This morning when my alarm went off I groaned….literally. I just did not want to get up this morning. It wasn’t that I stayed up late last night. I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was getting up earlier than usual today. In fact, I actually got to sleep in a little bit because I wasn’t on the volunteer schedule for our weekly Women’s Bible Study meeting this week. I just felt drained of energy. I was just plain tired. Of course, I wanted to go to the Bible study, but I also wanted to listen to my tired body and go back to sleep. What to do?
I did what I normally do when I have a decision to make and either option looks good to me. I asked God about it. I prayed about what I should do. In my head, pictures of the worship time during women’s ministry popped up. I thought about how I always get a good word when I’m there. I thought about the people who would miss me if I didn’t go. I thought about this blog and about how I usually use the message to prompt the topic of my post for that day. I knew if I went I wouldn’t be disappointed, but while all these thoughts were going through my head, I heard one word deep in my heart: Rest.
As soon as I heard it, I felt complete and total peace. So I closed my eyes and went back to sleep. I must have needed it because I slept for several hours beyond my original alarm time. I wondered how I could be so worn out and tired. There are probably many answers to that. As a general rule, I try to get 8 hours of sleep a night, but we all know that’s perfect world scenario stuff and this is not a perfect world. I eat healthy foods. I take a multivitamin regularly, and while I don’t exercise like I should, I do get out and about once in a while. I’m not coming down with any type of sickness. As a side note, since I began doing a daily declaration that “sickness can not come against my body because Jesus bore all of my infirmities,” I haven’t had even cold symptoms longer than a day.
I was just tired. And the most logical answer is that it’s probably a result of stress. No matter how much I focus on peaceful living right now, I’m under stress. We all are. There is good stress (yeah, I know that’s hard to believe). And there is bad stress (that’s the kind we’re talking about when we typically talk about stress). Like it or not, life right now is kind of heavy on the bad stress side of the equation for me.
There’s the foster care requirements that get more detailed, more ridiculous, and more and more difficult to fulfill every day. God has been so faithful in that by giving me a clear picture on the best that I can do, and aside from some really subjective, unrealistic requests I’ve been able to meet every new hurdle they’ve placed in my path. Praise God! But in addition to the constant barrage of new hurdles to jump over, there’s also the negative feedback you get and the separation from your family. All on its own, that’s a major source of stress. How many times after a long day do you just pick up your children and hug them? How many times have you dropped everything and felt your blood pressure return to normal just by rocking a child to sleep, nursing a baby, or just smelling that newborn smell? There’s just something about a sleeping child…or a child’s hug….or their laugh…that melts all your stress away or at least makes a sizable dent in it. And that’s a stress-reliever I no longer have access to regularly.
There’s also work. I work from home, which is great in the sense that I have complete control over my schedule for the most part and a lot of flexibility. But the downside is that my home is also the office, so I have to work hard to keep separation between work hours and non-work hours. Sometimes it feels like it’s an invasion of my space to work from home, because I have to keep everything clean and tidy and just so in case a customer comes by. First impressions are important after all. And since I manage a mobile home community that also happens to be where I live, there’s a fine line between a neighborly knock on the door and a tenant who just doesn’t get that you clock out at 5 pm. There are projects that I’m responsible for, and there are duties that I have to do each month no matter what. Sometimes all those things crowd together, and my week feels hectic and fast paced.
There’s ministering. It’s not a major source of stress. I love doing it, and I’m only doing what God has placed on my heart to do. But sometimes the amount of preparation and work that goes into ministering in different capacities is staggering. Depending on your ministry position, you may be on call 24/7. That’s not the position I’m in, but it’s a valid issue for people in ministry. And when you’re in ministry you can get trapped in the idea that if you’re doing it for God, then it’s all things you should be doing. But sometimes, that isn’t true. You can easily go beyond the calling God put on your life under the umbrella of serving the Lord. You can easily forget to rest. You can easily forget to take time to read your Bible and pray and worship. You can fall into striving. Sometimes you have to just say “no” to some volunteer opportunities in order to keep your calendar from filling up beyond what you can handle.
