Overwhelmed | Bend, Don't Break | August 23 2026

Hey everyone, and welcome to the brand new Burnett Church podcast.

My name is Tim, and I'm your host and the pastor of Burnett Church.

Today's podcast is the audio from part one of our series called Reactions Speak Louder, in which we start to unpack how our reactions affect the world around us and also say something about our relationship to ourselves and to Jesus as well.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Some of you know that over the course of July, I took four weeks off.

I have never taken four weeks off of any job ever before in my entire life.

It was weird.

By week three, I was beginning to twitch regularly at home.

And I started doing things like checking my email in week four.

I said it was because I didn't want to have a big list of emails to come back to, but truthfully, it was because I was getting bored.

In week five, I took five Sundays in a row off.

Week five, I had to do everything in my power to not come to church on week five.

All I wanted to do was come back, but I had said I was gonna do something.

And I had been encouraged by members of our board to be faithful in taking time off because the reason I took four weeks off is I had a whole bunch of bank vacation I needed to use from the first five years that I was here, and I really wanted to prove that I could do it.

And I did.

But it was hard.

I think I learned a few things, and I resisted the urge when I got back to do this series the minute I came through the door.

Because have you ever had that person who like lost 10 pounds and all of a sudden becomes an authority on losing weight?

Right?

Like I just lost my tenth pound yesterday.

Let me tell you everything about your nutrition that you're doing poorly.

This happens to me a lot because, you know, me.

I didn't want to be the guy who blasts through the door and goes, I I did it, I rested for four weeks, here's everything I know.

I am now an authority and an expert on rest.

So I waited four weeks.

And now I'm gonna do it.

I did learn a few things, I think.

One of the things that I noticed was not simply rest was good for me, how good it felt to rest.

I realized I was carrying a lot more than I was cognizant of.

Sometimes you don't know how much something weighs until you put it down for a little while and then try and pick it back up.

Right?

You become attuned to that weight in your life.

It took a while to get there.

The first week was a write-off.

The second week was okay.

Week three was the sweet spot for me.

Things that had become normal in my life, I suddenly realized without them, like my chest felt physically different.

And now when something starts to stress me out, I can actually feel it coming up rather than feeling it there all the time.

And I realize, you know, there's probably a difference between not working, which I do a fair amount, and resting.

Sometimes you're not aware of how tired you are until you stop.

And stop for a good long time.

There are things we carry for so long, we just stop noticing the weight of them.

Work, parenting, relationships, marriage, money, your schedule, the people who need something from you, the things that you're worried about, the things that the people who need something from you are worried about, the things that we're responsible for, things happening in the world that we have no control over.

And just because we can carry it, we assume we're okay.

Just because I have the strength to carry it now, we assume it's fine.

And here's my concern.

Here's why I think this is an important conversation right now.

It's August.

We're at the end of what is for most of us, many of us, our least busy time of the year.

And in some sense, I know because I know that some of you are looking forward to what September brings when you get back into the rhythm and routine, when you get to send your kids to school.

I am looking forward to that.

But if we don't think about it, September is gonna show up, your calendar is gonna fill up, and all of a sudden all the weight you had before you started relaxing in the summertime is gonna come back.

School and sports and lessons and meetings and church and work and activities and practices and appointments, and all of a sudden, in a very short period of time, every empty square on your calendar is gonna disappear.

And I think a part of the wisdom of following Jesus is learning to decide how we're gonna live before the calendar fills up.

The series that we're gonna look at together is called Bend, Don't Break.

It's actually a pretty decent picture of resilience, of something that we should think of positively, right?

Life gets difficult, healthy people can bend.

I have one friend here at Burnett who has regularly said, Blessed are the flexible, for they will not break.

And I resonate with that.

And I also realize we human beings were never created to live permanently bent.

Eventually, everything under the stress of bending will break.

We know this, and yet we still don't stop to create priorities because the urgent is a tyrant that wants to steal your joy.

And so what we often do is in the face of the tyranny of the urgent, we just start saying yes.

And what we start saying to the other things that are important is once.

Now, I'm not talking about the way Mennonites use once at the end of a sentence as a bit of a stim.

What I mean is is how we often say things like, well, once September settles down, I'll think about doing that.

