It’s weird to say it, but the bulk of Covidtide was overall an okay season for our clan — we remained healthy and with a home, two blessings I count daily in light of it all — and we had some net-positive major shifts I’m thankful for. But boy howdy… I’m tired. Spent. Weary. Sapped. And I’ve got a dull, residual low-grade trauma that I think SO many of us have, simmering on the back stove and asking for some attention.
I re-read the following over the weekend — it’s a snippet we include in the Literary London journals participants receive, waiting for them on their guestroom beds when they arrive:
“One of the most sobering things I learned as I listened to my exhaustion and allowed God to minister to me is that when I am dangerously tired I can be very, very busy and look very, very important but be unable to hear the quiet, sure voice of the One who calls me the beloved.
“When that happens I lose touch with that place in the center of my being where I know who I am in God, where I know what I am called to do, and where I am responsive to his voice above all others.
“When that happens I am at the mercy of all manner of external forces, tossed and turned by other’s expectations and my own compulsions. These inner lacks then become the source of my frenetic activity, keeping me forever spiraling into deeper levels of exhaustion.”
- Ruth Haley Barton, On Being Dangerously Tired
It stopped me in my tracks. I’ve been exactly where Ruth describes before (2018-19, to be exact), and I had to take my first-ever true month-long sabbatical in order to recover. I’m not in this place again, gratefully, where I’m at the mercy of external forces, other’s expectations, and my own compulsions. But I can see how I could be, soon, if I’m not careful.
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