that God has asked us to do it.

The problem isn't necessarily, I think for most of us, that we don't know how to rest.

In Tired of Being Tired, I did this deep dive on giving women a lot of practical tools and a lot of theological tools to help them change their mind and then begin to take practical steps as it pertains to how to actually rest.

But I want to bridge the gap of where we've been and where we're going this season and say this.

I think that a lot of us know how to rest.

I think a lot of us know that it's what we're called to.

I think the problem is that we're actually, many of us, scared to rest.

We're scared of what stopping says about us.

We're scared of disappointing people.

We're scared of what we might hear when we finally get quiet to face our own thoughts and feelings and emotions.