Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom! – 2 Corinthians 3:17

Following and Trusting : Encountering God Out of the Box

Rest by Design: Why Generic Sabbaticals Don’t Work

You were not made generically.
And so what brings you rest and what depletes you is not generic either.

That’s the thought I keep coming back to as I’ve been working on a new resource — one that pairs our gifting and personality with something we don’t often think to personalize: sabbatical rest.

I recently enjoyed a two month sabbatical and was amazed at how valuable this key was to know when I planned it.

Here’s the premise I adopted: If God designed you with a specific spiritual identity — a particular way of perceiving, processing, and engaging the world — then it’s true that how you get depleted is specific too. And how you actually come alive again? Just as specific.

Example: A person who is strong in mercy doesn’t rest the way a person who is strong in justice does. A visionary entrepreneur doesn’t recharge the way a teacher does.

A sabbatical that feels deeply life-giving for one person can feel hollow, even frustrating, for another.

Why “Sleep More, Pray More, Slow Down” Isn’t Enough

Most rest advice is one-size-fits-all. Sleep in. Unplug. Take a walk. And that’s not wrong, exactly — it’s just incomplete. It misses the particular way your spirit was made to receive from God.

So instead of asking “how do I rest?” I chose to ask a better question: “how does my design rest?”

A Small Taste: The Exhorter

Take the person with a dominant Exhorter gift — the most spontaneously relational of the seven gifts from Romans 12:6-8. Exhorters are natural encouragers, high-energy, deeply attuned to people, and they light up a room just by walking into it.

Here’s the twist: Exhorters are often depleted by their own greatest strength — relationship. They give themselves so freely in conversation and connection that they rarely notice the outflow has outpaced the intake. And because solitude can feel more threatening than restful to this gift, Exhorters will often fill their “rest” with more people, more stimulus, more motion — the very things that are quietly draining them.

What an Exhorter’s spirit actually needs in a season of rest is something closer to interior homecoming — discovering who they are, and that they’re loved, even when the room is empty and no one’s watching.

Understanding our uniqueness changes everything about how a sabbatical should be shaped.

There’s More to Each Gift

This is just one small window into what’s coming. Each of the seven redemptive gifts has its own:

Specific pattern of depletion
Particular sabbatical themes and practices
Anchor Scripture and listening prayer question

Once you understand how you’re wired, resting stops being generic and starts being restorative.

More to come.

In the meantime, I’d love to know: which gift (from Romans 12:6-8) do you suspect is your dominant gift, and do you notice how you tend to get worn out?

Merri Ellen 🙂