The Struggle is Real

I think I've posted a lot about being tired recently. I've even erased this several times because I don't want to sound like I'm looking for sympathy or whining. I'm not. When I sit down today to write this is just what came out. And as the kids fight upstairs while they are supposed to be cleaning, as my back aches for the best possible reason -carrying the weight of this sweet baby-, as the budget seems to get tighter every month instead of having some room to breath...I just keep finding myself in this tired, weary place. Maybe pregnancy is just making me more honest than I usually am, and I'm not so great at hiding the tired. It's not without its moments of joy and relaxation, but I think "tired" would be a good blanket label for how I've felt for a long time. 

It's not so much the tired that can be fixed with a good nights sleep, or a vacation. (Which I don't think we've had -without kids- since before there were kids. Sure we've taken a weekend here or there, but other than the 3 day cruise while I was pregnant with Jericho it's kind of been full speed ahead.) 6.5 wonderfully exhausting years that have been spent doing what I love to do, but that doing can leave a person stripped bare and realizing exactly where you are the weakest.

For me, I'm finding that I can only ignore my own soul for so long, and that soul needs stillness and rest. I catch myself searching for the stillness in the few hours after the kids are sleeping when I ignore that I need to be sleeping, in the minutes I send them outside and let them run wild and tell myself I don't care if the neighbors think they are loud, in the moments when I finally have a minute to sit down, in the moments when I think Billy has finally gotten that big breakthrough at work. Trying desperately to fill a gaping hole through the middle of everything with a handful of the wrong materials. It's never going to work. I just can't seem to remember that.

I know people joke all the time, saying "the struggle is real", but it really is real. We ignore it so much, cover it up in silliness and busy-ness and this cause or that, ignore it with self-centeredness or excuses. But it's still there. "It" being that nagging feeling that no matter what we do, its not enough to make us happy, its not meeting the needs we have, its too small to fill that hole we step around every day in the middle of the floor, that if we happen to acknowledge we just might fall in or the bottom might fall out. And where would it end? Where would we land? I know for me, the joy, the stillness, the rest, comes when I remember that I put the hole there myself, and it doesn't have to be there. God is the one trying to fill it, but I swat His hand away and tell him there's no problem here...this piddly few minutes I have should fix it. Carry on. Nevermind that He sees how futile the things I'm throwing into that hole are. 

I had one of those moments of stillness the other morning. I was praying for something that I just have to have or that hole might swallow me, I'll be so exhausted I'll just throw up my hands and say "forget it", and I felt God whispering straight to my heart that I already had in Him this exact thing I was begging for. My prayer was perfectly answered, simply because I let Him fill up what I can't fill myself. The peace that washed over me was something I hadn't felt in a long time. It's something that I could feel a lot more often if I just stopped struggling. Because as real as the struggle is, it's something that I insist on every day that I look away from Him.