my Articulate Heart

There is a kind of tiredness that sleep does not cure. You can be productive, busy, even outwardly faithful—and yet feel strangely unmoved by prayer, indifferent to God, dulled to joy. You still believe, but the heart feels heavy. Spiritual things feel demanding. God feels distant, not because He has withdrawn, but because something in us has quietly lost its desire to move toward Him. The Christian tradition has a name for this: sloth , or acedia . According to Thomas Aquinas , sloth is not mere laziness. It is a spiritual sorrow —a sadness toward spiritual good itself. It is the weariness that makes prayer feel burdensome, holiness feel unrealistic, and intimacy with God feel like too much effort. The soul begins to turn away, not in rebellion, but in fatigue. This is what makes sloth so dangerous and so subtle. It does not shout. It sighs. When Spiritual Good Feels Heavy Acedia whispers that prayer can wait. That God will understand if we skip today. That spiritual effort is ...

We live in an age that mistrusts waiting. Everything around us urges immediacy—instant answers, instant pleasure, instant relief. To wait is often portrayed as weakness, as though patience were merely the absence of courage. And so, when something within us longs deeply, we feel pressured to act quickly, to resolve the tension before it teaches us anything. Yet waiting is not emptiness. It is not passivity. It is not fear. Waiting is a form of strength. At the heart of every desire is a question: Can I trust that what is truly good will come to me in the right time? Waiting answers that question not with words, but with the posture of the heart. It says, I will not take what I have not yet received. True freedom is often misunderstood as the ability to do whatever we want. But freedom, in its deepest sense, is the ability not to act—especially when acting would reduce love to impulse. The person who cannot wait is not free; he is driven. The one who can wait is governed by som...

Desire rarely announces itself gently. It rises as a restlessness in the heart, a longing that refuses to stay quiet. And when it becomes strong—bodily, insistent—we grow uneasy. We assume something has gone wrong. Holiness, we tell ourselves, must mean wanting less. So we learn to distrust desire. We suppress it, manage it, or rush to silence it before it exposes something too deep. Yet desire did not begin as a problem. It was placed in us at creation—a thirst meant to draw us toward communion. Desire is not a command to be obeyed, but a movement to be understood. The trouble is not that desire is strong, but that it is poorly interpreted. We live in a world that treats desire like an emergency: feel it, satisfy it, immediately. Waiting is called repression. Patience is mistaken for weakness. But the body does not speak in demands; it speaks in signals. And signals ask for discernment, not impulse. Desire always reaches before it grabs. It seeks closeness, belonging, union. T...