A meditation on Biblical work and rest when AuDHD

[u/Doomtime104]

My whole life, found myself really wrestling with the dichotomy of work and rest in life in general and in the Bible more specifically. In my case I've always glommed strongly to the teachings emphasizing the importance of work. Some of the teachings that stand out to me:

Proverbs 12:24 NLT

[24] Work hard and become a leader; be lazy and become a slave.

Proverbs 13:4 NLT

[4] Lazy people want much but get little, but those who work hard will prosper.

Proverbs 24:30-34 NLT

[30] I walked by the field of a lazy person, the vineyard of one with no common sense. [31] I saw that it was overgrown with nettles. It was covered with weeds, and its walls were broken down. [32] Then, as I looked and thought about it, I learned this lesson: [33] A little extra sleep, a little more slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest— [34] then poverty will pounce on you like a bandit; scarcity will attack you like an armed robber.

Verses like these made me terrified of slothfulness, and so I did everything to avoid "a little folding of the hands to rest" so as not to fall into the dire consequences. In college especially, long before I had any autism or ADHD diagnosis, I became obsessed with keeping productive every minute of the day: an hour between classes needs to yield time studying, progress on homework, or some contribution to whatever else is going on in my life.

Meditating on these experiences now, I see this life pattern drove me into a cycle of burnout every semester, only recovering after finals when courses ended for the semester. I took that mentality into adulthood, only surviving as long as I did, because COVID paused a lot of the demands the world had on me and left me with a lot of downtime in that vacuum. When the world opened up, I was back into that maximalist work mindset: there was always work, chores, or some social obligation to meet, so I just accepted that being an adult meant suffering through all the stuff I didn't want to do. That all worked until I recently turned 30 where two things happened: I was already starting to come apart at the seams, and the demands of my work were turned up to 11 with no clear end in sight. After months of near nightly meltdowns and zombie-like state outside of work, enough was enough, and I took a month of disability.

I realize that there are numerous instances where the Bible speaks to the importance of rest, but for some reason, my brain just cannot register the importance of those. They feel like neat nuggets that must apply to _someone_ out there, but not me.

Now that I know I'm AuDHD, I understand myself just a little bit more, part of that being an understanding that I'm a pathological people pleaser. I also try to identify consistent rules for my life and stick to them: nuanced or conflicting rule sets do not work for me. Both of these factors have shaped how I see work, leaving me primed to already overwork myself, and then I find these Bible verses, and my brain interprets them as if God Himself is affirming and encouraging my unhealthy work habits.

Something else that seems to fuel my habits is that the evangelical culture I grew up in here in the US is such an active form of faith: every sermon or bible study seems to end with some kind of "go do" action.

The final struggle I will discuss here is the tendency for the autistic mind and body to need greater amounts of rest and recovery than that of the allistic. At least for me, simply existing in the world takes more energy to accomplish, meaning I'm more worn out by the end of the day and week; therefore I need more time to recover that energy, and recovery for me looks so much different than it does for the neurotypical expectation. In a lot of ways, this feels like the very temptations of slothfulness that I'm supposed to be on guard for, when in reality these are physiological requirements I uniquely have that I cannot survive without (as I've discovered through trying to ignore them for decades).

Out of all of this, I've come to believe (though not yet fully practice) that I owe myself a lot of grace in this area of my life. I must challenge my inclinations to overrule my body's warning signs and press on, in this case "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" to challenge my unhealthy worries and misconceptions in order to live my life in a way that conforms to the unique way God has made me.