Once hockey season is over, I can do that.

Once this project is finished, I'll give it some consideration.

Once the kids are older, I'll think about it.

Once work slows down, once Christmas is over, then I can slow down.

Except, you know where this is going, don't you?

Because you hear those things and you go, oh, I say that.

We get to the other side of once and discover once is never once.

And that leaves us feeling three things constantly.

Three pressures that if we don't manage it will be a constant part of our life.

And I know you don't want these things for yourself.

We become overwhelmed, overcommitted, and overexposed.

Overwhelmed meaning we're carrying too much.

Right?

Overcommitted meaning we're doing too much.

And a lot of the things that we say yes to, the problem is they're good.

They're good things.

There's nothing wrong with them.

But in our world, when information comes so quickly and transportation is so fast, you can, if you want to, choose between 17 good things every day and probably fit 15 of them in if you're really efficient.

By overexposed, I mean we're processing too much.

You know, we have more information than any group of human beings have ever had.

More access to more information.

And sometimes it's a really good thing.

But sometimes I wonder if we're actually supposed to have so much knowledge.

In fact, if you go back to the beginning of our story in Scripture, you could boil down God's one choice that he gave us.

The one thing he asked us to trust him in is it's not good for you to know everything.

Right?

What says in Genesis is, you know, it's not good for you to have the knowledge between the difference of good and evil.

Sometimes too much knowledge is a bad thing.

And so you pick up your phone, and Apple News has a whole bunch of horrible, horrible pieces of information.

Your friends are texting you about it, your email, you jump on social media, you know, and you've got in between all of that, you know, if if you're like me, you're trying to cram some sports statistics in there, and you know, you're you're wondering about politics and the war that's going on and other people's opinions and vacations and kids and social outrage, and we have so much in our pocket that we end up depleted, less patient, more reactive.

Little things that shouldn't bother us feel huge and set us off, much to the dismay of everybody around us.

We're less present when we get together.

We reach for things that numb us rather than things that restore us.

And sometimes, sometimes it's not just your body that's tired or your mind that's tired.

Sometimes it's it's your soul that's tired.

Does any of this sound familiar to anybody else?

Is it just my life?

No, I don't think so.

I think we're very, very much in the same boat.

Here's the good news.

Matthew 11, 28.

Jesus says, Come to me.

All you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Notice where Jesus starts.

He starts with, come, come to me.

And in fact, if we really think about it, he started with, I'm gonna come to you.

Right?

Jesus gives an extremely different offer than any other religion that I've been able to come across.

Because every other world religion starts with get yourself to God, fix yourself, get your act together, and then first find some discipline.

Not, or believe all the right things and God will be happy with you.

Then you can have a relationship with Him.

But Jesus, Jesus starts with relationships.

He starts with an invitation to a relationship before the instruction comes.

It's fundamentally different.

It was very interesting.

I I I told this story a couple years ago.

I I was I was getting an Uber drive to the airport uh one day, and normally, um, especially if the Uber drive is in the morning, uh, I don't want to talk to Mr.

Uber driver at all.

But somewhere around the Mary Hill bypass, I realized that I had drank too much coffee and water that morning.

So I needed to stop, which required me to talk to the Uber driver.

And uh, do you ever have one of those people that you're driving with?

As soon as you crack the door open, they shoved the rest of the door open.

Right?

So as soon as I started having a conversation with my Uber driver, that was it.

We were talking until we got to the airport.

And uh so he very politely pulled over at a gas station, you know, took care of that, and then got back in the car.

As soon as I got in the car, he asked me, So, what do you do?

Sometimes I'm very nervous about answering that question.

Because I don't know what people's experience with church and pastors has been.

I told him, I said, hey, I'm a I'm a I'm a pastor.

I I helped give leadership at a church in Maple Ridge.

He's like, oh, really?

Wow! Uh I've been I've been worried, and he started telling me his whole life story, which kind of boiled down to um uh he is entering his retirement year, so Uber is like what he does to keep busy after he retired.

But he's realizing that he hasn't equipped his family for life without him.

He's very concerned about what happens when he leaves the earth.

And in the course of our conversation, I'm gonna keep this as short as possible.

I brought him back to this particular offer from Jesus.

