Just Finding the Words

If the Lord had not been my help, my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence.  When I thought, “My foot slips,” your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.  When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.     Psalm 94:17-19 ESV

Crisis fatigue.

Maybe you are already familiar with this term.  I was not.  When my pastor mentioned this in a sermon a couple of weeks back, I immediately identified with the concept.  I have been at a loss to understand or explain my state of mind for quite some time. 

There’s something about giving words to a feeling or circumstance that just seems to yield a little hope in my weariness.  If someone else has identified the condition, there is a sort of validation.  Maybe I’m not really just going crazy if I’m not the only one feeling this way.  Perhaps, I am not alone.

Obviously, I think that it is important to view life through a spiritual lens.  My relationship with the Lord certainly impacts all of life, and I have not forgotten that my hope is in Him.  At the same time, while all of life can be viewed through a spiritual lens, not everything in life is inherently spiritual. 

My spiritual life is critical, and it is key to who I am.  I understand what my spirit needs, and so I have set in place some good spiritual practices. 

I have a physical body, subject to pain, sickness, and fatigue.  I require literal food to nourish my body.  This is easy for me to understand.  I like food!  I get hungry, thirsty, and sleepy, and it is not a hard thing to address those needs.  Eating, breathing, and sleeping come quite naturally to me.

Caring for my soul is the hard part for me.  The soul is where thoughts and emotions dwell.  It is where decisions are made, and their impact felt most keenly, if not always immediately.

My soul is a mess!

I’ve had a hard time understanding this, because it’s not just one thing that is troubling me. It’s not that I’m feeling lost because of A, B, or C.  This is where the concept of “crisis fatigue” is helping me understand things a little better.  Yes, “A” happened, and that was frustrating, but by itself it was not a great big deal.  But “A” was hardly past before “B” happened.  And I was literally still processing “B” when “C” and “D” entered the picture.  Honestly, over the past couple of years, I’m pretty sure I’ve been through the entire alphabet several times over!  I’m not going to walk you through all of that, because I understand that you may be working your way through an alphabet soup of your own.   (And, when I start trying to trace back the history of how I got from there to here, I’m just reduced to a messy puddle, and my tissue box is already nearly empty!)

Still, in just finally having the words to sort of explain myself, I feel oddly comforted.  Sadness certainly remains, and a lot of concern on a lot of different situations. 

I suppose it is because I find comfort in words that I love to write.  And perhaps, because I didn’t have the right words to understand this season, I have found it difficult to formulate words for any other purpose, thus little writing has been occurring.  I still have hope that someday I will complete that book I thought would be out by summer (though, interestingly, today is the first day of winter and it remains unfinished).   For now, I’m giving myself permission to write some other things.  We’ll call that “therapy.”

I have to believe that after the past couple of years, everybody’s got a little “crisis fatigue” going on.  Pandemics and political unrest have totally changed how daily life looks on planet earth in December 2021 versus December 2019.  Even if the rest of life is moving along pretty smoothly for you, this is still a strange point in history, and I think we’re all a little weary.

There are a lot of things in life right now that I can’t do anything about.  And there are some things that I CAN do. 

I suppose that is really the thought for this day.  Concerning myself too much with things beyond my control adds to the weariness of my soul.  Shifting my focus to the things that I can do, and genuinely trusting that Sovereign God is at work in all things is the only path to find rest for my weary soul. 

And there is rest for you there as well.  My God is big.

…Just a thought…