Could tired be a gift?
I think it’s the gift 2022 is already giving me.
The new year has come and I’ve slowed.
Dinner is taking me longer to prepare, longer to plan. As I type, our Christmas tree is slowly disrobing — the pine needles collecting now in piles — and Nate and I can’t muster the strength to rally the troops to take it down. Even my walk down the driveway to the mailbox feels like a shuffle.
He’s speaking to me in my tired.
Fourteen years ago, I suffered a heat stroke in sight of the finish line of a community race I’d been training to win.
It was 80 degrees, extremely humid, and I’d trained for months in unusually cool-for-summer 70-degree mornings. I had my time goals for each mile — my “splits” as they’re called in the running world — written on my hand. My brain locked onto those times — and I achieved most of them until the last mile, where I began losing my mind. I learned later that this is a common thread among those who suffer heat strokes: they ignore the signs their body is giving them to stop. When the stroke occurs, the body has already offered up many signals — a multitude of cries for help — to pause, to slow, to drink water. Finally, after no relief, the body shuts down.
There was no space for me to hear the warnings, to pay attention to what my body was telling me — my mind was fixed on those splits, on the attempt to win.
We are embodied. Limited. Full of dreams and passions for abundance and yet requiring 7-8 hours of sleep and 64 ounces of water in a day to function well. We have eternity in our hearts, and yet we can fracture an ankle, suffer a headache for days, and scrape the skin right off our shin in one fall.
This past year came with significant surprises … and significant life hurts. For a while, as I fielded those, I kept the pace. Daily dinner for nine, groceries delivered on time, texts replied to in the same day, expectations from others met. I watched my splits.
The temperature rose, life got heavier, and I still paced. But I’ve had enough years of living the repercussions from ignoring the warning signals God sends to invite us to forfeit our ideals — our splits — in honor of engaging (with Him) in the real, that the Sara who once pushed through until she landed in the medic tent couldn’t do that anymore.
So I stopped watching my splits and gave in to the tired. It was the best decision of my 2021.
Tired is a gift, friends.
God encased us in flesh. He gave us wrinkles and grey (on the back-side of forty) and a need for sleep and sunshine and water and … bathrooms. Is it too much to consider that He uses our bodies to reach us — to tell us when to pause, to slow, to sleep?
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.” (1 Corinthians 6:19 )
We all would agree He cares about this temple, this holding place for Him, but He also uses it to teach us ... to reach us.
Your steady mid-afternoon fatigue is telling you a story. Could it be God is using it to reach you? The real question: will you listen?
So many of us run our Christian race like I ran that women’s 4-miler all those years ago: eyes on the splits, convinced that we know the goal, idealized against hearing and receiving the gentle, persistent warning signs of God to re-align us toward His way.
There is a larger issue I see across the body of Christ (I’m curious, do you see it?) — in marriages, in churches, in families, in ministries: do we know when we’re tired and need help? Do we know when we’re sick, even if it’s a minor cold? Do we know when we need a pause … or outside assistance … or internal reviving … or new perspective, outside of our “safe” circle? Do we need to be hospitalized before we discover the cancer or can we alert ourselves to the small cough, the late night fatigue, the persistent chest pain?
On that fateful September morning (the one whose story is still speaking to me today) I got to the last mile — a straight road to the finish line, roaring crowds lining the race course — and I began to ask the spectators where the chute for the finish was. The rising body heat had gotten to my brain. I collapsed right there in the road.
Is it me, or are many in your world — in your ministries, in your churches … (heavy sigh) in your families — collapsing in the road, at the tail end of ignoring all the signs He gave as gifts to draw attention to what needs tending?
Friends: at any point we can forget the splits and pay attention to His reach for us.
Some of us would like a dream in the night or a prophetic word or a shooting star in the sky, but perhaps He’s coming with a more persistent sign: your tiredness, the mid-afternoon yawns, the glassy eyes as you repeat words you’ve said for years about God but which feel, now, without weight.
Just as it feels like so many around us are collapsing in the road, He is just as sure to provide the way out. It might require some guts: “Dear church, I need to take a sabbatical” or “kids, we need to cancel this spring’s sports” or “we have to stop pressing to reach this quarter’s goals, and hear the heartbeat of our employees, instead.”
And while taking this way is not nearly as flashy as winning the race and reaching your splits, it is often the kind of low, servant road that unlocks the deeply-safe-and-rooted connect with God we want more than anything else.
Your tired is a gift.
We surely can see the tired of the others around us. But let these few minutes of reading bring you back to your own tired … your own internal, gentle warning signs from Him that whisper: you need a different kind of training.
“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters … why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
. . .Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live”(Isaiah 55:1-3)
And so what do you do from here? It’s as simple as it started: pay attention to the small. Heed the little whispers coming through your frame. You don’t need to see God in the stars to know He is reaching for you. Your tired may be the shooting star you’ve been looking for … as if He is saying, through your boundaried, limited body: I want so much more than your strength.
{If this resonates with you, I write on topics like this a bit more candidly and a lot more frequently in my private writing space, SOAR.}
Until next month,
Sara
Yes, it could and is. I am so weary of so much, yet the never-ending beat goes on and on.. I'm relentlessly pursuing rest where I can find it, even if only in my head some days.
Thank you - so so much. This message hit to the very core of where I am right now. Thank you for sharing. I am grateful for you.