I am Tired

We all grow tired eventually; it happens to everyone. Even the sun, at the close of the year, is no longer a morning person.”

                                                                        Joyce Rachelle

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I am tired

I am tired for lots of reasons

Two weeks on the road (the wrong side of the road in Ireland)

Two weeks of fish and chips and cider (hard)

I am tired

After 16 years of working in the pressure cooker of community mental health

13 years as a Executive Director

And now as the Director of a pain program

It is tiring being in the middle of people’s pain!

It is tiring being in the middle of my own pain

I might well be bionic

(although I have had no joint replacements, yet)

12 surgeries later my body is a little beat up!

I am tired

After over 20 years in the pulpits of church

Small, medium, large, and then small again

I am tired because I am getting a little older

Turning 68 in less than a week

I am tired because I don’t know how to say no

Tired because I don’t always sleep well

Tired because I think too much

Feel too much

Care too much

I am tired because I am struggling against

Greed

Apathy

Fear

Hate

And I feeling like I (and those like me) are losing

My soul shrinks

My heart hurts

When I see 44% of America pick money over people

When I hear people call good evil, and evil good

I am like that plant

Roots thrust deep into thirsty land

Barely alive

Waiting for the rain

I echo the worlds of the Psalmist (63)

Who in a similar moment

“You, God, are my God,

    earnestly I seek you;

I thirst for you,

    my whole being longs for you,

in a dry and parched land

    where there is no water.”

But here is the thing

Even though I am tired

And perhaps a bit shriveled and dry

I am not a dead twig

Broken and separated from the source of life

I am a child of God

I am connected

I have the Spirit

And this reality, in which I participate

Well

Isaiah (41) said it well

“The poor and needy search for water,

    but there is none;

    their tongues are parched with thirst.

But I the Lord will answer them;

    I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.

18 I will make rivers flow on barren heights,

    and springs within the valleys.

I will turn the desert into pools of water,

    and the parched ground into springs.”

I am tired

But I am also renewed

And so tomorrow I will arise

A greet another day