Have you ever been tired of being yourself?
In sixth grade, right as I was beginning my so-called “inner search,” my tethering post and role were ripped from me when my dad died. I was in math class when my guidance counselor pulled me out and walked me to the office, where my mom broke the news. I went from seeing life through one lens to relearning who I was, and what I was supposed to do and be, without the primary male figure in my life there to teach me.
My relationship with my dad had its ups and downs, and it ultimately shaped how I saw God. One thing I took from him, fair or not, was that I had to have everything put together and buttoned up. There was no time for unpolished or unfinished. I had to fully flesh out an idea before I shared it. I had to have a decision settled in my mind at all times. He always had a plan, so I had to, too. I’ve been talking about that in small groups and mentoring relationships ever since.
Student ministry is where it set. I loved the people I grew up with and sat in small groups with. But I don’t remember learning about real vulnerability until we were almost out of high school. By then, it was almost too late, since the patterns I’d set in middle school were already in motion, long before I learned I didn’t have to have it all together.
At camp, on Thursday night, when emotions always run highest, I felt the crack emerge. I pulled my leader aside, told him I wanted to talk, and… I clammed up. He saw it on my face. He knew my mind was going and that I was going through something. But I plated up an excuse and served it piping hot: I was just tired, just “going through it.” And I ended it there. No wedge for him to pry with. Just a shallow excuse.
I thought it was just me: a kid without a dad, trying to hold it together. The year my dad died, two sociologists published a book about kids like me.
We were the MTD kids
In 2002/2003, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton led the National Study of Youth and Religion, surveying and interviewing thousands of teenagers across America. Those teenagers were the oldest Millennials. Most called themselves Christians, but few could say what that actually meant.
The sociologists named the faith they heard: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (or MTD, for short). It came down to five key beliefs.1
A god exists who made the world and watches over it.
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair.
The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself.
God doesn’t need to be involved in your life, except for when you need him to solve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.
As the researchers noted, the god of MTD is a “divine butler” or “cosmic therapist.”2 He shows up when he’s summoned, helps you feel better, and otherwise stays out of the way.
It’d be easy to just blame the kids. Kenda Creasy Dean, who worked on the study, wasn’t going to let the church off easy: “They practice it because this is what we taught them in church.”3 Her verdict on the rest of us? “We have received from teenagers exactly what we asked them for: assent, not conviction; compliance, not faith.”4
A few years later, David Kinnaman followed these same teenagers into young adulthood and watched many of us walk right out the door. His diagnosis in You Lost Me was blunt: insufficient discipleship.5
We were the MTD kids. Some of us left. Some of us stayed. And some of us became the youth leaders for the generation behind us.
We grew up into Brand Me
Zoom in on who exactly the butler worked for. MTD kept God in the house, but moved the self into the master bedroom. Let that arrangement persist for 15 years, and the self becomes self-reliant, no longer needing the butler at all.
By 2018, with Kinnaman again, Barna surveyed 18- to 29-year-olds who grew up in church. Us. The MTD kids, all grown up. Kinnaman and Mark Matlock found what they called “elective identity,” the belief that the individual is “the ultimate arbiter of what is true about himself or herself.” They gave it a clever, sticky name: Brand Me. And they summed up the message our screens, small, medium, and large, preach every day: “you get to — you must — define who you are.”6
You get to. It feels like the freedom we’ve always wanted. You must. This part is where the tiredness lives. You can fire a butler or a therapist. You can’t quit the job of being “you.”
We handed this down to the ones behind us. Gen Z never knew another way of life, and the unbearable weight lands the moment they leave the nest of home, church, and familiarity that carried some of it for them. In Barna’s 2023 survey, 46% of Gen Z teens said they always feel their life has a purpose. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 35% did. When Barna asked those who felt held back from being themselves what held them back, half named the same culprit: “myself.”7
It sounds like rent, a restless relationship, or a physical body that reminds you it’s not invincible. It sounds like tired, the most common negative emotion that Barna found in Gen Z.8
This was a thing before smartphones. In 1998, nine years before the iPhone launched, French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg published a book on depression called The Weariness of the Self. He argued that as the culture’s rule shifted from “obey” to “be yourself,” people stopped feeling guilty for breaking rules and started feeling less-than for failing to become someone.9
Phones simply amplify the shift, but with a perpetual audience. Researchers still argue over how much screens actually drive the decline in young people’s mental health, but nobody argues that this is only a young people issue. One scholar who interviewed college students heard them describe learning that “the appearance of happiness is more important than actually being happy.”10
A self you have to write, you have to defend. A self you receive, you can rest in.
