You’re doing too much—and you know it.
You call it purpose. You call it obedience. You call it being “in your grind season.” But the truth is, you’re exhausted and you’re not even sure why. Somewhere along the way, the line between serving God and proving yourself got blurry. And now you’re sprinting up a mountain He never asked you to climb.
Jonathan McReynolds gets it.
The Grammy-winning gospel artist has spent over a decade creating music that’s earned him critical acclaim and deep resonance within the Church. But beneath the accolades and album cycles, McReynolds hit a wall—a spiritual kind of burnout that no tour, award or devotional could fix.
“If all this is for God,” he remembers thinking, “why am I so tired?”
It’s a question more of us should be asking. Because what if the reason we’re so worn down isn’t the work itself but the pressure we’ve placed on it? What if the “calling” we’re killing ourselves to fulfill is more about ego than obedience?
“The problem is,” McReynolds says, “there really isn’t such thing as the end of the climb for people like us. By the time we’ve finished one mountain, we’re already scheming up the next one. And even when we try to rest we turn rest into another performance.”
Even joy becomes strategic. Relationships become resume builders. Church becomes a project. We’re not participating—we’re optimizing. And it’s slowly eating us alive.
“We turn everything into a climb,” McReynolds says. “Even the things that were supposed to just be… life. A relationship should be love. Church should be church. But we start performing even there.”
It’s not just the busyness that’s the problem. It’s what’s driving it.
“We took something God gave us—a gift, a purpose, a calling—and then our ego added layers He never asked for,” he says. “God said do this. But we turned it into that. Into a brand, a business, a burden. We piled stuff on top of the assignment because we needed it to say something about us.”
The result? Exhaustion that feels spiritual but isn’t holy.
“We do a lot of doing,” McReynolds says, “and not a lot of being. We know how to be pastors, worship leaders, creatives, bosses. But who are we when we first wake up, before we’ve succeeded or failed at anything?”
That question is the beginning of the descent.
And yes—there’s a descent. Because if the culture says to climb, Jesus often says the opposite: come down. Sit still. Be a child. Let go.
For McReynolds, that started with what he calls “a sacrifice of pause.”
“We’re used to sacrificing money or praise,” he says. “But we’re not used to the sacrifice of stopping. Of saying, ‘I could keep grinding right now—but I won’t.’ Of actually looking at your hands and asking, how did they get this beat up?”
Sometimes, the climb isn’t just physically exhausting—it’s spiritually disorienting. You get so busy building that you forget who you were building with. Or worse, who you were building for.
“I had to ask myself: was this really God’s idea? Or did my childhood perfectionism and my need to succeed start hijacking what God meant to be simple?”
McReynolds isn’t vague about where the pressure comes from. “It’s ego. That quiet voice saying, ‘If I stop, they’ll forget me. If I don’t outwork them, I’ll lose. If I fail, it proves what they always said about me.’ All of that has nothing to do with God.”
But what do you do when those voices won’t shut up?
“You answer them,” he says. “That’s what Jesus did in the wilderness. He didn’t pretend the temptation wasn’t there. He responded with truth.”
McReynolds suggests we do the same. Instead of pretending the lies don’t exist—lies about our worth, our identity, our value—we confront them. Not with hustle. Not with performance. With rest. With presence. With the reminder that we were already loved before we did anything.
That’s the spiritual reality McReynolds says we’ve lost touch with: being a child of God.
“Not a servant, not a leader, not a representative,” he says. “Just a son. Just a daughter. That’s what God wants. That’s what actually gives us peace.”
But letting go of the climb doesn’t just change how we relate to ourselves. It changes how we relate to other people.
When you stop performing, you finally get honest. When you stop optimizing every encounter for spiritual or professional gain, you make room for friendship.
“Most of us are more connected than ever and still feel alone,” McReynolds says. “And I realized it’s because I was walking into every space as a climber, not a kid.”
He compares it to a group of professional mountain climbers. “They’re surrounded by people—30, 40 of them—but they all feel isolated. Why? Because when you’re pushing yourself to the limit, you don’t have energy for intimacy.”
But when you pause—really pause—you start seeing what’s already around you. Friends who aren’t strategic. People who aren’t impressive. Community that isn’t curated. Just humans, showing up. Not for productivity but for presence.
“You don’t need to find new people,” McReynolds says. “You just need to stop long enough to see the ones already in your life.”
This doesn’t mean quitting your job or abandoning your dreams. McReynolds is still making music, still touring, still climbing. The difference now is that he knows when to come back down.
He’s not chasing applause. He’s not trying to impress. He’s finally learning to just be.
“This is all Dad’s stuff,” he says. “We’re just stewarding it. And when you remember that, you don’t have to be the boss anymore. You can just be His kid.”
You don’t have to prove anything today.
You’re allowed to rest. To be ordinary. To let someone else run the world for a while.
God never asked you to climb forever. He asked you to come close.
