Long Days

I have plenty to do.  There is no lack of chores around this place-inside and outside always need attention.

I still cook.  I clean.  I bake cakes and can summer vegetables.

I try to tackle craft projects and make the moments count.

But it is hard.

I used to be someone who made a list, stuck to it and worked my way through it like a battle plan.  First do THIS, then do THAT.  There were always more tasks than daylight.  And I never knew what kinds of unanticipated interruptions might alter my plans.

 

 

Now I still make a list before bed each night. It’s a habit I can’t seem to break.  But I know as I’m writing it that I won’t consult it when I wake up in the morning.

 

Not like I used to do.

I’m an organizer, a planner, a get-it-done, no-mountain-too-high kind of person

Or I was…

 

I never understood people who drifted through the day like there wasn’t somewhere to go, something to do.

Now I am one of them.

 

 

As a fellow bereaved mother said recently in a Facebook comment exchange, “I’m a shadow of my former self”.

And maybe that’s what makes these days so long-the robust person I once was, the active worker bee image that defined my character, the purpose-driven spirit that inhabited this body is gone.

What’s left is someone who looks like me, talks like me and moves like me but isn’t me at all.

Maybe burying Dominic has silenced the noise that drowned out the groaning of my perishable tent.  Maybe I had gotten used to thinking that THIS life was THE life I was created for.

These tents we now live in are like a heavy burden, and we groan. But we don’t do this just because we want to leave these bodies that will die. It is because we want to change them for bodies that will never die.

2 Corinthians 5:4 CEV

I don’t know how to reinvigorate this body. Only God can do that through His Spirit.

So I wait.

I keep trying.

And I remember that the Lord’s mercies are new every morning.