Cure for Exhaustion: Keep Pouring?!

by Alecia Klauk
(Chapin, SC)

Emotional fatigue is a powerful force. Do you know what I mean by that, emotional exhaustion? Imagine a long race run, dripping with sweat, legs burning, lungs heaving: that feeling. It's just of the soul instead of the body. I'm sure many of you know just what I'm talking about.

I feel like I've been living there. My soul feels like it just can't take that next proverbial step. There is nothing left, or so it feels. The breakdowns are becoming more common, and I am wondering how much longer I can duct tape my fragile little self together. The construct is beginning to show signs of possible failure.

Are you with me? Does anyone else get to that place where you know only three options remain:

1. Cry all the time, until your children are starting to become scared for your well being.

2. Scream all the time, until your children are definitely scared for their own well being.

3. The worst option: Quit feeling all together and just become a robotic machine, void of all emotion.

All three begin to have appeal when you just feel so overwhelmed that you wonder which end is up, what God is up to, and how to find your way up and out of the pit.

Please be comforted to keep reading as I assure you that this will be no "try harder" message. I'm not going to blast you for feeling here. But I do need to tell you how God pulled me out of the mud. It was quite unexpected, and I have to think that maybe I'm not the only one He wants to receive this particular message.

I hope you have noticed that I don't mind sharing my life with you. I tend to be pretty open most of the time. But there are times when I clam up, and seasons of great emotional exhaustion are prime times. But I am going to risk it and tell you about my weekend.

I have been sliding a bit lately. There has been so much pressure and expectation on me and my family that there has simply been no time to process the tidal wave of emotions that have been screaming for months.

This calendar year has been full of incredible change, most of it incredibly painful. We've been hammered, and it's been one of those times that you just think that grace would require God to ease up a bit. Then something else hits.

Exhaustion is an understatement. And yet, life continues to trample, and we have to continue on. And so we do, until the need to lie down takes over.

We trust the Lord, know His plan is good, are fully willing to submit to what we know is His perfect will, full of love and mercy. We are just tired. Does that make sense? It's deep and it's not. It's deep fatigue that needs a deep answer, but at the same time, the deepest places of my heart remain unshaken. In the uttermost of my soul, I am steady and at rest. Yet the exhaustion continues to scream.

It came to a head yesterday. I reached the end. The end of my ability to pull myself together. I collapsed into the safety of my husband's good listening ear and just unloaded. I was comforted as he did the same, and we realized, probably later than anyone really watching, that we needed to stop. To cry. To vent. To console. To feel. So we did. We had a date and ended up sitting in the car in a parking lot ... just feeling. Not very romantic perhaps, but extraordinarily bonding.

We sat and begged God for margin. Room for our hearts. We prayed and then sat in the quiet. That's one of the perks of a relationship that spans almost two decades: there is no discomfort to simply sit and wait. The still small voice spoke with one unexpected word. Shocking, really. But very clear, and spoken to us both.

It was conviction.

What?! Conviction? That seems to make no sense. But it did. We realized that in the wave of trying to feel, we hadn't felt at all and thus had created a wake behind us of need. Legitimate need not being met.

We needed to stop choosing option #3 (to go dead inside) and reengage our lives. We needed to pour into each other and the kids. We needed to allow the room to really feel, good things as well as painful things. The painful have been getting far too much play. Good needed equal time.

It's a strange thing that when your life is connected even in a visceral way to the world around you, then your absence from it goes greatly noticed. I think our kids have been noticing our fatigue, and sitting there, we realized that we needed desperately to get back in.

So we made a decision. In our begging God for emotional margin, we found that His answer was to pour out more. Again, it seems to make no sense. Tired? The relief will come in not stopping. That seems antithetical, I know. We needed to stop long enough to hear from the Lord, but we also needed to be willing to hear the answer. That answer was to keep going, but in a more directed and emotionally invested way.

We poured out repentance and submission to the Lord and knew what we needed to do. So we did what was the obviously holy answer: we cut our date short and picked up stuff for ice cream sundaes. We surprised the kids and took the ice cream outside for a picnic. We told them that we were sorry for being such tired and sad parents, and that we wanted very much to be like we were before. Before everything seemed to tumble. Before our hearts were broken in new and profound ways.

They received us with great grace, and by the time the night ended, we had happy and content children. Today has not been perfect, but there has been great fruit. I am grateful for the peace that seems to be so much more attainable than it felt yesterday.

So why do I share this with you? What's my point?

I thought the answer to feeling so exhausted was to stop, like some divine form of a trip to Aruba. Instead, the answer was to truncate my down time and go apologize to my kids. I think it presents a principle.

God's economy is full of great paradoxes. The way up is down, first is last, freedom is submission. And so God yet again revealed His incredible genius to my breathtaking simplicity. He wants to fill me up, yes, He does. And there are times when He does that in great quiet and tranquility. But this time, He has done it through action: the action of obedience.

And there's the principle. We want to feel like obeying in order to act. We want the emotion first, and at times, we can even sound like bratty children demanding that we feel good before we are willing to do what we know He has asked us to do. We want the emotion as a pay off for obedience. We don't say it that way. It may not feel that way. But I think it's still true.

So what I want to take from this experience is the reminder that there are times when God is going to meet my needs, my emotional needs, only when I obey. He is going to fill me up only when I've spent myself on the things and places He's called me to serve (which, by the way, is always and forever my family before anything else). He is going to give me energy when I've got nothing left. He is going to honor my obedience because He desires obedience more than sacrifice. And then He desires my obedience even when it is sacrifice. A sacrifice of praise, David said. My life can take that form, my whole life as a sacrifice of praise.

Why? Why does God work that way? Would it not be easier, more full of grace, to just make me feel better? At a cursory glance, perhaps. But when I remember that what He really wants is relationship and intimacy, when I remember that He's after my heart more than my behavior, when I remember that He shows Himself no more powerful and loving than to show up for me when I know I've got nothing left, when I remember Who my God is, then I don't question how He moves. I can't. Because He's earned the right to be there because He's always right.

And there's a purpose to all of this. All the pain and confusion and fatigue, it all has a purpose. Life can't be defined by a series of events meant to exhaust and test me. There's a grand plan, and I am being prepared for good works by my Father who has assigned those tasks to me. Same is true for you. I have to trust that. So do you.

Would it be easier to never have a negative thing touch my life, to never get to the point of exhaustion because there's nothing exhausting in my life? Easier, yes. Fruitful, no.

Let me prove it. A few years after we were married, my husband and I were swimming in the murky brown Atlantic. I felt something pretty big hit my leg, and my man assumed that the one of the tiger sharks that bred in that area had found me. He threw me up on the raft and pulled me shore. He thought that he would then become the prey. In effect, he proved what he had said to me on the alter of our wedding that he would lay down his life for mine.

The fact that it was a jellyfish that attacked me did in no way diminish the wonder of having my man able to have proven to me that he would keep his word. It was rather convenient that he didn't have to actually die to show me that he would!

Would it have been easier to not endure that sting, one that by the way continued to exert agony for several hours? Of course. But I'd take it again in a second because I have had the virtually unique experience of knowing the very real and practical love of my husband. I would not trade the pain for that knowledge.

Ah ha! There it is.

Sometimes, the pain is simply worth the booty. How's that for a bumper sticker? There have been so many times that the pain of the journey has just been worth the destination.

So hold on, my friend. Hold on and come back into life. Feel. Trust. And then obey. God's so good. Remember His promise of faithfulness, and that there's always a great big pot of grace at the end of His rainbow.