It sounds to me like you think that in order for God to work in your life, you need to get your life sorted out first.

But that's not what Jesus says.

Jesus said, Come to me.

Invitation before the instruction.

Let's start the conversation.

But then, but then Jesus says something that's confusing.

He says, uh, take my yoke upon you and learn from me.

So you could like, wait, Jesus, I thought, I thought you were going to do something that took something off of me.

But Jesus says you need to put something on you.

Do you know what a yoke is?

You know what a yoke is?

A yoke is uh this.

Okay, at least this is one version of it.

Right?

It's a it's a it's a large piece of wood, and it can be as simple as you want.

Like I found pictures of yolks that were literally giant twigs that had some rope tied around them to make sure that the animal stayed tied.

The purpose of the yoke is is is a couple.

It's to bind these two animals together so that their collective force, right?

Will uh will do more work, more heavy lifting than one can do on their own.

Okay?

And that's often how we think about this particular passage, I think.

Yoke was a term that was fairly common in Jesus' day when rabbis, you know, teachers, um invited students to learn from them, right?

So a yoke isn't just for collective effort, it's also a way of binding two animals together so that one can learn from another.

You know, every once in a while we have this really dumb idea in our house that we should get a second dog, okay?

Because our dog is wonderful, but he's getting old, he's 11, you know, and as a Labrador, we kind of know he's it's not gonna last forever.

Um and so every once in a while we're like, well, we love Telly, uh Telly.

Telly is our first dog, like 20 years ago, okay.

Uh we love Watson so much that if we just got another little little doggy, he could learn from them.

And then I think he probably would just learn to eat my socks like Watson does, and we we we snap out of it.

But we kind of know about this.

We know that if we put two animals together, that one can learn from the other one.

Generally speaking, the younger, less mature one will take on the traits of the older, more mature one.

This is what Jesus is inviting us to do, not to take on a weight, but to take on a relationship where he can teach us.

And the reality is that everybody is wearing a yoke.

Someone is teaching you what success looks like, what your kids need to accomplish.

How much money is enough, how available and productive you should be, and what other people should think about you.

Someone, someone is teaching you that.

Someone is the primary voice in your life for that.

So, in that way, what Jesus says, hey, uh come to me, all you who are weary, and trade the yoke that you have for a better one.

At the very least, I can't, I can't make life effortless for you.

I can teach you a better way of living life.

This is what the New Testament calls discipleship.

It's a commitment for one student to learn from one master.

So the question we need to ask ourselves is who am I learning from?

When we say I follow Jesus, we're not supposed to merely be saying that we believe Jesus exists, that we believe certain things about Jesus, or that I attend a church on a regular basis that talks about Jesus from time to time.

What that means is supposed to be I am learning life from Jesus.

The question isn't, do I have a yoke?

The question is, whose yoke am I wearing?

And I think the yoke that many of us wear says things like, keep up, don't disappoint anybody, make sure your kids don't fall behind or wear sneakers that are off-brand name.

Take the opportunity, answer the message, work harder, be available, stay informed, make more, do more, be more.

Don't let anyone know you're drowning.

Just keep on bending.

But it's really important to get to the end of this verse.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.

And if you do, you will find rest for your souls.

Unfortunately, Jesus doesn't say, follow me, and nothing heavy will ever happen to you.

Jesus himself is acquainted with human grief, loss, betrayal, pressure, opposition, and pain.

So if he didn't get to avoid those things, we probably don't either.

Jesus doesn't promise us a lighter life.

He promises us to teach us how to carry it.

The way of Jesus is still a weight to carry, but it's a different weight.

It's a better weight.

Maybe the problem is not only what we're carrying, maybe maybe part of the problem is how we carry it.

And the pace at which we've convinced ourselves we have to carry it.

But Jesus says, learn from me.

Watch me, walk with me.

Let me teach you how to be human, how to worship, how to love God, how to love each other.

Let me teach you what matters and what doesn't.

Let me teach you when to work and when to stop.

With a whole bunch of guilt about how busy you are and no practical help to manage it.

I don't want you to leave.

Here today and go, wow, I should really slow down.

And then just fill up your calendar again, anyway.

So I'm gonna try to give you a few things that I think make sense to me.

