Today, our family is getting a puppy. We have never had a dog before, and it feels like a seismic shift.
We were always too busy to have any more commitments at home. We have a cat, but she lives up to her name, “Freedom”, and is outrageously autonomous. The invitation for a small puppy to come into our home brings a newborn-like fear and trembling, knowing we are about to be disrupted.
The promise of my teenagers, loyally spending time walking her around the park and snuggling whilst watching television, I hope, draws them away from screens.
Across the last decade, I have always travelled extensively for work. The beauty of this rhythm is that I have friends all over the world, and I love them dearly. There was a ritual that I formed around packing, unpacking and coming and going. The blessing of this lifestyle was that I was often reminded how much I love being home. Gratitude flowed at simple pleasures of oats for breakfast, unfinished knitting projects, bed socks and lounges that knew my shape.
The cost is the simple pleasures of Saturday rhythms that are not disrupted, like gym classes, neighbourhood connection and planning my social life with ease.
Research from Paul Gilbert was a key part of my recently submitted thesis, which helped me name what was happening in my body during the seasons of relentless ministry pressure. It was central to this understanding, and it changed the way I see leadership, burnout, and the invitation to something more regenerative.
Gilbert’s work in compassion-focused therapy describes three systems that regulate how we feel and function. The threat system is the brain’s oldest defence mechanism, vigilant, and extraordinarily fast. When it fires, our bodies flood with cortisol, our hearts quicken, and we shift into survival mode. This system does not pause to check whether the danger is physical or social. A colleague. A critical email. A split board meeting. People’s disapproval. To the threat system, these are experienced in the body as equivalents.
For those of us in ministry leadership, this is confronting and clarifying in equal measure. The weight of criticism, financial pressure, theological conflict, and the creeping fear of moral failure activate a system designed to help us flee or fight. And when it fires chronically, without relief, it dismantles our capacity to reflect, empathise, and make wise, spacious decisions.
We were not designed to live in the threat system. We were designed to move through it. God’s language is flowers. Nature is His poetry. Silent expressions of divine beauty, love, and hope. He brings beauty from ashes and creates new pathways from fallow ground.
Our organisations are designed to crunch people into policies and systemic ways of producing from a capitalist lens. Only yesterday, I could feel my body rising to the knowledge that it was the end of the financial year and the pressure should be on. Do more, be more, find the donors, work harder— shape your identity through work.
The drive system pushes us toward achievement and reward, and Christian organisational culture has learned to worship at its own altar. The soothing system is what most of us in leadership have neglected: the capacity to rest in safety, connection, and stillness. To receive care as well as give it.
To rest.
To renew.
To trust God’s timing and answers over our own.
This morning, as I drove the kids to school, a song from our church service on Sunday repeated in my mind.
I wonder if that is why the puppy feels significant today. Not because she represents one more thing in an already full life, but because she represents something my family is choosing: slowness, presence, and a willingness to be needed at home more.
Regenerative ministry is not about doing less. It is about learning to move between these systems with intention and grace. To let the threat pass through rather than take up permanent residence. To receive soothing as a spiritual practice, not a luxury.
I think that is what I am slowly learning in this season. And I have a feeling a small dog is about to teach me more than I expect.
I pray today that if you are facing a battle, you learn to soothe, stepping into God’s ways above your own.
What is one way you can create more rest at home this week? Write in the comments, I’d love to lean in and have a conversation.
Let’s rewrite these stories together.
Meet Cashew: our Cavoodle.
