ISI Brotherhood Podcast

125. Do You Even Deserve Free Time?

• Aaron Walker • Season 2 • Episode 10

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When was the last time you truly rested without feeling guilty about it? In our achievement-oriented culture, countless Christian entrepreneurs struggle with the nagging question: Do I deserve free time, and if so, how much?

This profound conversation tackles the dangerous myth that rest is simply a reward for hard work. Instead, we explore how rhythm—not balance—creates the foundation for sustainable success and meaningful impact. God didn't design us to run on fumes, yet many successful business owners find themselves redlining through life, mistaking busyness for productivity.

Drawing from personal experiences spanning decades of entrepreneurship, we share candid stories about the hollow victories of financial milestones and the relational capital often sacrificed along the way. You'll discover why that vacation you've been postponing won't magically restore your depleted reserves, and why implementing daily and weekly rest rhythms is essential for both your well-being and business growth.

The episode examines how Jesus modeled time management, revealing powerful insights about selective availability and strategic rest that directly contradict our hustle culture. We provide practical frameworks for auditing your life across five key dimensions, helping you identify which areas are suffering from neglect.

Most importantly, you'll learn why rest isn't something you earn when you finally complete your to-do list—it's something you steward because you trust that your life, business, and family are safest when they're in God's hands, not yours. The question isn't whether you deserve time off, but whether you're managing your time or letting your time manage you.

Ready to break free from the guilt of rest? Listen now and discover how embracing sacred rhythms of restoration can transform not just your productivity, but your entire approach to business and life.


Key Takeaways:

  • Are you managing your time, or is your time managing you?
  • Rest isn't a reward—it's a rhythm that sustains impact and longevity.
  • Jesus’ example shows us that strategic rest is just as holy as hard work.
  • Vacations don't fix burnout—daily and weekly rhythms of renewal do.
  • Your business doesn’t need more hustle; it needs a healthier you.


Connect:

Speaker 1:

God really didn't design us to run on fumes. I mean he didn't, and a lot of us are redlining it today. We're running on fumes, we're really not getting all accomplished that we could, and I want you to know that rest is not a reward for hard work, but it's a rhythm of trust and of stewardship, and I want you to ask yourself right now, where you're sitting right now, are you managing your time, or is your time managing you?

Speaker 2:

So today we're wrestling with this idea of do we even deserve free time and if so, how much? As Christian business owners, we grind, we give, we lead, we serve. But what about taking time off? What about rest? What about margin? These are things that we wrestle with. We wrestle with understanding what is appropriate, when it should happen and what quantity, and today we're gonna be diving in, try to tap into a little wisdom, a little experience, a little scripture, and wrestle with this question. So Big A welcome to your podcast.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, hi, seth. You know it's funny. The preacher used to say that your sins meet you at the pulpit stairs, and this topic is really something for me that I struggle with big time. I've been working now for 50 years, every day, and now I'm backing up, I'm taking a little time off and I feel guilty. Sometimes it's like, man, I don't even deserve this, like I should just keep pushing forward. Physically, I'm in great shape, hopefully. Mentally I'm in great shape. That's debatable, but I feel like maybe I should just continue forging on, working hard, pressing. But then my wife goes hey, take a little time off, let's enjoy what you've worked for this whole time, and it gets into this. Do you deserve it, do you not? Do you keep going forward? How much free time do you need? And this is yeah. So I'm going to be teaching out of really diving into this for myself as well as teaching.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, as an entrepreneur, I remember writing in my book that we have these muscles that we train every day, and then, like when something happens like you sell a business or maybe you take a vacation it's awkward for a while. It's like I've been used to doing this and in this intensity and frankly, I think a lot of us have an adrenaline addiction and so when we go into these moments of rest, because they're either imposed on us or something great happens, we don't know how to handle it. We're just not equipped for it. It's not normal, right.

Speaker 1:

You know, the first business I sold, I was 27 years old and I thought I was going to take an extended period of time off. And a buddy of mine owns a house down in Naples, florida, and he said, hey, just go down there and spend the summer and you and Robin really enjoy it, y'all hang out. I had two small children at the time and I get down there and I'm like, hey, I've had this big, you know capital event in my life and I'm gonna take some time off, I'm gonna rest, I'm gonna enjoy the summer, we're gonna hang out on, and in three weeks I was back home.

