Exhausted by Never Arriving
An Instagram reel popped up in my feed the other day with a young woman lamenting (ratherly cheekily):
“When will my healing ever be done?”
It feels like once we have begun to make some progress on working on one aspect of our life, another seems to crumble just down the way. And we are stretching to try to block another hole in the dam.
For some personalities, this is exhilarating. Each day is something new. A new challenge, a new way to grow and to stretch. They lean into the excitement with reckless abandon.
I wish that my personality leant to this. I am not one that prefers to charge forward without a plan. I want to anticipate the turn in the road, have a layout of what could be at each fork, and take hours deliberating over which direction I should go. I have heard time and again that I just need to relax, to let go of control, and that reality for me is both exhausting and absolutely scary. An existence that has come about because of personality and past trauma. A maelstrom of being a person that likes order, and has needed that order to survive in emotionally dangerous situations.
Not Yet Complete
Along with this need to know what happens next, I want to feel like I have accomplished something, like I have achieved a goal and can now move on to the next task. I am extremely goal oriented and love the days when I can get to everything I wrote down on my checklist.
This journey of learning what it is to be a Christ follower and to be a woman of praise has led to moments where it can feel simpler to give up. This does not in any way mean that I do not recognize the grace and the reward that comes with persistence. But sometimes that persistence can feel like a meaningless grind day after day…
(…Is this a good time to throw in that I loved my philosophy classes in college?)
I want to be honest about this because I know that I am not the only one. The call that Proverbs 31:25 gives us – to laugh at the days to come – can be really simple for some people. They can relinquish that control and trust to God because they are able to see His promises and witness His grace, they know they can rest in the hope that God provides. For some of us, however, it can be more difficult. We know that God is good and sovereign, we know that God is enough, but if we are really honest with ourselves, we can be tempted to feel that He is all of those things to other people. He can direct and guide and bring hope…to roads that are not our own.
Maybe that has come about because the idea of God as our parent is a real thing to us–but our parents were often absent, did not follow through on promises or commitments that were made time and time again. Maybe we are in a hard season with the Lord right now, wrestling with Him over the hows and the whys, and it can feel like God wants us to suffer to learn a lesson before He extends us grace. Maybe the idea of giving up control to anyone can be a terrifying prospect, because everyone that we have met on earth has abused that trust and has shown us that we were fools for leaning into them the way we did.
It can be extremely easy to say to you “But those are people and they are not God.” And that is true. We have to be careful that we are not basing God off of our experiences, but that is far easier said than done. It takes a lot of healing from the sins of others to sometimes see God for Who He is.
Again, more works in progress we wish were over already.
Sadly, that is the reality of living in a sinful world– because of the marring of what God made, the earth and its order has been left in imperfection. And yet again, the vagueness of the English language is what fails us because we see perfection as “when all we hoped for happens”. We forget that the word perfection in the literal definition does not mean that everything is alright and going the way that we want it to– perfection literally means completion. We are not in a state of completion because we are not in our perfected state, made whole by God.
There are glimpses of that completion here on earth, moments when we can respond in the grace of the Spirit. When the day goes better than we anticipated. But we are caught right back in the loop of imperfection when the next day we respond with harshness, or what we took time to build does not come to fruition.
This incompleteness can be felt in every aspect of the Proverbs 31 woman: the moments when she does not respond to her children or her husband or those around her with grace and kindness. The moments when she did not prepare for the season ahead because she was distracted by the lure of the temporary. When her business does not pan out the way she had hoped, all the money and efforts bring in nothing but losses and discouragement. When the anxieties of tomorrow are outweighing the peace of today and she weeps at the season to come instead of rejoicing.
In those moments, it can be so tempting to just give up. To believe that these promises are not meant for us, that we will never amount to the woman that God has called us to be. The prescription in the last book of Proverbs is meant for another woman who is better and more stylish and more gritty than us. We do not have what it takes.
Victory in the Bones
It is in these moments of defeat, when it feels like we will never amount to anything, that we need to lean in closer to the promises of God. Everything God has told us will not come up void. He is a God who delivers, but He is also a God who does not deliver in the ways that we always expect. Deliverance came through people that often seemed like they would never amount to anything special, would not be someone who could be praised. Women like Tamar, who was tricked and rejected and did what she could in order to preserve herself (and the lineage of her family). Like Rahab, a woman who was both a prostitute and an enemy Gentile. Who used lies in order to save the spies in Jericho, but who God redeemed and brought into His royal family. Women like Bathsheba who were called in, most likely powerless, and taken advantage of for her beauty instead of her character. Who lost everything in the heat of a moment because of a man who stopped looking at God and looked instead at his inward wants and desires. She became the one we seem to blame in the church for David’s downfall, when she was merely acting in obedience to the king. We do not know how willingly involved she was in the events that followed that evening. But we do know that God redeemed her, eventually gave her a son that would be the wisest in the world, and allowed her to reap in the inheritance of being in the lineage of Jesus.
These were all women who could have at any point accepted that they were nothing, that God could not use them and did not see them. Instead, they did their best to remain obedient to God even after terrible circumstances, and He raised them up despite their choices.
God is willing and able to do the same for us. When it feels like we have disqualified ourselves from the promises and plans He has for His people, those are the moments when He can most use us because we no longer are resting on our own laurels. We are no longer concerned about trying to appear pleasing and attractive to the world, but instead we are moving toward the grace of the throne that we so desperately need.
Sometimes that throne can be hard to see, sometimes it can seem like God’s affections and attentions are turned toward something or someone else. The devil does all that he can to try to convince us that we are disqualified from the blessings and grace of God because of where we are, who we are, the decisions we have made, the poor witness we have been. Yet God did not even disqualify the dry bones in the desert, the people that no longer had flesh and blood, were no longer living for Him.