What do you have that you didn’t receive?
The church in Corinth had a branding problem. They had split into fan clubs: “I’m with Paul.” “I’m with Apollos.” “I’m Cephas.” (1 Cor. 1:12). Each side picked a representative voice and swore allegiance to him. Who you followed told people who you really were, and each week the congregation decided which side was winning.
Paul’s response feels out of step and unexpected. He refuses to play along.
“It is of little importance to me that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I don’t even judge myself. For I am not conscious of anything against myself, but I am not justified by this. It is the Lord who judges me.” (1 Cor. 4:3-4)
The phrase translated as “any human court” is literally “a human day.” One chapter earlier, Paul warned that “the day” will test every builder’s work by fire (3:13). Corinth held its own weekly judgment day, and Paul refused to participate.
Then comes the mic drop: “I don’t even judge myself.” Paul knows he’s in the clear, above reproach, and he says so. He just won’t rest his case on it. In plain English: Your opinion of me doesn’t have the last word. My opinion of me doesn’t either. I’m not the judge.
Paul isn’t claiming the trial is over. The verdict is still coming: “So don’t judge anything prematurely, before the Lord comes… And then praise will come to each one from God” (4:5). Paul claims the trial has moved to a different court, with a different Judge, on a different day. The court where you played defendant, prosecutor, and jury has no jurisdiction.
Then Paul asks the question that takes Brand Me apart:
“For who makes you so superior? What do you have that you didn’t receive? If, in fact, you did receive it, why do you boast as if you hadn’t received it?” (4:7)
Brand Me assumes the self is a product you build. Paul assumes otherwise, that it’s a gift handed to you. Everything about you came from somewhere outside yourself. A self you have to write, you have to defend. A self you receive, you can rest in.
That would make us only slightly feel better if the only Judge left in the room were harsh. So the next question is: what is this Lord like?
Come to me, all of you who are weary
Matthew 11 answers that question, but in an unexpected order. Before Jesus offers anyone rest, he talks about being known:
“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants… No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son desires to reveal him.” (Matt. 11:25, 27)
Notice who receives. Infants can’t build a résumé. They can’t even form very many words, let alone put together a highlight reel. All they can do is be held and be known. Barna’s researchers described Gen Z as a generation overly aware of its public image, while “few feel truly known.”11 Jesus starts there. The rest he offers begins with being known by Someone who’s already made the final decision.
Then the invitation:
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28–30)
The Judge of 1 Corinthians 4 is “lowly and humble in heart.” The only opinion that counts belongs to the gentlest person in the room.
What Jesus offers, while immensely better, is more than just taking a break. The rabbis spoke of taking on “the yoke of the Torah,” a teacher’s whole way of life.12 Jesus offers his own. The answer to an exhausting job you ever applied for (being you) is a different Master. A yoke still pulls. It just pulls with someone.
And Matthew puts the very next scene on the Sabbath, where Jesus tells the Pharisees, “the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath” (12:8).
Reading our weariness through Scripture’s story
If you’ve read any of my other pieces, you know that this method is Redemptive Correlation: reading the culture’s question through Scripture’s story. If we look at the original question we posed earlier, “Why am I so tired of being me?” and trace it through the Bible’s four acts, we get this answer.
Creation: we began in rest. God made humanity on the sixth day. Our first full day was the seventh, the day God “rested… from all his work that he had done” (Gen. 2:2). Adam’s life began with rest in work he hadn’t done, bearing a name and calling he hadn’t invented. God told us who we were before he ever gave us something to do.