Speaker 1:

Yeah yeah, and I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. I said I don't feel like I'm deserving of this, and it had been instilled in me my whole career to work, grind it out, work, work, work. And then I had an opportunity, and so I think, though, that there's a misconception of the word deserve, and when we often think about it, we tie our worth to our output, and that's what I was doing. I was sitting down there on the beach in Naples thinking I could be doing more in this. What are people going to think of me? You know, I'm a sloth, I'm lazy, I've got a little money, I'm going to just take it easy, and so I believe in myself that I should be here back working again, and so I felt like I had earned an opportunity, but I really couldn't rest, and Scripture really gives us a different model of this. He says that God said that the design for us includes a Sabbath rest. It's not earned, but it's commanded.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know, to this point around rest and the Sabbath, as I've been listening to a believer who is also Jewish and he frames the whole story in Genesis around God calling people to trust and rest and the human tendency to say no I'm going to figure this out on my own Like he really zeroes in.

Speaker 2:

So this is like a DNA level question for us, like are we holding the world together, right, or is somebody else holding the world together? And then for people and we're going to really dive into this, because I've been actually on a deep dive around time management and productivity and what that means for me but what's cool is I found a resource that's scripture-based that I love, and the fact the guy that wrote this book said he read 40 time management books and he said the one thing I noticed is all of them said, oh, you got to do it exactly like this, right, but none of them actually looked at how Jesus spent his time and he's like why wouldn't we go to the author of time right when we look at these things and so? But we framed it as the question today was how much time do you deserve? And maybe that was. You know, that was a good hook right. People are like, wow, this is an interesting question, but do we actually need rest? Do we need it to be higher performers? Some people still don't even believe they need rest.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think we definitely need rest. Two years ago I hit the wall pretty bad and I took a two-month sabbatical to get some rest and I came back much more productive, much more clear, had a plan, had a strategy, wasn't fatigued. So I think we certainly need rest. But I want to go back just for a second when you were talking about, like what is it? What does the model really look like? How do we get there? Like I'm very motivated, you know high d personality, uh, work and work, and work. I've been instilled by my dad and my mom to work and you know, like, how do you know, when you've gotten to a place where you can rest, we're're so driven, we're so motivated. Does that matter? Does the outcome matter, or should it be just the rhythm of life?

Speaker 2:

I think it has to be rhythm of life Big A. And the reason is is people tell themselves I think there's a lot of analogies to finance right, so money time, right, there's a lot of parallels. People will say I'm just going to work really hard and then I'm going to retire. And they get to retirement and they're like, okay, now I'm completely disconnected from purpose. I spent all of these years grinding, maybe sacrificing my health, and then I get to this magic age and everybody tells me I mean, frankly, the financial marketing apparatus tells us all that the goal we're all working towards is this retirement where it's total leisure and it's not what it's cracked up to be.

Speaker 1:

I'm at that age right, and I can attest it's not what it's cracked up to be.

Speaker 2:

And so we've sacrificed our health to get to this magic moment. And then we get there, and this is time and time again when we take our eye off scripture. This is what the world actually delivers us. It delivers us something that doesn't give us the emotional payout we were expecting, like you promised me when I got to retirement and if I did all the things just right, it was going to feel like this and son of a gun. It absolutely doesn't. And so, when it comes to time management, what I'm learning is and time off is you have to bake that time off into your daily and weekly routines, like it literally has to be on your calendar. You have to force yourself to rest, otherwise you develop such bad habits by the time you get an extended vacation or whatever. It doesn't help, it doesn't even scratch the itch because you've lost the ability to actually rest.

Speaker 1:

You know, it's in our culture, though.

Speaker 2:

It is.

Speaker 1:

It's like, hey, you got to always be on. I've got a brother that's a real estate agent and finally he made some real hard decisions, you know, because other people think that because he's a realtor, he should be available 24-7 to show property, and he's really devised now kind of a schedule with boundaries and he said, listen, I've got a life to live as well. Eight nine o'clock at night I'm not going to be talking to you about your house, and on Sunday morning I'm not going to be showing you a piece of real estate. But our culture says that we really should always be on, we should always be available, we should always be present. But our families are over here and we're spending this relationship capital to grow our businesses professionally and financially and we're spending this inordinate amount of relationship capital to accomplish it, and then we get a little success financially and we look back and we don't even know our family. And those are the things that we're trying to protect against.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and a lot of it is this fear of missing out, this fear of hustle. I was talking to somebody just this week. I just got back into town from a trip for a couple of days and I was talking to this older gentleman. I'm like, are you gonna? He asked us if we were gonna go out to dinner and I knew he'd been on the road. I'm like you should just go home and have dinner with your wife.

