This Long Tired Road

I woke up this morning ready for a nap. By 10:00 I was dragging. At sometime around noon I could hardly keep my eyes open. At 2:00 I finally gave into the siren song of plush blankets and fluffy pillows, dozing off for nearly two hours, only to wake up ready for another nap. When I’m not asleep, my body thinks that I need to be.

Normal thyroid but low Vitamin D (since corrected after 8 weeks of high dose supplements) was the verdict of the last blood test, but they were far from normal. My liver function and other tests mimic those of a person who’s morbidly obese. My scale may not think I’m fat, but my liver sure does. While I wait for my endocrinology appointment to finally get here and my family doc schedules a sleep study, I’m considering the practicality of using Scotch tape to keep my eyelids open.

My Catholic friends keep telling me to “offer it up” and to “unite my suffering to Christ’s on the Cross,” so I keep looking towards the Crucifix on my wall. There’s just one problem, Christ was already done by the time He got to the Cross. He even said so, “It is finished.” I’m so far from finished, even though I could use a nap right about now. I’m the Mom and the Wife and the CrossFit coach; so I have things to do even when I don’t really believe that I can stand upright to do them.

The more I thought about Christ on the Cross, the more I decided that my offerings were misplaced. I’m now joining this whole Extreme Fatigue thing up with the Via Dolorosa. When I think of Jesus stumbling his way towards Calvary with an aching body, unsure steps, and how tired He must have been…but He just kept going..because He had to. Quitting was not an option. One foot in front of the other, and all that.

I’m certainly not Jesus, I’m not even fit to loosen his sandal straps. I’m just a woman who’s tired, not of anything in particular, just bone-crushing tired; and a long way from being finished. So I’m keeping my eyes, not on the Cross, but on the long walk to get there. I’m imitating My Lord in pressing ever onward, no matter how much I’d like to stop and rest. Because I’ve learned that, for now, there is no rest that is enough for me, there is no amount of sleep that will refresh my tired body and soul. I can only hope to follow His example and continue slogging forward until there is an answer and a solution, or I get to the end of the journey.

Please pray for me as we run ever more tests, and let me know if I can offer up this long exhausting path for you.

Photo credit: By Remi Jouan (Photo taken by Remi Jouan) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)