Beyond Tired

 I (Olivia) stumbled upon a printed version of this encouraging note Emma wrote while cleaning our room today. It really spoke to me, and I hope it'll speak to some of you as well. The truth of these words she has expressed is fully lived out in her life every. single. day. I'm so blessed to have a living, shining example of a heart fully devoted and tirelessly committed to serving her King right here in my own sister. She speaks from experience. Be blessed.

My Favorite Time

By Emma Howard

                Once upon a time, two Saturdays ago to be exact, as I clomped around in my rain boots doing my chores, in my soul was quiet. All of my prideful thoughts, tiring dependence on self, and insistent complaining had ceased. I was beyond tired. My heart was at rest. I leaned on the Lord. As I realized this it reminded me of one of my favorite insights from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis “The only constructive passage in your letter is where you say that you still expect good results from the patient’s fatigue… But it won’t fall into your hands… The paradoxical thing is that moderate fatigue is a better soil for peevishness than absolute exhaustion.  This depends partially on physical causes and partially on something else. It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tried. Whatever men expect, they soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. It is after men have given in to the irremediable, after they have despaired of relief and ceased to think even half-an-hour ahead, that the dangers of humbled and gentle weariness begin.”  

                C.S. Lewis’s insight is astonishing. It is indeed after we have “given in to the irremediable” that the peace of dependence swells under our feet and carries us along in its sure tide. But one of the hardest things on earth is to enjoy being simply and painfully tired until you have broken through to that blissful state of beyond-tired. It is the writhing and wriggling suffering before the numbness of pain. And I can use those drastic words for I myself am painfully tired at the moment. But one cannot enjoy the peace of beyond-tired until one has made it through the simply-tired. And how hard that is! I took a nap today. It was supposed to be twenty minutes- it ended up being forty-five. I decided that was a semi-mistake. Although it helped with the rest of my day, it delayed my breaking-point into the Beyond. Oh, how I long to be there!

                The longing to be Beyond is natural for it is one of the closest states to heaven we can get to while on this earth. In Heaven is our eternal Sabbath-Rest, when we delight and depend completely in and on the Lord. My sins will be washed away and all my pride, self-dependence, and complaints vanish. Then and only then will I be able to truly rest.  Now, here on this earth I long to cease my efforts, and lean rather on those of the Lord. But my old-man continues to assert my strength, tiring me out and not allowing God to be strong. Only when my strength is gone do I conquer and realize that only His power can “get ‘er done”.  I sorely need to wash the striking verse “ For when I am weak, He is very strong” from all the grit, grime, dust, and dirt of over-usage a under-meditation and make it shine once more in all its beauty. The verse doesn’t mean that when I am tired and run out of all my human energy God steps up and announces He’ll take over now. Rather, God is my strength always, but it is only when all the cob-webs of pride and self-assurance are blown away by the sudden gusts of reality and I am left with bare-nothingness of my own to accomplish all my taxing tasks, that I can see His great strength.  For then, if I press on, He sweeps that nothingness away, as pair of ratty and tattered rain boots that allow more water in than they keep out, and hands me a pair of soft, sweet, and sturdy crimson moccasins that (I’m sure) are constructed of eagle’s wings.

“³¹ But those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Isaiah 40:31