Speaker 2:

And it reminded me of a Korean CEO that I talked to one time who told me that he rarely ate dinner at home with his family, even though he had a young daughter, and it was because he was out with the business guys literally every night and that that was actually expected in their Korean elite business culture. It's just the way they roll, and and and a little, a little, I mean it surprised me when I heard that. And then a couple you know whatever a year later I was driving with him and I said, why is that? And he goes, because we feel as if we step back, the world's going to go on without us and we're going to be forgotten. And so it was this idea that if I tap the brakes, if I rest a little bit. I'm going to lose my stature. I'm going to lose my whatever. We're hanging on to right, income, importance, influence, whatever it is right and that gets back to that trust issue that you brought up earlier, big A.

Speaker 1:

You said. Something that I want to go back on just a little bit is that it doesn't give you the feeling like you thought it was going to this age of retirement, this emotional feeling that you're going to expect. I talked to a mutual friend of mine and yours and he was 26, 27 years old and his wife texted him a picture of their bank account and she goes this is your goal. You've been shooting for this. You have a million dollars in cash in the bank and he said it was almost deflating.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

He said he thought he was going to have this elation, he's going to be so excited he was going to be able to share with his friends. And he said it was almost. This letdown, this disappointment, this feeling of it didn't do for me what I thought it was going to do for me. And I remember feeling that, when I was 27, selling out to a Fortune 500 is that, on the anticipation of it and even prior to the closing, I thought, man, you know, I've taken something when I was 19, turned it into a sale to a Fortune 500 at 27. And I remember distinctly the night or the afternoon that we closed, I went home and I felt a little bit hollow and Robin goes you're not all excited like I thought you would be.

Speaker 1:

And I said it doesn't make me feel like I thought it was going to make me feel, and that's what this is, that the culture is teaching us now, it's a lie, right To be on, to be always going. And so what I have found, you know, conversely, is that the more I put boundaries around the time, it's more of an influence on people that I coach and mentor, and it also is better for my family and that feeling is rewarding. Yeah, that feeling I get from my children, my grandchildren and my wife is like I'm glad you're present, when you're present.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because it's aligned with your true goals. And so the book that I want to just kind of highlight it should be a paid commercial, because I'm that high on it is a book by a guy named Jordan Rayner and the book is called Redeeming your Time, and it's been the best book I've ever read around. Something I struggle with, which is kind of time management, because by nature I'm curious about a lot of things. I'm relatively responsible and people ask me for stuff and I want to say yes. And he ties it back to okay, we should be grace filled and productive. He goes so much of the productivity hype in our culture is around this idea that we got to work harder and that we've got to compete. We've got to eat what we kill. You know, if it is to be, it's up to me like that's the ethos of people. And then they're always selling you the right widget that you need to buy from them to help you, you know, achieve this elite status. And his attitude and really ties for me to gratitude is no, we work hard as a response to what God's already done for us. We live in grace. Christ has paid the debt. He's redeemed us, he's called us to himself. He's prepared somewhere for the future for us.

Speaker 2:

And I like to say we're playing with house money and we're living on borrowed time, right, borrowed time, house money. That should give us a freedom, right, and from that place of freedom now we got to start saying I don't rest when I'm dead. The whole sleep when you're dead mantra is no, I actually need some rest in my day and maybe rest looks a little different. We can talk about that. Not everybody rests the same way. One of the things that Jordan talks about in his book. He's like if you work with your mind, he goes often. Rest is resting with your hands, doing something creative with your hands yard work. If you work with your hands, maybe it's sitting down, reading a book right. But we need to be replenished as we go, not just wait six months and hope we survive till then.

Speaker 1:

What do you tell younger entrepreneurs, small business owners today, would you say, seth Buechle, even in your business, that time off can increase productivity and not decrease it? And how would you give a testament to that in what you've seen in your personal life?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean time off. Does you have to let your brain kind of detox? You have to let it and it takes a while. Usually it's a couple of days as you go into a vacation and then a couple of days before you get off the vacation, your brain starts to feel that anxiety of like, oh my gosh, I got to get back on that horse.

