For Exhaustion and Fixation
Remembering the God who calms me.
Tonight I feel older than I was yesterday. More exhausted, spent. I feel worn down by life, imagining dreams fading into the waning light, disappearing with dusk.
I laid on the couch for two hours watching a reality TV show and scrolling Instagram, looking at engagements and weddings and babies. New jobs and new houses and new adventures. My adventure tonight was going to Wendy’s and getting myself a Frosty and returning to the couch, to more reality TV.
I got up off the couch at 7:30, mainly because I had to go to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth, fully prepared to go to bed. But then I put on a Josh Garrels record and sat in my rocker and opened up to the Psalm I always turn to when I feel this way, Psalm 131.
"O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore."I lift up my heart in an attempt to predict the future, to plan for every possibility. If only I do things this way and coordinate my next steps that way, then surely my dreams will come to fruition. As if all I need to do is wrap my limited imagination around the limitless possibilities of life.
I raise my eyes to the things I wish I could have done better, to the things I would have changed or the scenarios I wish I could relive. I think about the texts I shouldn’t have sent and relive the conversations I torpedoed with idiocy or ignorance or both.
Lifting my heart and raising my eyes changes nothing. It only multiplies the exhaustion, further addling an OCD-addled brain.
So I keep reading Psalm 131 and feel my soul slowly calmed, my heart and eyes coming to rest on the life in front of me. I am a boy with a bad dream and the Psalm is my mother’s hand on my back.
My brain fixates. God calms.
"O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore."In the last refrain, the one that begins with “O Israel,” I often replace it with my own name.
"O Drew, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore."I believe—because I have to—that hope is not just a feeling. Rather, it is often a choice.
I pray that you discover the God of calm, that you discover the God of hope.