Confronting Routine, Exhaustion, the Heimlich Maneuver, and the Truth about How You Feel
Peace can be quite a luxury item, at times. I had just closed my eyes when I heard my new alarm clock sounding off once again—a really adorable clock but not exactly consistent. She’s 4 months old, and for some reason, I had hoped by now that she’d fall into a deep, adult-like slumber and not stir again until after sunrise each night at least. She’s cute but effective at sabotaging sleep. It was the third night in a row that I was awake nearly every 3 hours with her. Maybe it was the fourth night. No, it was the fifth. I lose count. I woke up to a morning so full that my calendar block for the day was completely filled out with scribbled to-do lists in my circa-2003 planner, but when I sat up, ready to approach the bottle-filling station in my kitchen, everything in my body hurt. I just wanted the rolling sounds of the ocean, toes in the heat of the sand, and the haze of drifting in and out of sleep.
I placed my feet on the floor next to my bed, staring at the handles of my new rustic tobacco-colored dressers, and could not seem to wake up. My head was imploding from fatigue. My joints ached from not moving in the 3 hours I tried to sleep. My heart was already heading to the kitchen but my body was trying to determine if I was still dreaming or not.
Then it came. Help swooped in like a life raft to the Lusitania, the bread for revolutionary France, the ray of sun to a withering stem. My husband, Logan, who had a lengthy to-do list of his own since it was his day off, walked into the room and said those angelic words, “Let me take her. Try to rest if you can.” It was as if those words floated to me in a melody across the air. I still have a hard time picturing that morning, just a blur of him walking into the room and offering his hand to help. It was transcendental. I was beside myself with sincere gratitude—not because he was helping me; we help each other all of the time, but this particular morning, I was in so much need of it. I wasn’t even planning to ask him for help. I was just going to push myself until I inhaled enough coffee to feel functional and keep moving forward because that’s the only way to make it through that kind of day.
So I stopped. I listened to him and to my body, and I slept. I slept for hours. When I woke up again, I felt like a different person. I had no idea what time it was or what day of the week we were in, just that feeling you get when you are on vacation and time seems to pass before you realize it’s happened. My head felt clear. My body was relaxed and no longer aching. I was able to wrap up my to-do list and help him finish his in the process.
A week before this, I had tossed a Skittle in my mouth and started laughing at some ridiculous joke Logan said to me. Really laughing, the kind of laughing that takes you by surprise because it’s so funny and unexpected. And then I felt the candy lodge itself in my wind pipe. I looked down for a minute and tried to breathe. A slow whistling sound passed through and then nothing. No air, no Skittle, nothing. I stopped breathing in because I knew this was going to make it worse, and in all honesty, my next thought was “This is an incredibly embarrassing way to go out, if that’s what is about to happen here.” I’m 33 years old. I should have eating down pretty naturally at this point. Then, Logan took my arm and spun me around, without hesitation, and literally performed the Heimlich maneuver until it dislodged from my throat and I was able to breathe again. I wanted to laugh at first because it seemed so fast—the whole episode from start to finish was like a flash.
It sounds ridiculous but it scared me. My husband is a firefighter and EMT. He didn’t bat an eye. He didn’t panic. He didn’t wonder what to do next. He just did it instinctively. The tranquility of his demeanor throughout the incident kept me calm, and it resonated with me after that night. I kept thinking about how I almost panicked but he stopped me from doing it. I thought about a few days later, when I needed help and he recognized the need. I thought about how I struggled and he needed me to trust him. I thought about how we struggle with things in our lives. How day-to-day routines dictate to us what our day will look like but not necessarily how it will go—we can still control if it’s a day filled with good or bad depending on our perception of it.
I thought about this in the context of our lives and how and why we come to God about our circumstances. I have the worst problem with feeling like I can handle things. I can control this. I can positively influence that. I can make this situation work. Just change a few things. I am terrible at asking for help even when it’s obvious that I need it.
Matthew 11:28-30 says, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
God knows that we fall to complacency in our lives sometimes, that we are burdened by circumstances even as simple as daily routines or as complex as troubling experiences. He knows when we need rest before we do. He knows when we need help before we ask. He knows that we physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually cannot control or even understand it all. He knows when we are too stubborn to ask for the help that we need. The crazy thing is that he WANTS us to choose Him, to draw close to Him, to trust in Him.
James 4:8 says “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”
There is no reality that exists where that will not happen. If you reach for Him, if you pursue Him, if you seek His cause and purpose for your life, if you abandon your own stubbornness for the vulnerability it takes to fully follow Him, then He will not abandon you.
I recently watched America’s Got Talent and saw a young girl with terminal cancer named “Nightbirde” surprise the world with the honesty and vulnerability of her original song. It was honest and lovely. She wrote a blog piece that identified how, sometimes, if you don’t see God, then maybe you aren’t looking as low as you should be. You aren’t on the floor yet. You aren’t in the depths of those moments where you can’t lie to yourself anymore about certain and necessary truths or realities of your life. I know those moments of absolute torture, the type of heartache that rips you apart from the inside out, the ones where you can hardly face the realities of the truth. I know what it’s like to find a relationship with God that is so close and personal that seems to begin on a tear-soaked lavender rug on the bathroom floor. To bring him your best and worst versions of yourself, of your choices, of your fears. And it’s incredible. It’s transformational to give those worries and fears over to Him. It’s what He wants for us.
I’m in a season right now, and it’s not a permanent one but it’s testing me. My new daughter will not be 4 months old forever. Eventually, she’ll be older and independent, opening Coke cans and making life choices by herself, and I will miss these days so much that the memories will form sudden knots in my throat whenever they surface. My doctoral dissertation will be finished, and I won’t have that priority sitting on my shoulders for what needs to be completed periodically in order to make progress. Our new house will be completely moved into and so many updates that we need will not be overwhelming in number.
It’s okay to be exhausted by but in love with your life at the same time. It’s okay to feel overwhelmed by routines and to-do lists. It’s okay to let fear motivate you as long it’s not in the driver’s seat. It’s okay to ask for help.
Isaiah 40:31 says, “Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.”
Bring your life—the good, the complex, the scary, the joyful, and the bad—to God. Share it with Him, celebrate it, hand over the hard stuff. Stop looking at increments of time in each routine of each day as the context of your life. We are SO much more than that. We can do so much more. Stop telling yourself that you don’t have time to fall in love with your life, that you are too tired to grow, that you are too scared to change. God is there, low or high, waiting for you with open arms—like that parent who waits to scoop you up from the dirt when you blunder those steps and end up eating some of the ground—ready to wrap you in the exact warmth of His love.
God bless,
M
Blue Withens 