Fall: we started sewing. The first thing Adam and Eve did after the fall was build a highlight reel. “They sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (3:7). Then God asked the question that underlies every filtered photo since: “Who told you that you were naked?” (3:11). We built the audience we perform for, and we’ve been self-moderating ever since.
Redemption: the court moves, and the yoke is offered. In Christ, the trial we keep holding in our heads has been taken over by a Judge who is “lowly and humble in heart.” We trade authoring ourselves for the yoke of following him.
Restoration: the rest that remains. “Therefore, a Sabbath rest remains for God’s people. For the person who has entered his rest has rested from his own works, just as God did from his” (Heb. 4:9-10). That includes the work of being you. Scripture ends where it began: with people resting in work they didn’t do.
If you were an MTD kid too
If you grew up in a mid-200s youth group, this is your story too. You learned those five beliefs without being told what they were. And if you’re honest, plenty of us still live by that third belief: the goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself. We just added extra legs to it. Make a name for yourself, and keep it up no matter what.
So start where Paul started. Resign from your own courtroom. You can’t tell a student how to rest when you’re burning the candle at both ends. Before you mentor anyone, take the yoke yourself. “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened” includes youth pastors too. Especially youth pastors.
Then look at the ones who take your advice. Many of us now lead, teach, coach, or mentor Gen Z. In Barna’s study of young adults who grew up in church, about 4 in 10 of the most resilient Christians had an adult mentor at church who wasn’t on staff, more than double any other group. And 65% of those resilient young adults felt valued by the older people in their lives, compared with 24% of those who walked away from the faith.13
The gap between the two groups is a person, just like you and me. It’s the camp leader who saw the trouble on my face.
Next time a student tells you they’re tired, don’t let them get away with it.
You’ll get the same result my leader got at camp: an excuse handed over to see if you care enough to come back. So, come back. Ask one more question. And when you have something to say, it’s okay to admit that not everything is sunshine and rainbows. One campus ministry Barna profiled stopped telling students “You’ve got this!” and started telling them “Jesus sustains” and “You’re not alone.”14
Back to that Thursday night
I didn’t open up that night at camp. I told my leader I was tired, and I let that word do the hiding.
I wasn’t lying. I was tired. I was a kid who thought he had to be something more than just a middle schooler. Buttoned up, planned out, without a dad. No one told me otherwise.
Jesus didn’t take kindly to excuses like mine: “Come to me, all of you who are weary.” With him, tired doesn’t end the conversation; it starts it.
We were the MTD kids. We grew up into Brand Me, and we handed it down. We have to hand down something better.
A self you have to write, you have to defend. A self you receive, you can rest in.
So what if you took your own advice this week? What would the students you lead notice? And what would a tired generation say if they found one place, the church, where no one was keeping score?
I still tell people I’m tired. The difference is I know who to tell.
Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 162–63.
Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17, 71.
Dean, Almost Christian, 29.
Dean, Almost Christian, 37.
David Kinnaman and Mark Matlock, Faith for Exiles: 5 Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), 28, summarizing David Kinnaman, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church … and Rethinking Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011).
Kinnaman and Matlock, Faith for Exiles, 47–48.
Barna Group and Impact 360 Institute, Gen Z, Volume 3: Tracking the Changing Beliefs, Values & Attitudes of a Generation Coming of Age (Ventura, CA: Barna Group, 2024), 24–27.
Barna Group and Impact 360 Institute, Gen Z, Volume 2: Caring for Young Souls and Cultivating Resilience (Ventura, CA: Barna Group, 2021), 10–11.
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); originally La Fatigue d’être soi (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998).
Donna Freitas, interview in Barna Group and Impact 360 Institute, Gen Z: The Culture, Beliefs and Motivations Shaping the Next Generation (Ventura, CA: Barna Group, 2018), 22.
Barna, Gen Z (2018), 59.
Mishnah Avot 3:5.
Kinnaman and Matlock, Faith for Exiles, 139–40.
Brian and Emilie McCormack, interview in Barna Group and Impact 360 Institute, Gen Z, Volume 3, 63.