When God Comes In…
Journal Entry
February 5, 2020
I feel in a fog, but I don’t know which way the fog is coming from. I’m not sure if it’s because the world is heavy, society is heavy, opinions are diverse, being self-employed is wearisome, marriage is difficult, or because parenting is hard. But I do know I feel it.
I feel the vaccine mandates, and marriage debates, and parenting judgments and social isolation. I feel the impending failure of being a tired, unmotivated, sick, pregnant, business owner.
I feel the need to be with the Lord but no desire to seek.
I feel the weight gain accumulate as my body prepares once again to nurture and sustain new life.
And it’s heavy.
I want to mask the feelings with beauty. With fresh flowers and crisply ironed linens. I want to forget the ugliness of the world we live in by surrounding myself with art and music and all the inspiration. But I’m finding it’s not all fitting in me at once.
The beautiful florals and inspiration just shove the heaviness further down in me. But I don’t know how to get the heaviness out of me.
One verse resounds ” My yoke is easy and my burden is light..”
So I must trade my heaviness and feelings for a glorious exchange, casting my care on God. “
For as long as I can remember there has been a nagging in the back of me that something is wrong. Wrong with me, wrong with how I relate to people, wrong with my personality, just wrong. The things in my life never made sense, it was like there was a fog covering my eyes.
I felt paralyzed in life, traumatized by past events, and tense, bracing myself for future ones.
I would beg for God to speak to me, for me to feel his presence again, for me to just know somehow that he cares about me and that he still loves me. For years.
It started as a little girl, the feeling that something was off, something was strange about me. I thought – “I’ll get married and surely all will be well”. I got married and our lives fell apart.
“I’ll be a mother and I’ll be so busy surely I won’t have time to think about the inner tugging at my soul” I’d reassure myself. I had a baby and fell so deeply in the mire of depression and isolation I thought I’d never come out.
“I’ll start a business then surely people will praise me for my accomplishments and I’ll feel like I have earned people’s approval.” I started a business and nearly got eaten alive by it.
Suddenly I started seeing a pattern. Something in me, decaying me was penetrating my very being, spilling out and over into all the areas of my life. It was affecting my motherhood, my business, my identity ( what even is that anyway?), who I was as a wife. All of it, going haywire.
I’d talk to my husband about it. We’d cry and pray and rinse and repeat. I felt so… hopeless.
But another day would go on and I would just stifle the feelings, sing old hymns, and believe all was well. After all, God honors faith above all does he not?
I’d keep myself busy, ” God honors a faithful servant, does he not?” I’d tell myself. I read every marriage book I could find and can recite all of Josh’s primary and secondary needs in my sleep. I read parenting books, relationship books, business books. I motivated the very life out of myself.
And you know what. It was exhausting. Always feeling like there was something I was missing out on, someone saying something about me that wasn’t true, some sexier more fulfilling wife that I could be, a better form of parenting I could adapt.
I remember nights weeping so bad begging for God to deliver me from these awful feelings, from the vicious cycle of emptiness and loneliness while yet being surrounded by people. It wasn’t depression ( I had experienced that Post-partum) It wasn’t anxiety, it was just this overwhelming feeling of…undoneness.
….To be continued
