oh Lord, send someone else

I’ve been getting behind in Greek. Not understanding Greek. Not enjoying Greek. Wanting to strangle the ancient greeks. Envisioning throwing my Greek New Testament in my toilet…all 1,752 pages individually, in shreds, burned as well. It’s a bad day when a Christian wants to burn a Bible. That’s how much anxiety Greek is causing me!

I’ve also been sick of the drive. And I’ve been missing Ransom a lot during the day. And I miss my husband. And I feel like I’m sick of studying. And for God sake, the crying! The heartbreak of my 2 “painful” classes! I haven’t cried so often in years! Years!  I’m studying lynching pictures/detailed stories of tortures of black men & pregnant black woman who lived when my black father lived.  And the treatment of woman in Islam in Saudia Arabia.  It’s too much.  Makes me want to ball up on the floor every day.

I’ve been having anxiety dreams, like ones where my best friends & their babies are drowning and I can’t save them. Or this re-occuring dream where I have to climb up the Sears Tower in order to obtain my M.Div degree and if I slip, I plunge to my death—on graduation day!

I’ve been wondering if it’s all worth it. In a shocking turn of events I feel more under pressure and busy then when I overworked for InterVarsity.  I have 2 mid-terms, 2 papers & a tough quiz in the next 5 days and for all these reasons ongoing traffic looks so appealing to me.  If I study more, the house is a mess.  If I study more I have even less time with Ransom.  I have no study time in the evenings, the weekends are packed.  I’m puzzled as to how to make this work.

And I really really really really want to have a baby but can I do this at the same time? And when & if I do have that 2^nd baby how will I finish my degree? And how will I write the book? And how will I run BCM in our region? Is this what a mid life crisis looks like or am I just impossibly stressed and fearful?

And what may make all this make more sense is that I’ve also been sick, and really tired for the past few days, and that, my friends has clouded any rational thoughts I may have left in my over stuffed brain.

Last night as I was praying with Ransom as I put him to bed I sort of slumped into it on accident… i.e. “Mommy just feel so overwhelmed and mommy can’t do it anymore, Lord and mommy feels bad about it but mommy has to quit school because mommy cannot handle all the pain, and mommy can’t stand the drive anymore and maybe mommy isn’t even smart enough to be here and perhaps mommy has tricked the American Association of University woman into believing that mommy will make something of her life but mommy doesn’t know why she has started something so taxing and so challenging in mommy’s childbearing years. Maybe mommy should just stay at home with Ransom like a good mommy’s do, but mommy feels like you have called me to do something else with myself and has called mommy to leadership and ministry and to be involved in life changing and to somehow change the world but mommy feels like Moses, oh Lord, send some one else. Mommy gives up.”

And after I pray, Ransom prays & after pausing to look at me for a moment as if he had really taken it all in and understood what I had prayed he folded his hands & said:

“Hi Sus, (Jesus) thank you for my wace cows (race cars), mama-daddy, meatballs, my bed & milk. I dove (love) my mama. Mama makes me happy. Amen.”

And mama cried.

Again.