I just woke up from a 14 hour sleep. It was glorious and also torturous as sleeps of sickness always are. The Nyquil knocked me out for most of the night, but there were those periods where I wasn’t completely out and everything got confused where I couldn’t remember who I was or what I was doing.
Today, I will be spending the day on the couch. I have reading to do and syllabi to write, and I will work diligently in my moments of lucidity. Yet, I know better than to try to move very far forward when sickness has knocked me flat. In those moments, the work I produce will not be very good, and I will probably have to do it over again. Better to just rest and wait for the illness to pass.
My path in life seems much like this, too. Sometimes the direction forward seems so murky and unclear. Sometimes I’m not sure quite who I am or what I am supposed to be doing. At these times, I figure it’s best to sit back in the lap of a loving God and rest, waiting for the needed clarity to come.
I’m in one of those times now, trying to discern the path and trying to wait for a God who has it all under control to make my next steps clear. It seems so much easier to just get up and barrel ahead, blazing a trail and letting the sickness cloud my vision. But it is in these moments where we should seek shelter on the couch of our God’s love that we put ourselves in the most danger to be attacked or to take a really wrong turn. God will, of course, always get us back to our path, but we make a lot more trouble for ourselves than if we just wait and rest.
So today, I physically rest, and I rest in decisions, too, knowing that they will be made when they must be made and trusting that those things beyond my control – like the ability to make a nasty cold/flu thing disappear – will be handled for me. It isn’t easy to sit here with deadlines and tasks to be done and with frustrations and anxieties that I could try to fix; I want so much to be in control. But when I’m knocked flat, I’ve learned that sometimes the best thing to do is stay on the mat and let God stroke my hair while I recover and God makes it all right.