by Ken Janke

The older I get, the more I am aware of life’s limitations. I haven’t always been aware of my limitations. Perhaps the swirl of activity and the applause from spectators have best positioned me to work as if I’m immortal and to depend on my own strength. Recently, I faced a life-altering encounter that corrected my perspective and taught me a valuable lesson: My proximity to God is far more important than my activity for God. 

A few months ago, I suffered a massive heart attack that caused my cardiologist to admit that I was fortunate to be alive. After the doctors placed a coronary stent in my artery and I spent several days in intensive care, I came home with hope for a complete healing of my heart and a desire to find fresh footing for my work. 

Laying in my bed on oxygen, with cognitive fog and a body that was not responding the way it once did, I began to cry out to God. If I’m honest, I was frustrated. I asked. God how I was going to climb out of this hole I was in, scared that I would not be able to provide for my family adequately, and questioning the future with a new awareness of my humanity. My heart needed far more healing than just the physical healing. 

Before the heart attack, I had been running hard at life and work. I would say I was confident that impossible was just an opinion and definitely not my opinion. For the first time, I was facing real limitations, and I was not happy about these new-found limitations. I began to pray, and what I became aware of in this prayer-focused proximity to my Father was healing and transformational. 

In my darkest days of disappointment, I began to realize my limitations for the first time. As I complained to God, I heard Him whisper, “Son, you have more limitations than you realize.” I also heard God say, “I have never once been disappointed by any of your limitations.” 

That grace-filled moment of contemplative prayer with my Father awakened in me hope and peace. I began to accept the quiet life in which I found myself, and in that place, I began the process of recovery. In addition to physical recovery, I also realized that I was recovering from my desire to be relevant, accessible, and successful. I have come to realize that activity and the demand of influence can accelerate your life to a speed that limits your ability to see clearly. When that occurs, life becomes a blur.

According to spiritual writer Henri Nouwen, the purpose of the wilderness experience is to overcome the temptation to be relevant.¹ When Jesus is tempted in the wilderness by the devil, one of the key temptations is to turn stones into bread to satisfy His physical hunger.² On the surface, this seems a trivial act. What is wrong with using God-given abilities to meet basic human needs? Nouwen suggests, however, that the deeper question underlying this temptation is, What are we really hungry for?

This question is especially pertinent for leaders who see value in being relevant as a means of effectively connecting their message with the masses. “The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.”³ Undoubtedly there is value in being accessible and understood by the communities we serve; however, relevance can also become an idol if we are not careful. It is easy for relevance to transform into a methodology or surface-level marketing exercise focused on how to package the Gospel message in the most appealing and commercially viable way, rather than centering our identity in Christ.

Nouwen proposes that the antidote to an overemphasis on relevance is contemplative prayer—intentionally turning our minds to God in silence and stillness. He writes that we must reorient our lives around “a life that is not dominated by the desire to be relevant but is instead safely anchored in the knowledge of God’s first love.” ⁴According to Nouwen, our identity and worth is not found in how popular or accessible our message is, but simply in the person of Jesus Christ who loves us unconditionally.

Combining constant busyness with a disconnection from God through distraction creates an unhealthy scenario in which we lose sight of who we are truly called to be. We experience a type of spiritual amnesia that leaves us feeling adrift and looking for solutions in the wrong places, resulting in further disorientation. Relying on activities and perceived relevance as the source of our worth and identity is like building our house on sand. It cannot withstand the inevitable storms that will come. Our mission isn’t to be relevant—our mission is to love God and people. 

Through my health event, I realize that Jesus is not preparing me for more ministry, but rather He is using ministry to prepare me for more of Jesus! I am resting and recovering, and I’m being told that only time will tell me the pace and scale of my work moving forward. The question I began asking was, What can I do to cultivate a sense of self and purpose that is rooted in my intimate connection with God rather than usefulness and popularity? 

First, I believe that we must willingly embrace the wilderness seasons of slowing down and recalibrating our compass. We need to resist the temptation to always be doing or achieving, and instead sit at Jesus’ feet. Second, we must heighten our awareness of subtle temptations, like relevance, and be willing to resist societal and self-imposed pressures to perform. Third, we must realize that our identity and security do not lie in what we accomplish for God but simply in who we are to God—His beloved children. And like Jesus instructing us from Matthew 4:4, our source of sustenance and courage in the wilderness comes not from physical bread alone but from “every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Contemplative prayer positions us to intimately hear the voice of our heavenly Father, feeding our souls in a way no activity ever could.

