“Being tired all the time is not an issue of how much work we have, but how much REST we have.” -Pastor Steve Kim (sorry the wording may not be exact…but the point of his statement from this past Sunday’s pre-sermon sharing really spoke so true to my experience!)

Ever since I can remember (well, especially after becoming a mom, but I vaguely remember still struggling with this before that), I have often found myself saying this about myself “I’m tired” and “These days, I’m just tired all the time” to the point that if my fatigue was in any way caused by feelings of depression creeping in, the fact that I felt this way also contributed to making me feel more depressed.  When I am tired like that — basically tired all the time, with only maybe 5 minutes where I feel “alive” and “awake” in any given week — I feel like really nothing is possible, because just getting through the day seems barely doable (girls got to school with packed lunches/snacks, clean uniforms and possibly combed hair? baby got fed his milk and regular meals? house at least appeared clean in time for when company was coming over?).

The sad thing is, when I’m tired all the time like that…even my sleep can become tiring.  Because sometimes at the end of a day when I’m feeling so exhausted (but the bulk of my to-do list still remains untouched), I am also feeling defeated, and sad that I’m feeling defeated, and then angry and resentful that that’s how I’m feeling…and if I manage to fall asleep then I’m tossing and turning cuz the wheels in my head keep spinning and my sleep can be filled with vivid, disturbing, battle-like dreams that cause me to wake up tense, sore, and more exhausted than before I went to bed…

I’ve been learning over the past couple years that this really is abnormal –not in that I don’t believe this is a plight shared by many other people out there to even much greater degrees — but abnormal in the sense that this is not how things are supposed to be.  This is not the way God designed for us to live the lives He put here to live…

When I’m tired like this, it is also very different from the days when I remember being just as if not more busy, yet feeling so much better and even good about the busyness, feeling productive, and excited…like I can take on the world, and grateful for the opportunities I had been given to begin in some way to do things  toward that end!

What are some of the significant differences between this not-so-good “tired all the time” versus the type of tired that is part of the rhythm of an active, productive life?

For me, I am realizing that much of it has to do with my state of mind, and more specifically, how I view and think of myself — how I judge myself in terms of being acceptable or not, valuable for just being me or needing to justify my existence by being good enough or doing well enough in whatever it was I thought was necessary to prove my worthwhileness…

Being/feeling secure in who I am — not just theoretically because I know in my head that I should be and have no reason not be be — but truly feeling at peace with who I am and the fact that I am loved by God and my husband and my family and friends, versus being/feeling insecure and not really being convinced that I’m loveable just because I am me so I can’t stop worrying about whether everything is adding up and that I am or will be okay etc. etc.

While I haven’t fully thought this through, I think the “rest” that we all really need, in addition to the physical rest our bodies happen to require (sleep and quiet moments, and leisure activities), is an existential, mental/emotional rest from feeling like we are never good enough just for “being” ourselves, and therefore somehow need to be “doing” this or that or enough of something else in order to be able to be comfortable/satisfied/accepting with ourselves.

These past couple of weeks, I have noticed a shift in my own thinking, based on being able to tell and remind myself that I am worthwhile enough just being me that I deserve to be “happy” even when things don’t go quite right. While the examples I will end off with today might seem like small insignificant events, but the novelty of them for me, and the amount of weight that seems to have been lifted off my shoulders as a result, are indications of how they really are huge steps in my journey towards wholeness.

One day last week, after allowing the girls to play by themselves in the playroom so that I could attempt to get some work done, I discovered when I went to get them for dinner that all the art supplies were out, and as I proceeded to make them help me clean up, I couldn’t no matter how hard I tried find or get them to find the cap of the UHU gluestick. I started to panick,reminding the girls how many times Ive told them that they need to always put the cap back on gluesticks and markers etc., and how this is why I don’t let them use the UHU gluestick on their own (cuz I decided a little while back how much I love UHU gluesticks over all other gluesticks so I would pay the extra $$ to get the best gluestick for myself and my girls cuz we were worth it).etc. etc. (see how exhausting my mind can be?).. and THEN somehow I was able to pause, step back and realize, oh my goodness, that even while it might be the more expensive gluestick of gluesticks, it was still just a gluestick, and yes, I really could afford to replace it and even if I couldn’t I really could survive without it…so no, it wasn’t worth ruining the night for me and my family…it wasn’t worth berating myself and especially not worth berating the girls and inaverantly teaching them that somehow a lost gluestick cap is worth more to their mom than their happiness for an evening…

Then came my 3 baskets of half-folded laundry and my girls not having any clean socks in their drawers. I think it’s been 2 weeks going on 3 since they’ve been sitting there, still not completely folded and put away, but I’ve actually been okay hiding them behind a door for the few times we’ve had guests come over instead of freaking out every time that I still haven’t gotten around to doing it on top of everything else on that ever-growing to-do list of mine…

And finally, just today I realized that one of my new credit cards was missing, and I was about to totally beat myself up for being so absent-minded and unorganized, and how long has it been now that I’ve been saying I need to learn how to keep my purse/wallet clean and organized all the time…which would have then caused me to be short-tempered in general and especially with any normal interruptions from the kids to my attempt to remember where the credit card could be…but when I told my husband that it was missing (hoping that maybe he might have seen it somewhere and could help me end my suffering), he just suggested that I call to cancel it and request a new one… and instead of being frustrated that he wasn’t helping me find it (so that I wouldn’t have to feel like a disorganized absent-minded failure) like I normally would have reacted, I was able to actually listen to his reasoning and think, hey, he’s right. Why not just call it in as lost and move on with my life — and not ruin my evening or that of my husband and kids… Seriously it took me one maybe two minutes total…So much easier….and So much more time to get the rest I need =)