Could Being Tired Be a Gift?
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 being disrobed — 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 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?
Maybe 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? 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.
[Offered by our dear Sara Hagerty.]