The Exhausted Hours
Learning to rest in God when Netflix feels easier
It’s 9 PM. The kids are finally in bed. The workday was brutal. Your body is tired, your mind is fried, and every part of you is screaming for one thing: escape.
The remote is right there. The algorithm knows exactly what you want. One click and you’re gone—absorbed into someone else’s story, someone else’s problems, someone else’s world. No effort required. Just consumption.
But something in you hesitates.
The Most Normal Thing in the World
Let’s be clear about what we’re describing: the most normal thing in the world. This is what everyone does. This is what most Christians do. This is so utterly unremarkable that questioning it feels almost absurd.
Work hard. Come home exhausted. Decompress with screens. Repeat.
It’s not sinful. It’s not scandalous. It’s just… life. Modern life. The way things are.
And yet.
The Moment of Choice
There’s a moment—maybe you’ve felt it—when the Holy Spirit whispers something different. Not condemnation. Not guilt. Just… an invitation.
What if you came to Me instead?
And everything in you recoils. Because you know what that means. It means effort. It means silence. It means sitting with your own thoughts instead of drowning them out. It means being present to yourself and to God when all you want is to be absent.
Prayer feels like work. Netflix feels like rest.
So why would anyone choose prayer?
The Honest Struggle
Here’s what no one talks about in church: the transition is brutal.
When you first start choosing prayer over passive consumption, it doesn’t feel holy. It feels like deprivation. Your brain, wired for endless stimulation, revolts against the silence. Your body, trained to associate rest with screens, doesn’t know what to do.
You sit down to pray and your mind races. You open Scripture and the words blur. You try to be still and you feel more agitated than when you started.
This is normal. This is the withdrawal period. This is what it feels like when you’re rewiring years of habits.
And here’s the hardest part: almost no one around you is doing this. Your Christian friends are watching the same shows. Your small group discusses the latest series. The implicit message everywhere is: this is fine. This is normal. Why are you making it weird?
What We’re Actually Doing
When we collapse into passive consumption every evening, we’re not just “relaxing.” We’re:
- Training our brains to need external stimulation to feel okay
- Numbing emotions that might need to be felt and processed
- Avoiding the interior life where God actually meets us
- Forming habits that will be with us for decades
- Teaching ourselves that rest means escape rather than restoration
The exhausted hours—those precious few between work and sleep—are actually the most formative hours of our day. What we do with them shapes who we become.
The Deeper Rest
Here’s what took me years to discover: prayer actually is rest. Real rest. But it’s a different kind of rest than escape.
Escape-rest numbs you. It distracts you from your life. You feel temporarily better, then somehow emptier. You wake up the next day no more restored than when you started.
Prayer-rest restores you. It brings you back to yourself. It processes what the day held. It reconnects you to the Source of life. You rise from it genuinely renewed, not just distracted.
But—and this is crucial—prayer-rest doesn’t feel restful at first. Not when you’re addicted to stimulation. The early days of choosing presence over escape feel like choosing pain over relief.
You have to trust that it gets better. Because it does.
The Transition Period
If you’re feeling called to make this shift, here’s what to expect:
The first week will be uncomfortable. Your brain will scream for stimulation. Prayer will feel forced and dry. You’ll wonder why you’re doing this.
The first month will have moments of breakthrough mixed with many moments of struggle. You’ll be tempted to quit constantly. Some nights you will quit.
The first year will slowly reshape your interior life. Prayer will start to feel less like discipline and more like desire. You’ll begin to crave the silence you once feared.
Eventually—and this is the promise—you’ll look at a screen and feel the emptiness it offers. You’ll come home exhausted and actually want to pray. Not because you’re holier, but because you’ve tasted something better.
Permission to Struggle
You have permission to find this hard. You have permission to fail repeatedly. You have permission to acknowledge that choosing prayer over Netflix at 9 PM after an exhausting day is genuinely difficult.
This isn’t about guilt. It’s about formation.
Every time you make the harder choice, you’re building something. Every time you sit in the uncomfortable silence, you’re training your soul. Every time you bring your exhaustion to God instead of to a screen, you’re learning a different way to live.
You’re not weird for finding this difficult. You’re countercultural. And countercultural always feels strange.
The Invitation Remains
Tonight, when the day has drained you and every fiber wants escape, the invitation will come again.
Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
Not the rest of escape. The rest of presence. The rest of being known. The rest that actually restores.
The remote will be right there. The algorithm will be ready. The path of least resistance will gleam invitingly.
But there’s another path. Narrower. Less traveled. Uncomfortable at first.
It leads somewhere better.
You don’t have to take it tonight. But you can.