And the first starts with the scriptures.

You're probably familiar with this.

The scriptures give us an ancient practice called Sabbath that we should all probably consider giving more bandwidth in our life than we do.

Sabbath was at its heart and its core, an intentional decision to stop.

And I think sometimes, especially if you've been around church for a long time, you may start to get the impression that Sabbath is an obligation.

Man, I have to slow down again.

I slowed down seven days ago.

I have to slow down again.

Sabbath is not an obligation.

It's a gift.

It's a gift that God himself took advantage of.

That's at least the story that we're told in Genesis.

The end of creation.

God decided to rest.

And if he needs it, maybe we do too.

Maybe we need to learn that I am more than what I produce.

That the world will not fall apart without me.

That my family doesn't have to have every experience.

That every opportunity does not imply or require a yes.

That the work will be there when I get back to it.

And that God will meet me.

Where and when I slow down enough to hear his voice.

Our society wants us to believe that if we stop, that we're somehow we're lazy.

It's an act of trust.

I often remind, especially our worship and tech teams, because if something's gonna go wrong here and people are gonna notice it, it usually happens up here.

You know, if something goes wrong in the gym with the kids, all of you adults are here, you have no idea that they make mistakes.

Their record is flawless.

But what I tell our teams on a regular basis is hey, if we make a mistake and it doesn't go the way that we planned, Jesus will still be king tomorrow.

Jesus will still be king tomorrow.

Now, all those amens, Jesus will still be king if you don't take your kids to that event.

Jesus will still be king if you get to that email or text message tomorrow.

In other words, if you're not a Jesus person, you're just here trying to figure it out, and you're not even sure if Jesus is king in the first place.

Let me just say it another way.

The world will not fall apart without you.

This is perhaps one of the greatest gifts that I learned when I was away for four weeks.

The church was still here.

Nobody burned it down.

And there were a couple of little niggly bits that had to get recorrected after four weeks of non-maintenance.

But I think Jesus is still King.

And the roof is still there.

So maybe we could just calm down.

Or maybe I could just calm down.

I hope you're tracking with me.

If you are, here's what I need you to know.

Your rest will not happen unless you plan for it.

You will almost never accidentally hit the Sabbath.

Because life will consume everything you let it consume.

Did you ever get a raise at work?

And then a month later go, where did all the money go from my raise?

You have more money than you had the month before.

The bank account still says zero at the end of the month.

If we don't make a plan, right?

This is why when we talk about resources around here, we say you need to make your financial plan a priority and progressive.

And uh and and you have to have a plan for it, right?

Like like I would encourage you, if you're gonna be a person who follows Jesus, you know, the the way that I summarize this in in my life is uh, you know, I I I give first, I save second, and I live on the rest.

Right?

Because if you don't do that, guess what?

The money you meant to be generous with is gonna go to Starbucks.

I promise you they don't need it.

Right?

Don't just hope you'll rest.

Decide when you will rest.

And do some things that actually restore you.

We're all built a little different, you know?

Some things that restore me would not restore you, and vice versa.

You know?

But if you think about it, where does your soul unclench a little bit?

Who helps you slow down?

Some of your friends help you speed up, but some of them are really good at just being.

What is it that you find restorative?

A long, delicious meal?

Walking or being outside, reading, music, coffee with somebody that you love, cooking a meal for your family.

Family time with nothing on the end of the calendar.

Maybe it's prayer, maybe it's worship, maybe it's doing nothing at all for a while.

Or if you're like me turning a baseball game on at 4.07 and knowing that by 4.57 you'll have napped for at least 15 minutes.

If you don't know what those things are, can I give you a resource that might be helpful?

There's a book, it's a classic now, by an author called Gary Thomas called Sacred Pathways.

If you just need to do some self-awareness checking, what resonates with me?

He just outlines several very common ways.

I think there's nine or ten of them in there.

Ways that people find that they can find rest for their souls.

And and and I think you need to be aware of what looks like rest, but doesn't actually restore you.

Because you could sit on your phone for four hours in your living room and not accomplish much of anything, but still fill your mind up with a whole bunch of stuff that weighs you down.

Don't get me wrong.

