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the theology of tired (and a prayer for the sleep-deprived)

5 Comments

I am tired.

I am tired all the time. I’m tired of talking about how tired I am.

I know I knew tired before I had kids – tired from college, tired from work, tired from grad school.

But since 2009 I have been weary to my bones. This is the happy side effect of answered prayers and three growing children.

My husband and I joke that we could sleep for a decade and still be sleep-deprived. This would probably be scientifically true if I did the math. But you know. Too tired.

Sometimes tired feels like a character flaw. Take better care of yourself! Go to bed earlier! 

Sometimes tired feels like an inner critic. Stop complaining. Everyone’s exhausted. Move on.

But tired is the plain fact of my life. The contours of kids and work and home and every other devotion and demand to which I give my days and nights.

I love it all, but I am tired.

After a week where we tried to go to bed early every night – tried but got tied up with work again, caught up with chores again, tripped up by something hilarious on the Internet again – I’m hiding out during my children’s nap/rest time. Trying to think theologically about tired.

(Which is hard when we stayed up till midnight and then woke at dawn. Again.)

Tired is the antithesis of Sabbath. Since we’re supposed to be Sabbath people, am I failing by being tired? Maybe.

Tired is the cry to God throughout Scripture. The weary words of the people wandering too long, the Psalmist stuck in the pit. Is tired simply supposed to spur me back to God, swap whatever burden I’m dragging for the lighter yoke? Perhaps.

But here’s where I get stuck. Setting aside sleeplessness that’s stubborn or selfish, there’s a certain segment of sleep deprivation that cannot be removed. It is the side effect of sacrifice.

And I see it all around me – parents with young kids, parents with teenagers, adult caregivers for aging parents, students working toward degrees, professionals caring for those they serve.

I’m starting to think we’re Sabbath people who are meant to be tired, too.

(My six year-old just interrupted to ask if rest was done. The irony is not lost on me.)

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Vocations are tiring things. They wake us in the night. They pull us out of bed in the morning. They keep us working.

So if we are called, then we will grow tired along the way. We haven’t failed. We have given a fully faithful and perfectly human response. We have given ourselves, body and soul.

Children are stirring. Dinner is unmade. Four Word documents are still open.

I will be tired again tonight.

But setting aside a moment’s complaints and an afternoon’s acedia, I am deeply grateful for the bone-tired of my life. I’m called to love. And love is tiring.

A simple prayer for the sleep-deprived

God, I am tired.

Give me rest. Give me peace when there is not enough rest.

Grant me patience. Grant me forgiveness when there is not enough patience.

Lend me clarity. Lend me charity when there is not enough clarity.

Help me love. Help me believe there is always enough love.

Amen.

And let us not grow weary of doing good,
for in due season we will reap,
if we do not give up.
(Galatians 6:9)

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Comments

  1. Val Starkgraf says

    8 August 2015 at 8:28 am

    I am reading this after spending pretty much all night (one nap) sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor of the church nursery scrubbing toddler sticky and dust off all the toys. There is this existential moment when, at 1:15 AM, you find yourself sitting on the floor…scrubbing a grubby “Chicken Dance Elmo”…listening to a modern version of a Fanny Crosby standard… What. Am. I. Doing. With. My. Life.

    My day job is taking care of an adorable 18 month-old, and my nights and weekends as church sexton at my church.

    I “get” the theology of tiredness as sacrifice. I live in that place.

    Reply
  2. Laurel says

    8 August 2015 at 9:04 am

    Laura, this is a perfect prayer for a tired, weary soul. Thank you for sharing it. <3

    Reply
  3. Erin @ Humble Handmaid says

    26 August 2015 at 5:15 am

    What an amazing, encouraging, fortifying post! It struck a chord with me this morning when I, too, am up before dawn (again) to pray and prep the day for my family. Thank you so much. 😉

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. The Theology of Tired (and a prayer for the sleep-deprived) | The Catholic Wife says:
    26 August 2015 at 8:00 am

    […] But setting aside a moment’s complaints and an afternoon’s acedia, I am deeply grateful for the bone-tired of my life. I’m called to love. And love is tiring. [continue for a Prayer for the Sleep Deprived] […]

    Reply
  2. A Good Mid-Week Prayer | Ragamuffingospelfan's Blog says:
    16 August 2017 at 9:58 pm

    […] http://www.motheringspirit.com/2015/08/the-theology-of-tired-and-a-prayer-for-the-sleep-deprived/?su&#8230; […]

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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