I really did not anticipate how tough it would be to have two small kids... to be woken up 3-10 times every night for months on end (by both children).... How much it would feel like drowning... like dying... every day... for months... coming up for air in a brief moment of peace (both children napping at the same time?!)... only to be shoved under the waves again (they take turns waking up every thirty minutes right after I fall asleep for nap too). Today, a friend who is in college asked me to pray for an upcoming final exam. I almost snickered. Oh for the days when a final exam was the most difficult thing on my radar.
As I prayed, I sang... Lord, meet us where we are. Give us strength for the trials that we face today.
It made me think about how tough it was for me in college.... lack of sleep, hard work, hard exams, writing papers.... feeling overwhelmed and like I couldn't cope at times.
Then thinking how it was when I was working full time, and didn't have that awesome summer break you get your whole life up until you graduate college.... day in, day out, waking up, going to work, stress of coworkers, tasks, and more, coming home, trying to run our video business at night, going to bed late, waking up and doing it again.... how overwhelming, how hard that was.
Then remembering how I felt after Jax was born... like I was in a dark hole and I didn't know when I would get out. Any sleep deprived fatigue of my college years or working years became like a sneeze compared to the pain of being woken up by a little person, every hour, every night... sleep deprivation is a legit form of torture for a reason. How overwhelmed I was, how I didn't think I could go on one more day.
And now.... two small kids, it's once again the hardest thing I've every done in my life, the most sleep deprived, the most exhausted, the most overwhelmed, I've ever been in my life. Worse than all the other times, but yet, the same, because the other times felt just as terrible in the moment.
And it made me think.... when am I going to learn how to trust God a bit more? How to cope with the torture of sleep deprivation? How to sustain peace and joy in my heart and home, despite whatever the current hard thing is?
Each time, at some point, things got easier. It was always a combination of the situation itself letting up just a bit, and me learning what things I needed to do in order to cope and function in the situation. A little of each.
And I can't laugh at the friend who desperately wants prayers for a college exam, who has lost sleep studying for the last several days, because that is their trial right now.
And even more, that is what God is using to stretch, to grow.... how each of those life circumstances, where we feel stretched beyond our capacity, we somehow get through, with His help, and it prepares us for the next stretching. For the next time it seems to hard to bear, and we look back on the last hard time and think, that was easy, in comparison to THIS, to NOW, I laugh at my silly old self back then who thought THAT was SO hard. Now THIS, this is HARD.....
This is what He does. Mold us. Change us. Let our desperation and fatigue drive us to the Cross, to his throne, to His strength when all of ours was used up long ago.
I haven't learned it all yet. But I want to find a way, in this season, to learn peace and joy, so even when I feel like I'm drowning and half dying between a crying baby and a tantruming toddler, I can know that this too, will calm down at some point, and I will find ways to cope, and the Lord will hold me up so I can make it one more day, one more moment. So that the next time it's hard, today will seem easy.
So I can learn, what it means, when I feel like I'm drowning, for Him to teach me how to swim.