Instead, He turned to Ezekiel, the man that should have been a priest but instead was a prisoner, and asked “Son of man, can these bones live?”
In which Ezekiel, the man who could have just as easily disbelieved that God could bring any promise to light as he was held captive by his enemy, replied “LORD God, only you know.” (Ezekiel 37:3)
And from there, God called the dry bone to life. He brought them from bleached relics on the ground to flesh and blood, the bones rattling to life. And from there, He commanded Ezekiel:
“Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man. Say to it: This is what the Lord God says: Breath, come from the four winds and breathe into these slain so that they may live!”. So I prophesied as He commanded me; the breath entered them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, a vast army.
Ezekiel 37:9-10
By God’s power in him, Ezekiel was able to command the lifeless bodies to live. God was able to use Ezekiel, the forgotten prisoner, to bring about an army of the LORD. In what ways can He use you, dear sister, in the dry places of your desert, to bring about life for Him? How can He use you as a prophet to speak words of renewal to the dead places around you?
Ezekiel was not freed from his place of captivity. The Babylonians were not overthrown by this army. There was so much work that needed to be done. However, God’s power, purposes, and promises never left that wasteland. He needed the Israelites where He placed them, so that He could bring about a bigger and better promise in later times that would bring salvation to us all..
In what ways, in this season you have to speak the breath of God into the dry bones around you, is God using this to prepare to fulfill the purpose and the promise of the next coming?
In the moments when it seems like what you are doing can have no purpose, no meaning. That your existence is one of no impact. Know that God is using you for greater things than you can ever imagine. I used to wonder if the people that were not mentioned in the Bible were ones that God cared less for. And I believe that this idea is a very Western, social media driven understanding of fame. That if I do not have the followers or the platform or the notoriety that what I am doing in life has less meaning, less value, less purpose. Yet men and women in history that had no name in the records were responsible for carrying those stories. Were the ones that raised and influenced and protected the people that God did name in the books. Their meaning was not any less. Their struggle still mattered.
And so does our struggle. So does the daily laying down of control, some days we are more perfect (complete) at doing this task than others. When the journey seems to be too tough, rely on the knowledge that God sees and knows. That it may take generation upon generation to know the impact of your struggle, the reality that your obedience in the tough times, when you wanted to give up, will come to fruition. And that you are not alone in your giving up. But it comes with consequences.
When we look at the story of Gideon, we remember that he led a small army against larger foes, was able to win a battle with far fewer men and didn’t lose a single life. Gideon’s small existence as a judge in a struggling nation did not disqualify him from doing great things for God. But his journey did not end well. Instead, he gave up and gave in to the societal pressures around him, and his family and people were left whoring themselves to the idols of the day (Judges 8:33). Forgetting the promise that God led them to. Forgetting what God was able to do in the moment when it felt like it was better to just give up.
May we in the moments we are faltering, want to leave a better legacy. I pray that you can make the conscious decision to trust that God is better, even when He doesn’t feel that way, or when circumstances seem to tell you otherwise. That you can trust in Him with the failure of where you are at, because that is when He is able to empower you.
Completeness in Humility
But he gives greater grace. Therefore he says:
God resists the proud
but gives grace to the humble
James 4:6
In the days when it feels like you are failing. When you are keenly aware that you are never going to arrive on this earth. And all of that is disheartening, it makes you want to throw in the towel. Do one thing for me.
Take the next step. It may be painful, it may seem like it is stretching your muscles so far. Every inch forward comes with excruciating pain and soul numbing exhaustion. Please know I am not saying this as a compassionless cheerleader on the side of the play. Know that I am on this journey with you. Some days that next foot fall is an eternity and it is pointless. Completely meaningless in the face of it all. But God cannot bless those that do not respond to Him, even if the response is just getting up the next morning. Even if the response is trying to do the same thing again and again in the face of failure.
In that next step, confess that you cannot do this without God. It is only in the surrender that we can find true grace and success. Pray that He can take what you are not able to do and multiply it. Use it for His Kingdom. Once we get our eyes off of what we think we need to accomplish and shift our gaze to trying to accomplish something small for God and God alone that He can use as an echo of something greater, that is when the defeat feels less crushing.
Claim your place as a citizen of Heaven on earth, knowing that completion will not come now but in the afterlife – or, really, the fuller life–\ when we are with God once again. That what may seem like accomplishments and success here in the sinful dominion may not be what God wanted as victory in His Heavenly Kingdom. Know the promises that He has given you, rest in them:
‘Just one thing: As citizens of heaven, live your life worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then, whether I come and see you or am absent, I will hear about you that you are standing firm in one spirit, in one accord, contending together for the faith of the gospel, not being frightened in any way by your opponents. This is a sign of destruction for them, but of your salvation—and this is from God. For it has been granted to you on Christ’s behalf not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him, since you are engaged in the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I have.”
Philippians 1:27-30
In the moments where it seems pointless to keep going on this journey, that it feels like you are always going to fail, put aside your pride and continue on bravely anyway. You are not the best judge of eternity, no matter all the tools you have collected to control the outcome. You are a poor leader. and you will never always be prepared. Do not let this reality exhaust you, but instead lean into it. Let it hurt. And know that while you cannot control the outcome of tomorrow, that God can. And He is always for you.
He wants you to succeed, but He wants you to do so in the light of Heaven’s reward and not earthly glory. So even if you never get past a handful of followers, if you never earn a million dollars, your daily struggle was not for waste. Because every moment you wrestled with God, He was able to shape you just a little more into a better imitation of Himself.
At the end of the day, you will reach completion. It is going to be a further away goal than you imagined. But, my dear sister, it will come.