4 Good Things to Remember When You Don’t Want to Face the Day
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Do not try to go over the tops of the great ice-mountains. Look out for the valleys the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through. — C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, p. 173.
I heard my alarm clock chime at 6 a.m., turned it off, and huddled deeper beneath my bedding, despite the warm summer temperatures. Another 45 minutes passed before I heard the door to my five-year-old and three-year-old’s bedroom open and the bathroom door close. Everyone was awake now.
My body felt like lead on the mattress. My brain screamed inside my head that I couldn’t do it, that I couldn’t face another day of barely hiding my anxiety and exhaustion and depletion from my family and friends. I felt the weight of that slow simmer of irritability and the deep-seated personal reproof of guilt for not loving every moment of my incredible life. I really didn’t want to be needed.
Peering out from my covers to glimpse the rolling farm landscape out my bedroom window and seeing the silent beauty of sprawling fields with sporadic trees peeking through the morning mist, I hoped the sight of them would fill me with enough courage to get up. That their beauty would lead me to accept the day had begun. That nature’s splendor would strengthen me with fortitude necessary to do my job as a mom.
But they didn’t.
1. It’s not enough to look inside yourself for strength.
Some people may encourage you to look inside yourself for the needed resolve to power through another day. They may tell you that you are beautiful and strong enough. Or that if you surround yourself with good, healthy, restorative things, you’ll be empowered enough to overcome anything. The world will advertise the solutions to making a better, happier you. Yet, the more I looked inside myself for answers, the more I found myself thinking, “I have given enough. I shouldn’t have to fix how I feel too.”
And that is exactly correct. None of us can conjure up the perfect concoction of food + drink + beauty + work + pleasure + rest to relieve the deep emotional turmoil. The satisfaction we so deeply crave at the depths of our emotional valleys can only come from God himself and none other.
2. The satisfaction we so deeply crave comes only from God himself.
I looked up at my bathroom mirror with the words from Isaiah 58 scrawled crookedly across the top third of the glass, and my heart broke:
If you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday. (Isa. 58:10)
I broke down in tears and cried as I read the Bible verse. I knew that I was being taken care of. I couldn’t will my gloom into the brightness of the noon day, but God promised that he would do it for me. He promises to do it for all his children. Regardless of how you feel, God is always faithful and true. We need to stop trying to figure it out on our own.
3. Our Father in heaven won’t forsake us.
And the Lord will guide you continually
and satisfy your desire in scorched places
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters do not fail. (Isa. 58:11)
We all feel like we lack the strength to make it through so many days as we earnestly seek to love God and our neighbor. The Lord’s promise to walk alongside us without pause, to satisfy our hunger in the deadest seasons, to make our physical body’s very foundation strong, so much so that we will be like something which does not fail, are promises that only the most loving Father would make. Never would I make those promises to myself, because I know that I could never bring them to pass. If you try day-in and day-out to pull yourself out of your emotional turmoil, know that only God can rescue, sustain, and uplift you.
4. Listen to your heavenly Father, not yourself.
With every heavy step down the hallway to the kitchen, my mind kept reminding me, “Failure. If you can’t just feel happy on a day as pretty as today, with a family as incredible as yours is, you are a failure.” Have you heard those words in your head? Are you familiar with the heavy gloom of guilt and accusation? But God never tells me I’m a failure. Instead, he promises strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow. His promises never fail and can always be trusted, regardless of our current state at any given moment.
Friends, when you encounter days, or weeks, or months, or years that feel impossible to survive, whether from events you experience or lies the devil whispers in your ear, don’t look within yourself for your cure. Fall into the lap of your Father in heaven who not only understands you without needing to hear you explain yourself, but also has every answer you need to take the next step in your day.
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