Speaker 1:

Do I even know. Robin always tells me that she's going to send me on vacation three days before the family arrives.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, so I have time to detox.

Speaker 2:

So it certainly helps. But the bigger thing that I am concluding is we get so busy with minutiae that we actually don't get to do the deep work. I actually think deep work is satisfying to us. I think part of this issue that we're talking about rest is actually tied to I feel anxious because my life is so busy yet I'm not actually getting the most important things done. That, to me, is the problem we're trying to solve.

Speaker 2:

It's like why do I need rest? It's not often just because I'm burnt out and tired physically. It's generally because my brain is like cooked, because I've just been trying to slog through 10 million things all at one time. And what I'm learning and what I appreciate about this book is it teaches you how to capture all those issues, put them somewhere, you write them down, you know they're going to be taken care of and then kind of reverse engineer it. I mean, dan Miller was a tremendous friend of yours. He was a mentor to me from a distance. Got to meet him a few times and he really highlighted that certain days of the week he was doing deep work. And I think part of why we don't feel rested is we're buried in shallow work because we never organize ourselves enough to do some deep work.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's so good. I remember going over to Dan's, oftentimes on the weekends, and he'd be sitting on the front porch of the sanctuary that he built off to the side of his house, and I'd be like Dan, how's it going today? He goes I'm doing some really deep work and I'm like it looks like to me. You're just sitting here. He goes. That's really deep work and giving my mind an opportunity to rest and to reflect, and you know here's the thing, though that most of us tie our identity to our output. We really value what's on the profit and loss statement. This could yeah, we really value what's on the profit and loss statement. I want to. This could be an episode within itself, but one of the things that we've got to pay attention to is how we can develop margin in our life so that we can do deep work yeah and we stress ourselves.

Speaker 1:

You know, we buy things we can't afford. We leverage ourselves to a point that we feel like that we have to work 24, 7, 7 days a week and we don't have to do that. But so I'd just say be mindful of how you're spending your current resources, not to allow yourself to a position where you don't have runway or you don't have margin so that you can sit and do deep work.

Speaker 2:

And nobody's going to do that for us. I mean, that's the other revelation here, there is no intervention coming.

Speaker 2:

Nobody else gives a rat's tail about this. If you don't take ownership of it, nobody's going to do it for you and what they're going to do is they're going to keep asking you for stuff and they're not being bad, they're just stating their needs. I think part of our issue as leaders is we're not coming to grips with our own human needs and with our mandate from scripture, like we are tasked with being good stewards but we're not great stewards of our time. Many times, at least, I haven't been, and even saying I'm available, you know, it's kind of this humility thing Well, I'm available, I'll take any call, right. And then we're like, yeah, but am I accountable to actually achieving the goals that I set? Because you know, especially relative to family and others and business, if I'm so busy, you know just doing the productive work, but I'm not getting the higher order goals, you know, are we really making progress?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and then someone's going to suffer Some of the commitments prior that you've made promises. They're going to suffer as a result of that. You know, in ISI we teach a lot about systems and team building, and that's really the secret to earning time freedom is having other people that you can delegate things to. You can have systems and processes. Scott Beebe owns my Business On Purpose. He's a master at developing, creating systems and processes to help us allow ourselves to have more time freedom, and so really think through what you're doing. Is it the redundancies that's keeping you from accomplishing your goals and being able to rest? And if so, you need to get some coaching or mentoring or help around creating your systems and really going through team building exercises in order to allow you to have more time freedom.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and also your health. As we talk about these traps right, these traps that entrepreneurs can get into is we fear that if we rest a little bit, we're not going to keep winning, we're going to lose our place? I think it was Seven Habits that talked about. You got to sharpen the saw. You got to take time to sharpen the saw right, and for us, that's many times it's just exercise, right? Nobody's going to drag us out of bed and to the gym and everybody's going to want time from us, but if we're not in physical shape, if we're not, you can't perform.

Speaker 1:

No, there's no way, not for very long. No, we're not. You can't perform. No, there's no way.

Speaker 2:

Not for very long.

