When I am weak

sleep-deprived, hungry, PMSing, recovering from illness, recently-moved, or overstimulated…

Photo by Federico Respini on Unsplash

It’s six in the morning, and the baby is crying. She’s been up since five. Right when she woke, I went in to feed her for twenty or thirty minutes before putting her back in bed, hoping against hope that she’d go back to sleep for another hour. Mornings have been rough at the new place, with the sun rising right into the girls’ windows, and my body is craving a little more sleep.

She was quiet for a few minutes, but no longer. I find myself wresting, in my mind and heart, with the obligation I know I have to tend to my children and a strong desire to avoid that obligation. I know that I won’t be able to fall back asleep while she’s crying, but I don’t want to get up and face the day. I consider letting her cry in bed for a little while longer. If it weren’t for the likelihood of her waking her sister-roommate, I might have considered it more seriously. But if I’m not ready to care for one child at six AM, I’m certainly not ready to care for two.

It’s not that this is particularly unusual for me, especially at that hour of the morning. But coming as it did after a month of illnesses, a move, and a week of cranky, tired, still-adjusting children (and adults!), I felt more viscerally than usual the desire to just… run away from it all.

The reality is, of course, that no matter what time the kids woke up that day, I wouldn’t have felt “ready”. Sometimes, you just don’t, and in that week, there was little I could have done to emotionally steel myself for another twelve-to-fourteen hour struggle for my joy, for my patience, for my charity toward the family I love dearly and also sometimes want to run away from.

Angry—not so much at her as at the sun for having the audacity to rise, at the windows for letting in the light, and at the hectic schedule that has led to a chronically over-tired, early rising fifteen-month-old—I wrestled with the Lord in my bed, daring him to let her keep crying. “See if I care,” I tell Him. “Watch me do nothing about it.”

And all of the sudden, I found myself confronted in my spirit with the idea that the will of God is encountered in the demands of the present moment:

There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.

- Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ

Well, shoot.

There was my answer, then. I had known it all along, had known from the time she first woke up that she wouldn’t be going back to sleep, but I had fought it. I told myself (and the Lord!) that I was going to choose to prioritize my legitimate needs over the whims and wants of other people. But that wasn’t what I was doing: I was simply being selfish, pouting like a child who doesn’t want to take a bath.

James and I read most of Caussade’s book last year, and while I find myself hard-pressed to recall any specific quotation, the central thesis of the book has stayed with me, convicting and consoling in equal measure. And there, as I stared at my ceiling, I realized that by staying in bed, I was rejecting the will of God that was being revealed to me in that moment, in the form of my crying child in the other room.

“But I don’t want to!” I whined in prayer. “I’m just so tired! And besides, it’s not fair that I’m biologically wired to wake up when the kids cry, and James isn’t, so I’m always the one who’s awake early with them, and even if I wake him up and ask him to take care of the baby, I probably won’t be able to fall back asleep!”

I didn’t receive any “words” back in prayer, merely a renewed insistence that to reject the needs of my child in that moment was to reject the will of God for me.

And so, my anger having given way to shame and resignation, I pulled myself out of bed and got the baby up for the day.

The entire process probably only took a few minutes, but the Lord’s reminder to me in that moment was a powerful one. Childish pouting, resisting what I’m being asked to do, insisting that I want—nay, need—my own way… that all feels very familiar to me as the mother of a just-shy-of-three-year-old. It’s just that I’m usually on the other end of that behavior.¹ It was shocking to recognize this behavior in myself, but also illuminating, and I tried to maintain that balance as I moved through the rest of the day and the week.

A day or two later, as I was preparing for Sunday Mass, I found this idea coming up again. The second reading for Mass that weekend was from 2 Corinthians:

So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

- 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 ESV

For when I am weak, then I am strong.

For when I am sleep-deprived, hungry, PMSing, recovering from illness, recently-moved, or overstimulated… then I am strong. For His power is made perfect in weakness.

I’ve read this passage a million times before, always feeling a certain distance between myself and St. Paul. I don’t tend to see myself as having been given a particular demon or a particular cross—at least, not in this season, although there have been times in the past—and I certainly don’t fear becoming “puffed up” or conceited about my evangelical abilities. Quite the contrary, most of the time. I tend to read this passage and say, more or less, “That’s nice, Paul. Thanks for the #humblebrag.”

So I don’t know what, beyond a special grace from the Holy Spirit, prompted me to consider the reading in this light on that Sunday morning. But the memory was still fresh of my pleading with the Lord to remove, well, honestly, any of the below:

1. The sleep deprivation I was experiencing

2. The crying of the oh-so-awake baby

3. The biological differences between myself and my husband

4. The sun?

In my weakness, then I am strong.

What would it look like to really believe this? To embrace it and live it out as a mother? To model for my children the finding of God’s strength in the midst of my obvious and overwhelming physical and moral weakness?

“My grace is sufficient for you.”

How would I act if I believed that the Lord was speaking these words to me in my particular life, rather than just plastering them as a platitude on wall hangings and pillows and greeting cards and Christian rock songs?

I’m still sitting with these questions.

