Rest and Scrupulosity

What does it look like to rest amid scrupulosity?

“Rest” and “scrupulosity” feel contradictory to me. Is there room for rest amid the persistent cycle of rumination and anxiety?

Obsessions don’t clock in and clock out. They don’t berate you for a limit of 40 hours a week and then relent during off-hours. They give no vacation time or holidays. They don’t take a Sabbath. (Actually, with heightened exposure to Scripture, prayer, and other means of grace at church, they often increase on the Sabbath!)

The Striving of OCD

There is a work inherent in scrupulosity. It’s the work of compulsions. When the intrusive thoughts come and anxiety builds, we feel we have to do something to resolve the doubts and get rid of the anxiety. But we know that in OCD, this work is futile. It may tamper down one thought only for the next to pop right up. And through it all, our endless striving never really calms the anxiety.

This striving comes from a deep unrest in our souls. But rather than being a sign of condemnation (“If I truly trusted God, I would feel rest”), it is a marker of the nature of the battle we are fighting: scrupulosity.

Take, for example, the obsession that many strugglers have around their salvation: What if I’m not really saved? Where do I stand? Am I okay? Or perhaps you know you’re saved, but you still just feel this overwhelming guilt. Does God truly, joyfully forgive me? Does he love me? Am I nothing more than a rotten sinner? Our views of self and the Lord are distorted, and it seems the only way to true rest is through striving.

But through compulsions, we will never get to the point where we can say that they were worth it. The obsessions don’t end. The endpoint of rumination will never be satisfaction, like an answer to a riddle. You will never be able to say, “I’ve figured it out. The work of my ruminating has paid off, and I don’t have to ruminate anymore.” OCD will tell you that the only way to true rest is through ruminating, or enacting out other compulsions, but that’s just not the case.

OCD is a ruthless taskmaster. Obsessions are unforgiving and compulsions will never cut you slack.

So what does it look like to rest when the very ground we’re supposed to be standing on feels rocky and unstable?

John Andrew Bryant’s book A Quiet Mind to Suffer With has been a helpful resource for me. Throughout the book he talks about this idea of a quiet mind, or a quiet understanding. He describes it this way: “That patient, quiet understanding is the place where I stand with Christ and don’t do anything to make things right or win or be okay.”¹ I think this is a really helpful picture of what rest may look like. It’s choosing, when the intrusive thoughts come, not to strive, not to engage in compulsions, not to succumb to the downward spiral of rumination. Of course, fighting OCD is much more difficult than simply choosing not to engage with it, and by no means am I saying that we suffer as a result of our choices. However, if striving is the default, then pursuing rest is a conscious action.

Furthermore, rest feels counterintuitive. When our thoughts are telling us there’s a problem and we need to solve it, rest feels wrong. When the worry feels like work, why would you choose the easy way out by resting? But as we’ve already discussed, the work of OCD is not productive or fruitful, and it doesn’t lead to true rest.

Our Resting Place

So how do we rest? Even as we seek to cease our strivings and not play into the game of obsessions and compulsions, we must find an anchor point, and it will only come from outside of ourselves.

It begins with an invitation. Jesus says, “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28). Jesus sees. He knows, both the striving we’ve chosen and the struggle we haven’t. He responds with compassion.

It is made secure by his finished work. In the beginning of Genesis, we see the pattern that good rest follows good work. When it comes to our standing with God, Jesus has done all the work, and we get to rest.

Your striving is pointless. You have nothing to prove. Even on your very best day, your work falls short. But this is good news, because it means that your security was never dependent on you, anyway. You can neither earn it nor forfeit it.

In the truest sense, rest isn’t simply a feeling or a state of mind per se. It’s an objective truth that we are invited into. To borrow from John Andrew Bryant’s language, part of resting is—even though we may not think, perceive, or feel like we are okay—knowing that we are okay, because God himself has made it so.

And the irony is that if we want true rest, we don’t need to look for rest in and of itself. As we struggle with assurance of salvation, our hope is not found by focusing on our assurance itself but on the object of our assurance. In the same way, finding true rest is not by finding rest itself, as a feeling or a state of being. Rest is found in relationship. It is found by gazing upon our Creator and Savior, the Author and Source of rest himself.

Take and Eat

Rest is not easy. I know it’s a battle. The obsessions and compulsions will still come, whether in overwhelming salvation-centered questions or in the everyday nagging from a scrupulous conscience. Rest is not once-and-done, but it’s something we wrestle with over and over, and I think we will for the rest of our days on this earth. And the struggle to rest is certainly not unique to OCD sufferers, even if the themes may look different.

But don’t be discouraged by the repetitiveness of this struggle. It’s really just another sign that we are not self-sufficient. We need Jesus, and the goal is actually growing dependence on him, not growing independence. 

I pray that we can be quicker to lift our eyes from our obsessive doubts and look to the One who has secured rest for us. I pray we can be quicker to stop our ruminating in its tracks and rest our eternal salvation in the only One who can do anything about it, anyway.

The gospel is counterintuitive to how we think. For the scrupulous doer, we like applications that push us to act. But the invitation is simply to come and to be. We rest because of his work, not ours. When we say, “I have to do x, y, and z,” Jesus says, “It is finished.” What is finished? Everything necessary to make you his. Consider this invitation, as one songwriter beautifully described it:

Take and eat; all the work is done
Stretch out your feet in the Sabbath sun
With this bread, old ambitions break
And as we pour the wine, we feel our hungry hearts awake
To the meal we could not make.²

Jesus has made the meal. All that’s left to do is pull up a chair and dig in.

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1. John Andrew Bryant, A Quiet Mind to Suffer With. ↩︎
2. From the song “The Meal We Could Not Make” by Son of Laughter. ↩︎