Speaker 1:

No, no, you can't. You need to really schedule your free time, I think, with the same discipline as you schedule your meetings. Seth, are you really good at taking a day a week, complete sabbatical or complete Sabbath? We'll call it today, and I'll be first to admit I'm not great at it. I'm getting better and there was a time where I worked every day but I'd go to church and I'd come home and we'd eat with the family, but I was always make time to do some kind of work. Even as I've gotten a little bit older, I see the value of completely separating myself from doing tasks that I normally do. Now, like you said, I go out in the yard and do some things. I enjoy helping Robin with the flowers and the shrubbery and just working out in the yard doing things like that. I don't consider that work. I'm talking about my normal task. How good are you at doing that?

Speaker 2:

I'm a D, I'm bad, I'm bad at it. In fact, one of the regrets I have, if I were to do it over again and I will be teaching this to my kids and I feel bad about it because I feel like I missed the window. Now I'm sure that's probably just another lie, I'm believing, but I would have implemented a Sabbath. I'm Jewish by blood. I'm a Christian by God's design right, I'm Christian. And so I probably resisted a little bit of that Sabbath thinking because it felt like it was a regulation maybe being put on me, and then also because I'm a pretty driven personality and I like activity, right. But the thing that I think people miss about why a Sabbath is so important and why I wish I would have implemented it is the relational gold that comes, you know, in this book from Jordan he talks about one of the things he's done with his kids is, you know, friday afternoon phone goes on silent, my phone takes the day off, right, it's about games, it's about these other things. Sunday morning he gets up, gives his kids a coffee I thought that was hilarious Takes them to donuts, right, and they play games as a family, they go to church and whatnot, and it's the relational capital that is replenishing to the soul.

Speaker 2:

It's not so much that I'm just refraining from work. It's no, no, no, no, no. I'm actually making this about celebrating God's goodness and doing something tangible. That isn't about me needing rest. It's about me acknowledging God commands me to rest as a act of faith, to remind, even optional, to write, to remind myself and to remind others. I'm living in God's world, he's meeting my needs and I'm going to celebrate him and I'm going to rest. And so I don't know how to do this with my kids and grandkids at this stage. But, frankly, I missed this boat. I just missed it and I didn't. I didn't do it and I wish I would have.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's one of the reasons that you and I host this podcast is to teach those that are behind us Don't make some of the mistakes that we made, be better, and we're telling now from experience that we know there's a better way. So learn on our dime those that are listening and don't do some of the things that we've done wrong. Try to implement that in your family and the dividends will be huge, you know. The last thing I wanted to talk about a little bit was time as an investment in what or who, and that matters most. Our number one core value here is relationships matter most, and the best use of our time or our free time that we have.

Speaker 1:

It's not playing Nintendo or Netflix or it's not those things to escape. It's really investing in people and purpose, and these are the things that I did recognize about 25 years ago, those that have been following me for any period of time, though I had a horrific automobile accident where the life of a pedestrian was lost and I really flipped the switch and really became self-aware of the people and the brevity of life and how fast life can change. And so for me, I do know the investment in the people is more important than the time in the business. So for you, seth, you've not had that type of travesty in your life, but realizing it as an older man, small business owner, what would you tell people in? How to invest their time and the reason it's important to invest it more in people and purpose, rather than your free time just going out doing whatever you want to do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a great question For me, I think, figuring out what makes your soul come alive right. I think it genuinely does have to be kingdom aligned or it's going to ring hollow, right, which is why you bring up people. I don't know.

Speaker 1:

Should it be others focused more than inward focused?

Speaker 2:

I think there's got to be a balance. I mean yes and no, Some of both. Look, I mean, jesus is back to the. Jesus is a perfect example. He didn't allow every interruption. Some people have said Jesus is always available, and many times they're like, hey, jesus, come with me and go over to this place, and he's like, no, I'm teaching my disciples right now, and so I think it's both.

Speaker 1:

And he rested he. It's both and he rested. He rested right. He was in the boat On the other side. There was people over there that were starving and dying and he's like I got to take a nap here for a minute on the front of the boat Right.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. I got to rest, and so I think, no, we need rest, mm-hmm, personal unrest and we need to do things that actually give us energy and life, and that's going to be unique for each person. And then there's also the but we have to acknowledge if it turns selfish. In the same way that our productivity can turn selfish, our rest can turn selfish. By definition, we're selfish human beings, but one of the things I love this principle is Jesus also accepted his uni-presence. Like God, is omnipresent. Jesus, being part of the Godhead, was omnipresent, but when he came to earth, he says I'm going to be in one place at one time. I've been really bad at this and I'm making good progress on saying no, I'm going to focus on the person and the task at hand, one at a time. A lot of times that's my phone and my task list. That's got half of my mind, while I'm having a conversation with people and getting better at saying, when I am doing something that's not work, can I just actually do it, just be there, just like slow it down.

