A teaching post for women who are showing up everywhere but feeling absent from themselves
“These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
— Matthew 15:8 (NIV)
It is entirely possible to serve faithfully without being present.
To show up week after week, to give and teach and volunteer and lead and encourage — all while your heart is somewhere else entirely. To go through every outward motion of a faithful, serving life while the interior is hollow, distracted, disconnected, or simply running on empty.
I want to talk about this today, because it is one of the most underdiagnosed conditions in Christian women’s lives — and it is costing us more than we realize.
We call it faithfulness. Sometimes it is. But sometimes what we’re calling faithfulness is actually a form of spiritual performance: showing up because it’s expected, serving because we’re scheduled, leading because we said we would — and doing all of it with no real connection to the Source that was supposed to be fueling it in the first place.
The lips are honoring Him. The heart is far away.
How This Happens Without You Noticing
No one decides to serve without being present. It happens gradually, by accumulation.
A season gets busy. The morning time with God gets compressed. The compression becomes a pattern. The pattern becomes normal. Meanwhile, the calendar is still full, the commitments are still active, the roles are still being filled. From the outside, everything looks the same. From the inside, something essential has gone quiet.
The drift is so subtle because the activities don’t change. You’re still in the same ministry. Still attending the same gatherings. Still playing the same role. The serving continues. Only the connection has gone, and because the serving looks the same from outside, no one notices — least of all you.
Until one day the joy is gone. The work that used to feel like offering now feels like obligation. You find yourself serving with a kind of low-grade resentment that doesn’t make sense, because you chose this, you love these people, you believe in what you’re doing. But the energy isn’t there. The sense of purpose has become muted. You’re going through the motions and wondering when this became so hard.
This is what Martha looked like in Luke 10. Her hands were still moving. Her heart had drifted somewhere into anxiety and frustration and comparison. The service continued. The presence — hers, and her awareness of His — had gone.
What Service Carries When It Comes From the Right Place
I want to contrast two versions of the same outward act, because the difference is real even when it isn’t visible.
When service flows from genuine connection with Jesus — when you’ve been at His feet before you go out to serve with your hands — it carries something that performance doesn’t. There’s an ease to it that isn’t laziness. A generosity that doesn’t run dry as fast. A quality of presence that the people around you can feel even if they can’t name it.
I’ve noticed this in women I’ve walked alongside. The ones who are most sustainably effective in ministry are rarely the ones doing the most. They’re the ones who have a rich interior life that consistently feeds their exterior work. They’re not doing less — sometimes they’re doing more. But they’re doing it from a different place. From fullness rather than obligation. From a heart that has been with Jesus that morning.
And the ones who eventually burn out, grow cynical, or step away from ministry altogether — more often than not, there is a story of prolonged service without presence. Years of showing up without going deep. Giving out without going back to fill up. And one day the reserves are gone, and there’s nothing left to offer.
The difference between sustainable service and depleting service is almost always the interior life that feeds it.
The Lip-Service Problem
Matthew 15:8 is a sobering verse, and I want to handle it gently because it’s easy to hear it as condemnation when it’s actually meant as a diagnostic.
These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
Jesus is quoting Isaiah here, speaking to the Pharisees — but the pattern He’s describing is not limited to religious leaders. It’s a very human tendency: the exteriors of our faith can stay intact long after the interiors have gone quiet.
We know the right words. We show up to the right places. We perform the right practices. We fill the right roles. And none of that, on its own, guarantees that our hearts are actually near Him.
This isn’t meant to create anxiety about whether your spiritual life is “real enough.” It’s meant to create honest self-awareness. Because the alternative — performing the external life of faith while the interior grows numb and distant — is both personally costly and ultimately fruitless.
Jesus doesn’t want your lips. He wants your heart. The lips-honoring is not nothing — it matters. But it was never meant to stand alone. It was always meant to be the overflow of a heart that is genuinely close.
What to Do When You Recognize This in Yourself
If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself — if the description of going through the motions feels uncomfortably familiar — here is what I want you to know:
This is not a reason for shame. Drift happens. It happens to people who love Jesus genuinely and serve Him faithfully. It is not evidence of failure or phoniness. It’s evidence that you’re human, that life is demanding, and that the interior life requires consistent tending — and sometimes that tending gets neglected. Recognizing the drift is not the problem. Recognizing it is the beginning of the solution.
Return to the posture before you return to the service. Before you change your calendar or adjust your commitments, go back to His feet. Not to check a spiritual box, but genuinely — bring what’s there. The emptiness, the going-through-the-motions feeling, the honest admission that you’ve been serving on fumes. He already knows. He’s been watching, and He’s been waiting for you to come back.
Tend the interior first, then reassess the exterior. Some of what’s on your schedule may need to come off. But you can’t make those decisions wisely from a place of depletion — you’ll either cut too much (out of exhaustion) or cut nothing (out of obligation). Return to stillness first. Let His presence do the restoring work. Then, from that anchored place, look at what He’s asking you to carry this season.
Be honest with someone you trust. The going-through-the-motions life is often sustained by the performance of being fine. Naming it — to a friend, a mentor, a small group — breaks the isolation and creates accountability toward change. You don’t have to have it together. You just have to be honest about where you are.
What Keeps Presence and Service Connected
In practical terms, here is what I’ve seen sustain the connection between interior presence and exterior service:
The daily return. Not a particular length, but a real one. A moment at His feet before the day’s demands take over. It doesn’t fix everything, but it changes the starting orientation. You walk into the day having been with Him, which means you walk into your service as someone who has recently received rather than someone running only on what they gave yesterday.
Honest prayer during the service, not just before it. Not just a pre-service prayer routine, but a real, ongoing conversation with Jesus while you’re in the work. Lord, what does this person need right now? Am I serving from love or from obligation? Let what I’m doing be from You, not just about You. It is possible to stay connected while you’re active — not perfectly, but intentionally.
Seasons of intentional replenishment. Sustainable service requires seasons of going deeper before going wider. Retreats, sabbaticals, times of study and quiet that are not primarily productive but are deeply nourishing. Women who serve for the long haul are almost always women who have built replenishment into their rhythm rather than waiting to be forced into it by burnout.
Knowing when to say no. This is harder than it sounds, especially for women who love to give. But saying yes to everything is not faithfulness — it is often a way of avoiding the harder work of discernment. Not every good opportunity is your assignment. And a no that protects your interior life may, in the long run, preserve a yes that actually matters.
The Invitation Is Back to Presence
The good news in all of this is that the remedy is not more complicated than the problem.
More service won’t fix it. A different schedule won’t fix it. New commitments won’t fix it. What fixes the absent-hearted service is the same thing that created Mary’s settled, generous presence in the first place: time at His feet.
That’s the invitation — not to stop serving, but to stop serving at the expense of being. To protect the interior life that makes the exterior life worth anything. To let your presence with Jesus be the source of your presence with others.
He wants your heart near Him. Not just your hands in His work.
Come back. The service will be better for it. You will be better for it.
And the people you serve will feel the difference — even if they never know exactly what changed.
For Reflection
- Can you identify a time when you were serving without being present — going through the motions while your heart was somewhere else? What did that feel like?
- What keeps you most connected to Jesus while you’re serving, not just before you begin?
- What is one practical step you can take this week to tend your interior life before it shows up as depletion in your exterior service?
This teaching is part of the At His Feet, In His Service series — a book and eight-week devotional for women who want to serve from fullness rather than fumes. Learn more at https://awakewomensministry.com.