Self Care – A Christian Perspective

Categories Inspiration, Lifestyle, , , , , , , 21 Comments on Self Care – A Christian Perspective

Hey guys! I haven’t posted one of these more “motivational” type posts in a while, and this topic has been on my mind quite a bit recently, so I decided to I’d share my thoughts on this with you guys today. 🙂

Self Care. Those have been big words for the past year or so. The self care trend has been huge. But as Christian teen girls and women, should we really focus on ourselves or should we be focusing completely on others. Or is there some balance. It’s very confusing.

Yes, You Should Take Care Of Yourself..

Let me preface by saying that I think it’s super important to take care of ourselves. Jesus himself needed time to rest and pray. There are multiple times in the Bible where Jesus goes alone to “rest and pray” (Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31-32, are just a few examples)

I really think that “rest and pray” is the key. We are both soul and body, therefore both our soul and are body need time to rest. I think that’s where most of us start going wrong. We kind of go to far with our bodies, and not enough with our soul.

I mean, it makes sense. It might be easier to go buy candles and face masks, instead of study our Bible.

But like I said a minute ago, we are both soul and body, our body needs rest, and our soul needs rest.

And Yes, You Should Be Serving Others..

There are so many Bible verses about how we should be serving others, and how we should be selfless.

I see a lot of quotes about how we should be putting our needs above everyone else, and that we are basically the most important thing in the entire world.

That’s not true: We are made to serve and love God, but also to fill ourselves by resting and prayer. As I mentioned above, Jesus himself took intentional time for rest and prayer. Yet Jesus wasn’t selfish.

Do nothing in selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.

Philippians 2:3

This means that we shouldn’t think that we or our needs are more important than everyone else.

The thing is, if we are so focused on ourselves that we cannot even see other people, that’s when we go to far.

I think a lot of people mistake self care as being selfish, and as we know, being selfish is not biblical, but taking care of our bodies and souls is.

It’s a hard line, because nobody wants to think of themselves of selfish, yet at least I know that I’m selfish sometimes.

I’ll be honest, it’s a lot easier to just sit in my room, than to go and help my siblings. It’s easier to just let “someone else” do the work. That’s where selfishness comes into play.

If we’re honest we don’t really need every spare minute of our time to ourselves. We have plenty of time to be helpful, to do ministry, etc.

Next time when you’re in a situation of choosing to be selfless or selfish, ask yourself honestly if you really need this time to yourself. And the truth is, maybe you do. But in truth, most of the time we could spend time for ourselves later, and do the work now.

Ask yourself “WWJD” (what would Jesus do), in a certain situation. Would he go rest and pray, or would he serve the other?

Many times Jesus will rest and pray when all the days work is done, but there are a few times where he “left the crowd behind” and went to rest and pray. (Mark 6:30-32)

In conclusion…

It is our responsibility to take care of our God-given self, but it is also our responsibility to love others. Taking care of ourselves isn’t selfish in itself, (in fact, it’s necessary) but taking it to the point of us believing that we are the most important (or only) thing there is to care about in the world, is selfishness.

I hope this was helpful to you guys, and I’ll just let you know now: This is my perspective on self-care. Yours may be similar, or exact opposite, that’s fine. This is how I’ve interpreted my own readings in the Bible, and other articles I’ve read.

Have a wonderful day guys!

💙 Hannah

21 thoughts on “Self Care – A Christian Perspective”

  1. Man, I love this, Hannah! I totally agree. I’ve noticed that when I sacrifice something important of mine like time to go help someone else or do what God commands, God always makes sure my needs are taken care of in return—so much better than trying to take care of them all myself. Reminds me of the verse “He who waters will himself be refreshed”.

    Thanks for sharing your perspective! 💪

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply

  5. OKAY I LOVE THIS. I totally agree with you! I dislike how the culture is more and more trying to give people an excuse to be selfish and less motivation to serve others. We definitely do need to take care of ourselves because if we burn out we can’t take care of others OR ourselves, but often people take that too far and since taking care of others sounds hard and stressful, decide it’s just because they need more “me-time” first. I love how you made the point of Jesus taking time to rest and pray, and how we should do that as well. Great post, dear!

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  8. Yes, I agree with this so much!! I see a lot of people saying “you’re a Christian, taking time for yourself is putting yourself before others and that’s selfish” wayyyyyyy too often, and that’s simply not right! You CANNOT serve others if you yourself haven’t been taking yourself, but on the other hand, you can’t be taking every single day for “self-care.” You said it so well!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  9. Great post! I learned about this particular subject of Jesus resting when I studied Christology in theology school. If Jesus needs time to rest and care for himself, its safe to say we need to do the same. This is a nice balance of teaching self care and selflessness. Nice Job! God bless.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  10. I am a Christian health and wellness coach!! Yes self care is so important to our well-being!! We need to be filled out before we can pour into other Platforms in our life!! I really enjoyed your post 💗

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  12. Pingback: 12 Monthly Challenges | Goal Planning For 2020 – the striped plaid

Thoughts on this post?

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s