Look, sometimes Melissa and I sit in the living room and just fire reels back and forth at each other for a couple hours, and we laugh and we love it, and we, you know, break out a bottle of wine, and it's so much fun, it's great.

Like every once in a while, it's fine.

Don't let it control you.

Don't do it by accident more often than you mean to.

Take charge.

Okay.

Let's land this plane.

Where's your Sabbath?

Where are you gonna stop?

Where are you gonna slow down?

When are you putting in places, put yourself in places that restore you?

When are you going to be with people who are restful?

When are you gonna set an example for your kids of not letting life terrorize them?

When will you deliberately become unavailable?

Put it on your calendar.

Now, if rest matters, rest deserves a plan.

Maybe it's traditional, maybe it's Sunday afternoon through Monday.

You know?

If you're gonna do that, can I can I give you permission on something?

I'm gonna step on I'm gonna step on something here for a quick second.

When I was a kid, I was not allowed to ever play sports on Sundays.

Never.

And I still hold it against my mom.

Okay?

So I don't believe that you should take this hard line, you know, born out of your religious conviction, to never let your children have fun on Sabbath day.

Okay?

But you don't always have to let them go and have fun on Sabbath day either.

It's good for everybody to have rest.

Sometimes we just overloaded our kids' calendars and the names of I was just watching a video this week where like professional athletes were like, parents, don't do this.

Don't get sucked into the, you know, let your kids have fun.

If it's fun, go do it.

Maybe it counts as Sabbath.

When I was 15 years old, I went to my mom with a PowerPoint and explained to her why why I found soccer fun and why she should let me go to a soccer tournament on a Sunday, and I won.

So so it it yeah, I know.

I know.

Fifteen years of saying no, and I finally got a yes.

And then I screwed it up because I missed church for it.

So anyway, I wasn't supposed to do that.

There's a line.

That's all I'm saying.

Find it.

Okay?

I'm gonna invite the band to come back just as we as we wind up.

Maybe you spent the last few years trying to become better at carrying the weight.

Maybe this morning you're realizing that carrying of weight is unsustainable.

Let me let me call you back.

Jesus is offering you something better.

Not try harder, not get tougher, not even just hang on.

Bend, but don't break, and don't bend for too long.

Jesus' invitation, come to me, is all we need to remind us that we weren't meant to live bent.

For those of us in the room who follow Jesus, maybe it's time to reprioritize.

Maybe the invitation this morning is come back.

Maybe you've slowly traded the yoke that you took from Jesus once.

For somebody else's yoke.

Maybe they changed it while you were sleeping.

You didn't even realize it.

Maybe achievement or success or parenting, money, busyness, even church ministry have become the yoke that you've taken on.

Jesus would say, Come on back.

It's time for me to set the pace again.

And if you're not sure what you believe about Jesus this morning, can I just say we're so glad that you came?

So glad that you took the risk.

We know that it's tough to walk into a new place.

Not sure exactly how it will.

I really hope this morning has been meaningful for you.

I hope that people treated you with enthusiasm.

I hope that you want to come back next week.

But you know, one of the things we believe here is that you can belong before you believe.

You don't have to have everything sorted out today to actually just try it.

Try it.

Try slowing down.

Try it because Jesus will let you try the yoke on without buying it.

Give it a shot.

What?

What if what if this guy, Jesus?

You know who we believe was God, but we also believe was fully human.

Knows something about what it means to be human.

What if his invitation is worth your time and attention?

You don't need Jesus to take you out of your life.

I'm not I'm not advocating for that in any way, shape, or form.

But what I think you do need to do is let Jesus teach you how to live the life that you have.

And maybe one of the first lessons we need to learn or relearn today is how to stop.

Come to me.

All you who are weary.

Find rest for your souls.

Take my yoke upon you.

Let's pray together.

Jesus, we know we need to slow down.

I don't think that's news to most of us.

Learning how to slow down.

When to slow down, who to be with when we slow down, what to do when we slow down is less than.

And so we confess this morning that we need you to teach us, to set the pace, to inform the calendar, to inform the priorities, help us learn them, take them on, and help others to do the same.

And for that we come to you.

Because only you can help.

Give us the courage, the wisdom to do what it is you call us to do.

In Jesus' name we ask.

Amen.