take a break.

Too often, surrounded by four extra shadows who are surprisingly loud, I live black hole days. What is a black hole day? It is a day when I sit exhausted on the couch at the end of bedtime and look around trying to figure out why I was so busy, why I am so tired, and why nothing got done. Days that I look back on and try to figure out where it all went wrong. Most of those days were filled saving one child or another from disaster while simultaneously trying to referee a fight, and keep the dog from eating everyone’s shoes ( I have found a solution to the shoe problem, but the rest are infinite problems). I find that the more I fill my time, the more of those days I have. And while I know that black hole days are productive because everyone is still alive, I hate the feeling of failure that comes when I look around me and things don’t look the way I think they should. Busyness is the definition of motherhood. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love my family and I love serving my family, but sometimes it all seems so long and tiring and yet uneventful. So I have a theory; I get so busy and so focused on serving my family and trying to be “like Christ” that I forget something really important: rest. I think I have stumbled upon the mistaken belief that serving others and dying to self means that I have to devote every moment to everyone else. I forget to schedule time for me. This type of behaviour on my part culminated in the past couple weeks, when I felt so exhausted that my kids ate too much mac and cheese and I watched Downton Abbey, and Brian probably thought that our house was about to fall apart. For months and months, maybe even the past couple of years, I have forgotten how to rest. It is a danger for moms, whether working or not. We so easily feel the weight of responsibility and respond by pouring out all we have into the people around us and serving in any way we can and worrying about things that we don’t need to worry about and forgetting to ask for help. We see things on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram and all of a sudden feelings of failure hit us when we were actually doing just fine. And then we try harder to meet a benchmark that only seems to move farther away the closer we get. It is so tiring. And in it all we forget to rest. We think that martyring ourselves for the sake of our families is noble and right. We sacrifice everything on the altar of “good mommy-ing” until we cannot do it anymore. People might not notice when you have it all “together” but they for sure notice when it all falls apart. And we stand there, staring at the pieces and wondering where it all went wrong. But it went wrong at the beginning, when we forgot how to rest and forgot that resting is important. It is good and right to sacrifice for our families and to serve our families, but we are also allowed to have needs. I am allowed to have needs. Even Christ recognised the limits of his human body and rested. He also encouraged His disciples to rest. There are verses about it. Resting is ok, its necessary, its how we were created. God set aside a whole day for rest. A WHOLE DAY!!! You want to know what else? When I rest I give God more time to touch my heart and open my eyes and show me things about my life that I was missing. Like today, when I took my girls outside to play and got to listen to their imaginations. I got to hear their laughter and see their smiles. I witnessed the fullness of God’s work in creation through the eyes of my girls who tell me that God “paints pictures in the sky” for them. That is my God. And He wants me to see it all, to see what He created for me. He wants to share with me the wonderful things around me. I will miss it all if I stay so busy that I forget to rest. I need to remember that Pinterest and Facebook are horrible guides to parenting. I need to remember that the only Judge to worry about is the heavenly One. I need to take time to see the things I can only see when I rest. I want my girls to see the beauty all around them. And I don’t want to be too busy to show them.

I am also a worse mother without rest. I yell more and have less patience. I do and say things that make no sense. Last week I was trying to ask Aleeda to get me something and I was so tired it took me six times to form a comprehensible sentence. SIX TIMES! What? I am supposed to be the one in charge and I couldn’t even form a sentence. My poor girls have born the brunt of my stubbornness in this area more than I care to admit. And the saddest part is that I am trying to do it all for them. In reality, I get little accomplished and show my girls the worst side of me as I try to teach them manners. It is that backwardness that helps me to see the need for rest. When I try to do and be it all, I end up being a worse parent; but if I take the time to rest and relax and just enjoy than I am the mom I want to be. So here is the beginning of a new kind of parenting, the kind where I remember to take care of myself.  Take a break. Take it all in. Let my heart be touched. And I encourage you to do the same. Take a break and see what you see. God will be there, in  your rest, to show you more of Himself. I promise.