Rejecting “Anxious Toil” in Law School
by Caleb Betts
Jesus has radically changed the way I work as a law student, guiding me from a mindset of “anxious toil” to embracing restorative spiritual disciplines that help me stay rooted in the purpose behind my work, and not just the exertion of my own energy and will-power.
Before the COVID pandemic shut down in-person classes, I would commute to my law school campus every morning. My drive took me from the hilly neighborhoods of El Sereno to the very center of Downtown Los Angeles: the beating aorta of a city constantly pulsing with exertion. Every city block seemed to showcase a new building in rapid development. Men in hard hats frantically scrambled to and fro, holding clipboards, directing traffic and pouring concrete. Before long, these construction crews will be replaced with monumental achievements towering 60-stories high, expanding the already impressive LA skyline and further establishing it as one of the most iconic downtown destinations in the world.
LA makes a tantalizing promise: if you exert everything you are — your ambitions, emotions, even your very soul — towards your dreams, then you can build a life that satisfies your deepest longings. In reality, what many find after arriving in this city is that instead of achieving genuine fulfillment, the raw exertion required to succeed really just numbs these pained longings within. It makes us feel in control, but in reality most of us are still being propelled forward by fears and anxieties we misidentify as ambition.
Law school was no different. Even while sitting in the lecture hall, exertion was the constant force propelling my soul forward. The intellectual rigors of the law school lecture demanded my constant attention, with every passing moment an opportunity for the professor to cold-call “MR. BETTS,” placing me center stage of what felt like the most critical moment of my life. In this all-too-common scenario, my mental exertion would shift from my case book to the hundreds of eyes surrounding me. I could feel the exertion of their stares as tangible as my shoulders felt the Gutenberg-sized law books jammed into my backpack, except this was the weight of expectation and judgement. Even after the cold-call ends, my state of exertion only resets, fixed on the 10 point font running across the pages before me.
This first year of law school brought tremendous stress into my life. “Imposter syndrome” pressed me to spend countless hours in the library to prove that I belonged. My assignments regularly added up to hundreds of pages of reading a day, all while I struggled to understand legal case law that forced me to spend up to 30 minutes on each page (if that math doesn’t add up, then you understand how common it was to feel utterly ill-prepared to handle a cold-call during the next day’s lecture). On top of this, retaining my scholarship required me to maintain a minimum GPA at the end of each academic year, producing the same unpleasant sensation one would feel if a piano tied to a string hung over their head. But in the midst of all this — during one particularly caffeinated evening reading through property law — I sensed Jesus challenge me with the impossible: “Change your relationship with work.” Prayer guided me to study the person of Daniel in the Bible. He faced a far greater task than a law student trying to fight for his scholarship, being kidnapped from his home country and forced to both adopt the culture of his captors and train to serve in their royal court. Yet despite the high stakes and pressures placed on him, he made the radical choice to reject the influence of these pressures and instead remain grounded in his purpose. In this way, refusing the food and wine offered by the Babylonians was not just a dietary choice. This choice was consciously made to maintain his spiritual discipline in seeing past the illusion of his relationship to the Babylonian world. This choice was intended to ground his identity — even his very reality — in remembrance of the people he had left in captivity. This choice, though potentially disastrous for Daniel, was rooted in a powerful truth: That without the help of YAHWEH-GOD, he would fall prey to trusting in the exertion of his own strength and ability and forget who he was called to be. He wisely understood that neglecting to resist these surrounding pressures would suffocate his soul, and ultimately, his very connection with God. And sure enough, when the interpretation of the king’s dream required nothing short of divine revelation to produce, Daniel was the only advisor in a position to the interpretation of the dream that could not be revealed through his own exertion, but received from God alone.
Jesus has challenged me to take a similarly radical stand against law school’s continual worship of exertion in my own studies. In its most practical sense, this looks like practicing Sabbath every Sunday as a reminder that unless God speaks into my life, my work will slip into anxious toil. On Saturday evening, when the sun goes down, I force myself to put the law books away, toss my highlighters aside, and create space to hear God speak. Sometimes I find myself in the local park practicing my guitar while reading poetry or words that have a refreshing absence of legalese. Other times this looks like me taking the evening to be present to my housemates and learn a new dinner recipe. For one day a week, the hammer is set aside, the assembly line comes to a sudden halt, and in the space left vacant by the weekly exertions of law school, I find myself instead inviting the Spirit of rest promised by Jesus to those with heavy burdens. “Come to Me, all who are weary, and I shall give you rest.” As a law student, weariness was my best friend, and I was overdue for some better company.
This challenge has not come without a cost. There has not been a constant reward of miraculous revelation to help build a perfect GPA as some sort of reward for my “obedience.” Instead, my grades and opportunities have always been precisely what Jesus requires for each step of the journey — often too narrow for comfort. And time and time again, when I find myself daily slipping into the habit of anxious toil, I sense the heart of Jesus lovingly revealing my childish confidence that somehow believes the exertion of my energy alone will help grow His Kingdom, when in reality I wouldn’t even be on this journey without His taking of my sin upon the cross and accomplishing the greatest work of redemption I could never handle.
Everyday I struggle to remember this truth as a law student: anxious toil will only produce the illusion that going where I need to go, or building what I need to build, ultimately depends on my effort. But this is not the call of Jesus. The call of Jesus is to receive an entirely new life. To receive an entirely new relationship with work, time and labor. And this new relationship has helped me understand that the greatest work God has in store for my life was never mine to begin with.
My encouragement for the church is to root our exertion in the gift of Sabbath; and as co-laborers, we must ask ourselves the following questions everyday: Am I working from an identity grounded in rest, or am I toiling after a goal or identity that promises the rest my soul longs for? Does my blueprint for success provide for boundaries that allow my soul to breathe and be refreshed? If not, how can I invite the presence of Jesus into my weekly routines in a way that protects the health of my work? And most importantly: Am I willing to sacrifice the illusion of control to prioritize resting with Jesus, even if it is counter-intuitive to the hyper-productive lifestyle my goals seem to demand?
Caleb Betts is a second-year law student currently pursuing his J.D. at Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles. Some long-term dreams of his include entering the coffee business, acquiring real estate to finance affordable housing projects in Skid Row, and building a legal practice around transactional business law in Los Angeles. When he isn’t working, he can be found in the kitchen trying to perfect his coffee craft, in the living room enjoying a game of chess, or in a local park practicing his guitar. Follow Caleb on IG @afrobetts.