Yesterday, there was the added stress of a yearly physical. Those have never been fun, but now that I’m 40, there are a lot more tests that have to be run to make sure I’m in good health. Last year’s physical had some abnormal results. The doctor who did the exam wanted me to come in for more testing, but I declined. 1) She wasn’t my normal physician. This isn’t a huge issue, but given that I felt my regular doctor would have a different viewpoint on the test results and next steps, it gave me confidence to decline. I told her that if my regular doctor wanted me to come in, I would consider it. 2) I just didn’t have time for that. We’ve all had those days, right? This foster care nightmare was just starting, and I just did not have one more brain cell to devote to negativity and bad news. I was used up! So I said, “Not today, Satan. Thank you very much!” and declined to fall prey to the worry of an abnormal test result. I put it off, and I told God that I was sure if there was a problem He could more than heal me from it and if there wasn’t a problem then worrying wasn’t going to do me any good anyway. But still there was the possibility that the test would be abnormal again, and I might have to make different choices, so those thoughts were going through my mind as I sat in the exam room yesterday.
Then I had my daughter’s yearly physical. That’s stressful only because with her mental illness you have no idea what kind of child you’ll be dealing with. I’ve perfected the art of not reacting when she says outlandish things or tells stories about memories that could never have happened. But the added stress this year is the fact that I have to do all this under the watchful eye of a foster care system who thinks the problem of my daughter’s mental illness rests solely upon my parental shoulders. If I don’t smile enough when I greet her, I get labeled as a cold, uncaring mother. Smile too much, and I could set her off. I have to respond to her concerns, but not encourage her lying. I have to know when to react and how to react so I don’t get sucked into a never-ending spiral of escalating feelings. It’s draining just typing about it! There’s the stress of hoping her latest stint in a mental hospital has resulted in a medicine combination that might actually work, and then seeing that her symptoms are still there so she may very easily spiral all over again….and of course, there is the trauma response that her spirals provoke in me, which a system skilled in trauma has no patience for because I am an adult and should just deal with it.
Yes, my need for rest was probably totally due to stress. And that’s okay. God knew what I needed, and by listening to Him, I did what I needed to do today. Yes, I’m sure God would have made sure that I didn’t suffer negatively if I had gotten up and attended the Bible study meeting. I’m sure I would have had a wonderful time of worship. I know I would have gotten a good word that I could apply to my life, but it’s also okay that I just took some time to rest. I think sometimes we forget that rest is part of God’s plan, too.
Rest was such a big part of God’s plan that He gave us an entire day devoted to it and commanded us to remember it and keep it holy. God designed us for rest. He didn’t design us for stress! We are designed for rest. We need it physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. We need rest from our physical labor, which is why God modeled working and resting for us in His work of creation. We need rest from fear, anxiety, worry and stress. That’s why God offers us His peace and tells us to cast our cares on Him. We need to rest in God. When we trade our stress for God’s rest, we enter into His design for our lives. When we take His yoke upon us, we kiss stress goodbye. Too much rest leads to laziness, but too little leads to burn out. As usual, God calls us to a path of moderation between the two extremes.
“Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength… It is wisdom to take occasional furlough. In the long run, we shall do more by sometimes doing less.”
Charles Spurgeon
So today, I rested. I took the time I needed, and as a result, when my visitation time rolled around for foster care, I was more in control of my emotions. I was able to handle the misbehavior of my kids and the expectations of the system. I was able to take deep breaths and be a calming force to help my kids handle their own stress because kids get stressed too (more on this in my next post). I was able to handle the things that I needed to handle today without irritability or anger or an emotional outburst because I got the rest my body so desperately needed.
So today, I’m encouraging you to take an honest look at your life. Are you getting enough rest? Beyond sleep, are you resting in God? Are you turning over your cares and worries to Him and leaving them there? Are you letting go of worry? Are you working with God in the tasks you undertake on a daily basis so that the yoke of work is light? If you’re not, there’s no better time to start.
God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change, The courage To change the things I can, And the wisdom To know the difference. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time, Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, Taking, as Jesus did, This sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it, Trusting that You will make all things right, If I surrender to Your will, So that I may be reasonably happy in this life, And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen
A Beautiful Mess 