Speaker 1:

Be fully present.

Speaker 2:

Talk to somebody you know and then stacking. I mean, you know this, people hate this about today's world. I was with a guy at a board meeting this week and he said you know, I used to work for myself for 20 years. He goes. Now I work for a larger company and my calendar is open. So what happens with an open calendar? People book meetings back to back to back and you end up chain smoking your freaking meetings for eight hours and you're just spent. And so the point of that is guarding our time so that we can be fully present and do the things that we're doing with some intention.

Speaker 1:

I remember for 20 years when I was building my businesses early on in my career, I'd sit down on the couch and I'd go to sleep in 30 minutes after working all day. And then Robin has said to me countless times during that period of time all I get is your leftovers.

Speaker 1:

Yeah yeah, and it made me feel terrible. Quite honestly, it didn't make me feel terrible enough at the time to do anything about it. But looking back now, I really cheated her for a period of time and after the accident, I started doing some things with my kids and with Robin to show them that they were the most important. Like I would even go get my kids out of school. And they're like what's wrong? Nothing's wrong. I'm getting you out of school, we're going to eat ice cream, we're going to the park. And they're like dad, what in the world? And I'm like no, you're more important. Well, don't you have meetings today? Yeah, I do, but you know what?

Speaker 1:

I canceled them, and I want to encourage some of you listeners today to think through that for yourself. It's like how could I demonstrate to my spouse or to my children or to my grandchildren that they're important? And I think that's canceling something that maybe you've got to do. That you'll get to later. Oftentimes we hurt the people that are closest to us the most because we think we can get away with it. So I just want to encourage you don't give them your leftovers. And the margin principle says without space, you can't hear God's voice or see other people clearly.

Speaker 2:

Well and strategically. This is one thing that's really hitting me lately. People clearly Well and strategically. This is one thing that's really hitting me lately.

Speaker 2:

If you have a big idea and you have something really important, the idea that you're going to get that insight through a drive-by experience is a myth.

Speaker 2:

You learn that insight by studying a problem. It's been said that an expert is somebody who's made all of the mistakes in a very narrow field of practice, right? I also heard from somebody talking about product market fit. They said, basically, you will, you'll know that to find product market fit, you have to have what's called a learned secret and meaning you've paid the dues to actually learn something. And so this is an argument for this deep work that we were talking about is you have to give yourself enough space, enough margin, enough sitting on the porch like Dan Miller at the sanctuary to say it may not look like I'm working, but I'm actually letting my brain kind of process through things and ask myself good questions so I can come to a conclusion that's very strategic. It's one of the reasons why many of us don't get where we want to go is we're not slowing down enough to be truly strategic and think something all the way through. It's just the pace is too fast for us right now.

Speaker 1:

Well, we live reactive and not proactive. Yes, sir, we're not intentionally following our vision plan or our vision story, and so we get sidetracked. So the audience is listening right now. They're like well, okay, how do I know how much time to take off? There's a few things that you can do that I think will really help you. And first is audit your life.

Speaker 1:

We use it called pillars personal, professional, relational, spiritual and financial. Those are the five pillars in ISI that we look at all the time. You need to audit those things and say how is it that I'm falling short personally or professionally or spiritually? It's hard to keep all the balls in the air at the same time, but you've got to do an audit in order to find out where you're at, or take note of your current position and be honest with yourself. I tell people all the time what is it you know that you're lying to yourself about? Just really be honest and sit down and take an audit of your life. And then you've got to think which pillar is it that's getting neglected? And I think if you do that.

Speaker 2:

That's really a clue to you, because your time should reflect your values, right, they say. Your checkbook and your calendar reflect what we really believe. That's true, and here's a perfect example. My associate pastor preached the message this weekend. I was listening to it while I was traveling and it was about prayer. And he said prayer is actually the reflection of your maturity, of a Christian life. And then the guy had a second quote, I think it was Martin Lowe joins, he said, and everything else in the Christian life is easier than prayer.