Nouwen says that “through contemplative prayer we can keep ourselves from being pulled from one urgent issue to another and from becoming strangers to our own and God’s heart.” ⁵When we are constantly busy and driven by a need to be relevant, we lose touch with what is most central—our intimate relationship with the Creator.

Making contemplative prayer a priority helps us maintain focus on God’s face rather than the constantly shifting sands of relevance and busyness. Nouwen calls it an intentional stance—a sustainable, daily rhythm and practice that becomes a habit of slowing down to catch up with our Creator. In quieting ourselves, we give space to listen for God’s whispers of affirmation, direction, and comfort that uphold our identity, far above any metric of success.

Of course, developing contemplative spiritual disciplines is a process that requires effort, sacrifice, and perseverance—especially in our fast-paced world. But diligently cultivating proximity to God through practices like silence, solitude, Scripture meditation, and prayer will bear the fruit of living confidently aligned with our true purpose and priorities. 

Anchoring our identity in Christ and focused time alone with God will provide the stability to weather life’s uncertainties and remain unmoved by fleeting measures of adequacy. When our worth is defined by Divine love rather than social relevance, we find freedom to obey Christ’s leadership in our life. Some of the obedience markers that have been instrumental in my recovery have been found in three ways.

• Regular solitude with the Creator replenishes a leader’s soul with confidence in who they are to Him personally, not just what they do for Him publicly. This withstands temptation.
• Contemplation deepens a leader’s intimacy with the heart of God, finding joy in pleasing Him rather than seeking approval from people through perceived relevance.
• God often uses the insights gained through prayer to tune a leader’s message to His agenda, not manipulating methods to conform to latest cultural trends or loud voices.

When built into routine, contemplative prayer anchors leaders securely in God so that relevance loses its lure as the path to significance. His perspective and purposes take precedence.

The story of Oswald Chambers provides an example. In the early 1900s, Chambers was a popular Bible teacher and conference speaker who traveled internationally, influencing thousands with his messages centered on intimacy with God.⁶ Amidst his success, however, Chambers began experiencing burnout from the pressures of constant travel and ministry demands. When World War I broke out, Chambers’ overseas speaking engagements were canceled, and he became a chaplain to British Commonwealth troops in Egypt. 

Chambers welcomed this time apart as an opportunity. In Egypt, he had no audience or ministry platform, which freed him to rediscover his first love of simply abiding in God’s presence through Scripture meditation and prayer. In his isolation, Chambers was able to re-center his identity in Christ alone rather than what he did for Him.

As a result, when Chambers returned to teaching after the war, his message was transformed. His talks were no longer performances to inspire crowds, but humble invitations to intimate fellowship with Jesus. Chambers’ concern was to get men and women into the presence of God. The fruit of Chambers’ wilderness experience was a wholehearted embracing of contemplation over constant production. In his later journals, he described an overwhelming assurance and liberty that came from anchoring his being in God rather than achievements. 

Chambers had discovered, as Nouwen emphasizes, that our true purpose and significance lies not in being relevant through our service but in being loved by the God who sees our heart. In reflecting on Jesus’ triumph over temptation in the wilderness isolation, Henri Nouwen compellingly challenges our tendency to value being constantly productive over cultivating an intimate relationship with our Creator. 

May we embrace the gift of wilderness seasons to nourish our soul’s deepest craving for the only source that can fully satisfy—the living God who knows and loves us completely. Through the wilderness season—a season of quiet and preparation—we are positioned to be refined and taught by God. It is our chance to strip away any false identity that we are carrying. Our identity ultimately comes not from what we do, but from simply being near to Him.

Perhaps you’d like to consider how a spiritual director might be a trusted guide who could accompany you on your journey of faith. If you’d like to have a conversation with us to explore what this might look like, please contact us and we will follow up with you. Contact us here: Soul of the Shepherd.

1. Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1989). ↩︎
2. See Matthew 4
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3. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, 14. ↩︎
4. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, 20. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 20. ↩︎
6.  “The Life of Oswald Chambers,” Utmost.org, 2024, https://utmost.org/oswald-chambers/. ↩︎