John 10:10
\”The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy;
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full\”
(emphasis added, of course)
These last few weeks, I\’ve been struggling. I\’ve been struggling to stay motivated at work, at home, with my husband, with my kids, with my parents, with all the events and changes and day to day tasks. I\’m dragging my feet, feeling apathetic and uninspired.
I also feel a bit discouraged. I want to write, I want to read, I want to get my creative juices flowing, start planning and researching and building up resources and knowledge. Instead, I feel … stuck. Between working full time, being with the kids in the evenings, wanting to workout and spend time with the hubby, and just plain vegging out, I\’ve been struggling to keep on going. I\’m up early, I sleep late, I\’m physically just tired, and in between all the hours of going-going-going, I am struggling to use my time intentionally, and I dread each day.
I realize, however, that part of this has to do with the fact that there is so much building up and doing of things with very little structure. Imagine building a house with no foundation, or walking around with a few of your bones missing. You might be able to patch up or muscle through some things, but it would help a ton to have something solid to keep you upright! Lacking foundation also means it\’s hard to have longevity. Where am I pulling motivation, strength, and meaning from? And how do I keep this going long-term?
That\’s not to see there aren\’t seasons of life that are just hard. (And for any parents out there, parenting is hard!) There are just going to be times where it\’s so busy or overwhelming not because of lack of boundaries or trying, there are just seasons of life that get thrown at us once in a while. Right now is just one of those seasons for me.
\”Life to the full.\” There are books and blogs filled with what this might mean and how to get there, so I won\’t add too much content to this discussion. I point out this verse because as I read it, I imagine God breathing life into Adam, expanding his lungs, filling the space between his ribs. Life, tangible and real. And for the body with missing bones, the house with no foundation, I imagine the presence of God filling in the spaces, pressing into the empty places, making the ground solid, and giving us room to use the life that was passed down from Adam to flex and move, build and grow.
I can feel the aching longing for \”life to the full.\” And the only way I can live it fully is to live it with Jesus. In the past week, I\’ve been reading a book called Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids, by Dr. Kara Powell and Dr. Chap Clark. I won\’t remember everything in it, but I want to take a few things and use them to help us, my family, see God in the everyday. So we\’ve started to do just one thing, which is to share the highs and lows of our day, and one way we saw God working today.
I\’ve done the \”highs and lows\” activity with other people before. But the last one, remarking on how God worked in our lives that day, has been eye opening for me. My husband and I, though both long-time Christians, have always found it slightly awkward to share our personal spiritual lives with each other. We have such different styles and ways of processing life. But this has helped us connect, and for myself, it makes me more aware that God is present and he walks with me.
Although I will still continue to have anxious thoughts, restlessness, and impatience, my hope is that having an awareness of God working, even if it\’s not through solutions or methods I expect, will remind me of where my foundation, my bones, should be. There are reasons for the longing, the restlessness, the unmet expectations, and even though they don\’t feel good right now, my hope is that that somehow, in the grand scheme of the story that God is writing, they will be a meaningful excerpt in this chapter of life.