A Christian novella about rest and renewal for women feeling overwhelmed. Follows Helen Ward, a sixty-one-year-old woman who forgets where she put the milk, cries under a kitchen sink, and slowly learns to let others help. The story opens with Helen discovering milk in her linen cupboard, searching for keys inside the fridge, and kneeling in water at the church hall. Miriam Cole, a practical…
When Your Soul Is Tired is a Christian novella of rest and renewal, adapted from the FaithCollective devotional of the same name. It is written for women who love Jesus and have quietly become very tired, especially those who remember everybody but have forgotten how to receive. The story follows fictional characters Helen Ward and the people who love her, unfolding over several weeks with ordinary setbacks and moments of grace.
Chapter 1 introduces Helen Ward, a sixty-one-year-old woman who discovers milk in her linen cupboard and cannot remember putting it there. She searches for her keys inside the fridge, cries under a kitchen sink at the church hall, and is helped by Miriam Cole, a seventy-three-year-old woman with practical hands. Miriam gives Helen a notebook with Matthew 11:28-30 written on the first page.
Chapter 2 shows Helen waking before dawn with the supper assembling itself in her mind. She receives a message from Pastor Daniel telling her to stay home. In the kitchen she opens Miriam's notebook and writes down everything she is carrying: supper, her mother's appointment, her daughter Lucy's rent, Peter's quietness, church accounts, the linen cupboard, and the feeling that God must be disappointed.
Miriam arrives with mandarins and helps Helen sort through her list. They begin with Helen's mother, who needs a lift to a specialist. Helen's brother Paul lives forty minutes away and has not been asked. They move to Lucy's rent, her daughter who is thirty-two, raising seven-year-old Ava and changing jobs. Helen draws a small circle beside fears dressed as appointments, admitting that every worry does not arrive with instructions from God.
The novella includes 13 chapters with titles such as The Woman with the Keys, What the Basket Held, The Quiet Was Not Empty, Lucy at the Door, The Chair by the Window, The Meeting, Three in the Morning, The Woman beneath the Apron, The Call after Lunch, The Old Apron, A Place at the Table, The Unfinished Garden, and Beginning Again. It uses the King James Version for direct Bible quotations and paraphrases other passages with Scripture references.