Speaker 2:

Wow, and what was interesting and I want to tie that back to rest, because it comes from the same root, because we would rather work hard and grind it out than we would admit that we are children of God and his kingdom and we need his help. And I think our issue with rest isn't how much we think we need. I think we're a crappy judge of how much rest we need. I think the issue is really how dependent are we, how trusting are we Right? And that's our issue with why we struggle with rest. And I would argue, ask your wife, if you're married, how much rest she thinks you need.

Speaker 1:

And I would start there.

Speaker 2:

I would literally start there. I think we're a terrible judge of how much rest we actually need.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because we let our ambitious, big, hairy, audacious goals get in the way. Yeah, we do, and we want to be accomplishing something at every minute. I think the next thing that you've got to do is ask yourself is my schedule aligned with who I say I want to become?

Speaker 2:

And if it's not, who's in charge of your schedule? I mean, I know a lot of our listeners are self-employed and Trevor Mock, one of my closest friends. His question he's been asking lately is what did you hire your business to do? And I've had to wrestle with that for the last year because if my life sucks and if I'm stressed out, I get nobody to blame, particularly if I work for myself, and I'll just let that one sit.

Speaker 1:

Wow, so true. You know really, we've talked about it earlier but you've got to use a rhythm, not a balance mentality, because you won't get a perfect balance every week. I don't care what you do. You've got to look for these healthy rhythms, whether it's a weekly Sabbath, whether it's a quarterly getaway, or you've got to have some margin daily in your life. You've got to have some means to measure this by. So look for a rhythm and not a balance.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but you also have to define what winning looks like right.

Speaker 1:

In the beginning. You have to identify that or otherwise we'll never know when we've accomplished it or when we've won right.

Speaker 2:

Specifically relative to rest, like what does good rest look like? Because I don't even think we know right. Specifically relative to rest, like what does good rest look like? Because I don't even think we know right.

Speaker 1:

You know, you said it earlier and I think this is really important. You said ask your wife, but we say involve your inner circle.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Like ask the people that you're around, whether it be your children, your spouse, your accountability partners, your mastermind group. Who are those people that can help you figure out what do I need to do in order to get this rest that I'm needing? And I even ask people do I seem present to you? And sometimes Robin will say no, you don't. Like I can tell you know, we've been married 45 years now. She knows when I'm not present she's like where are you at? And I just start laughing and she goes because you're not sure. Here on the couch with me, yeah. And I'm like yeah, I know I've got this thing going on, or I've got this deal I'm trying to close, or I've got you know whatever. And she's like why don't you set that aside and deal with that in the morning and right now be present with me?

Speaker 2:

Yeah for sure. And to kind of wrap that up, that's a question what is the non-negotiable for you about phone? Recently I took X. I don't spend any time on X, I was loving it. You know Jordan Rayner.

Speaker 2:

In his book he said one of the things he does he doesn't read any news any longer. He just says I'm done. He goes, it's not my issue, I can't fix it. Eventually. If it's important enough, somebody will bring it to my attention. Like, what are the things that we can cut out of our lives that might actually make us more restful? Right, and then have some discipline to say, no, this is non-negotiable. I am going to read the word and work out during this time. Right, I am going to put my phone on silent at 5 pm, because I think what we'll find is, if we build that into our lives, as you were saying earlier, big A, we'll quit believing that myth that either A I deserve this time off, or B when I get that week off in Hawaii, in the fall, all of a sudden, my life will be back to feeling balanced. I just don't believe that. I think we got to pull it into every day and got to start to surrender a little bit on this topic.

Speaker 1:

Man, you are so right, and when I start thinking about summarizing this, god really didn't design us to run on fumes. I mean he didn't, and a lot of us are redlining it today. We're running on fumes, we're really not getting all accomplished that we could, and I want you to know that rest is not a reward for hard work, but it's a rhythm of trust and of stewardship, and I want you to ask yourself right now, where you're sitting right now, are you managing your time or is your time managing you? You know, if we're honest with ourselves, most of us wear busyness like a badge, but the truth is it takes real men that exercise their faith more than hustle ever will accomplish in your life. So we've got to exercise that faith in our life, and God modeled the Sabbath, not because he needed it, but because we need it.

Speaker 1:

Your free time isn't something you earn when you finally finish the to-do list. It's something that you steward because you trust that your life, your business and your family are safest when they're in God's hands and not yours. Hey, thanks for being with us today. I enjoyed being with you, seth. Thanks for hanging out with me today, and we'll see you next week on the ISI Brotherhood Podcast.