After reading the Mass readings for the day, I turned to

Missy Rose Ewing

’s weekly reflection on the same. Missy’s thoughts often mirror mine—or call my attention to something in my own life that I have been avoiding or failing to notice—and this day was no different. The Lord was revealing to me once again the importance of responding to His will as revealed in the duties of the present moment, even when it meant doing things I really didn’t want to do.

Missy was reflecting on the life of St. Catherine of Siena, and her own struggles to make sense of the saint. I’d encourage you to go read the entire reflection, but I’ll share a snippet here:

But for me, right now, I remember Catherine every time I want to tug away when God nudges. When I get that sense that God continues to present me with the thing that I would rather not do, that’s when I think about Catherine. I ask her to guide me in the push/pull to hear what I need to hear and say what I need to say, to love with an uncomfortable love.

Sometimes I will learn the most about myself by doing the thing I want to do the least. Catherine has become, for me, the patron saint of taking a second look at what is hard to understand about God. She’s the friend I turn to when I think maybe I’ve judged a situation or a person because I’m seeking a painless life for myself. Catherine understands thorns, especially ones like me.

Do you see the thread continuing to pull through? This concept of pulling away from God’s will because it’s uncomfortable or confusing or unpalatable?

Our pastor said in a homily recently that, of all the kinds of mortification and reparation available to us, perhaps the most graces are available through the patient acceptance of sufferings we did not choose. Yes, we can (and should!) embrace voluntary and required mortifications at the instruction of the Church, and there is much grace to be found there, but we are so quick to overlook the sufferings and crosses that we don’t choose. His words reminded me of a passage from Claire Dwyer’s This Present Paradise, another book that I highly recommend and that has deeply shaped my spirituality.² Claire says, about St. Elizabeth of the Trinity:

The greater suffering sometimes is not being able to choose our own suffering.

As the mother of two young children, I often feel trapped by the needs of my family. Especially in seasons like this, where the logistic necessities of moving and the thundering-toward-us of the choir camp I’ve been coordinating feel overwhelming on their own. These things come on top of the insistent and very vocal nature of toddlerhood, which can be a cross in and of itself. And yes, of course, I “knew what I was signing up for” when we had our children. (Can we please stop saying this to parents?) Even so, when the baby wants to nurse and the toddler wants to play Connect Four and lunch needs to be made and I have five urgent emails to respond to, the overstimulation and the stress and the hunger feel like crosses I didn’t choose.

And so we come back around to the question of the duty of the present moment. What I want to do—what I think will contribute most to the decrease of my overall stress level—is to respond to the five urgent emails. These five adults who want my attention feel more important than the fifth nursing session before ten o’clock in the morning or the third round of “now my turn, now your turn” this week.

But the demands of my vocation? The thing that the Lord is asking of me in that moment? It’s not always the same thing as the task I most want to check off my list at any given time.

I am trying to use this principle as a guide to help myself prioritize: what I am asked to do is attend to the duties of the present moment. That is all. I am not asked to attend today to tomorrow’s duties. (“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”³) I am not asked to attend to the duties of my children or my husband (even when I don’t think they’re doing their duties well enough or at all). And while there will certainly be times where I insist on setting aside time to pursue non-family-centric interests and obligations, I cannot allow myself put off my duties to my family “until I finish this text” or “until I get that newsletter written” or “until I finish reading this chapter”.⁴ My trying to type out an email on my phone while half-heartedly reading The Cat in the Hat Comes Back and passing out blueberries leaves me serving no one fully, and tearing me to pieces in the process.

This, I expect, is the line: The duty of the present moment won’t cause us to become fragmented.

We might not always like the obligations of the present moment. They might cause us stress or frustration or sorrow. We might, given the option, choose different duties and sufferings and crosses. But following the Will of God for us in this moment will lead to wholeness, not brokenness. It will not fragment us and send us into multitasking overdrive, driven mad with stress and snapping at our loved ones.

Instead, we can find a serendipitous play on the word present—in the present moment (the moment we are in here and now) we can focus on being present (attentive and focused) with one person or one task at a time.

Do you struggle to see the will of God in the demands and obligations of your vocation? How do you balance the physically-present needs of those around with the more “distant” needs of professional life, friendships, or simply the administrative tasks of family life?

1. When my daughter is acting this way, I can step back and usually identify a reason (or several): she didn’t get enough sleep; it’s lunchtime; she’s feeling cooped up; she needs to run around; she needs some one-on-one attention. Knowing the “why” behind her actions doesn’t necessarily change my expectations for her, but it does change how I approach her and how I act in relation to her.

The same, as we’ve talked about before, can be said for us. If we’re fighting tooth and nail with the Lord when He asks us to fulfill some obligation or duty, it’s worth asking why that might be. The answer might not change what needs to be done, but it can help us be more gentle with ourselves as we do it.

2. I (of course!) cannot find my own copy at the moment, but searching for the book on Goodreads provided exactly the quote I was looking for. The Lord provides.

3. Matthew 6:34 ESV

4. I loved

Amber Adrian

’s thoughts on asking her children to wait for a moment until she was ready to be present with them.