Resting Up

I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh
I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time
-Otis Redding, Sitting on the Dock of the Bay

Be still, and know that I am God.
Psalm 46:10


If fibromylgia has taught me anything, it’s how to rest up. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. Leisure is now not merely just a matter of choice, but an affair of how will I relax today? I have work clothes…and I have relaxing clothes. Not much in between. Not that there’s anything wrong with having several pairs of yoga pants from which to choose. Am I right?

Not that relaxing has ever been difficult! I’ve always enjoyed slow mornings and lazy Saturday afternoons. Sitting on a bench at the Boulevard Park watching the sunlight ripple and dance across the bay. Curling up on the couch watching scary movies is surprisingly relaxing; at least, after the credits roll. Reading novels has also always been a favorite way to truly relax. Sinking into stories, other places, other times refocuses and refreshes, bringing the things that make us human into light.

Lovely Bellingham Bay. 

When I was a teenager, relaxing also included activities: doing, moving. I used to take long leisurely bike rides around our neighborhood--around the orderly Sunnyland streets or up and down the woody trails at Cornwall Park, wherever the mood struck. I can still remember the freedom in strapping on my helmet, hopping on my bike, and pedaling under my own strength. I could go anywhere I wanted, anywhere I could bike to! It didn’t feel like work, though. That was the main thing. Movement and effort and exertion isn’t work at all when you’re strong and stretched and well-practiced. Wonderful to feel the wind in your hair, the wind in your sails, the pavement stretched out behind you and in front-miles of possibility, feeling peace in the freedom going under your own steam.

So when something like chronic pain and fatigue take away the ability to move as easily, what does that mean for leisure and movement and freedom? Because now I struggle with seemingly chronic stuckness. My lovely couch feels like a heavy anchor sometimes. These days, my movements are not made up of variety and impulse and going wherever the wind takes me-I can usually be found in only a few places. So it’s easy to feel like my world is smaller. Perhaps you feel the same way about your current season of life? My days are marked not by activity and movement and doing so much as things like survival, researching ways to feel better, and resting like a boss.

Of course, life is made up of just those things, isn’t it? Survival through tough seasons, be they seasons of work, relationships, health, choices for the future. Finding ways to have the good life through wise decisions-water, exercise, rest and sleep, healthy relationships, etc. Learning to rest well, however, is not just about getting those eight hours of recommended sleep or getting those magic eight glasses of water. It’s a holy activity for the believer and follower of Jesus.

From the beginning pages of the Bible to the ending chapters, humans are meant to be in relationship with God. Adam and Eve walked in the cool of the day with God-before sin, before the fall-this was their main activity. Not marked by seasons of toil and mere existence-but by relationship with the One who made them for His enjoyment. And then we see Jesus, a Rabbi, a teacher of influence-famous through His healing of the sick and the preaching of the Gospel-call His followers not just servants, but friends. Servants are known for what they can do, what they can produce. Friends are known for enjoyment-we choose our friends-we have things in common, we laugh at the same things, we are there for each other in different seasons.

We are known to God and loved by God not for what we can do, not for our levels of activity, not for our items checked off on a to-do list, not for how many miles we put on the bike. He delights in us and over us for our mere existence. God doesn’t care what you do. He cares about you. He cares about me. This makes my current season, and indeed, all my seasons of life, full of purpose and wonder. This makes my mere existence not so mere after all. Knowing I am loved by the Creator because He made me, not for what I can do-this changes everything. This changes my pain. This changes my evenings and weekends of rest. This changes the workday. This changes all my relationships. How I think about the past, the future.

And yet how hard it is to remember this one simple fact that transforms! You are loved. I am loved. I want to remember this-have it stamped and etched and written and burned into my identity. I want all the days I am given to be enfolded  and embraced and enveloped by the fact that no matter what is happening, what I am capable of doing or not doing, God’s undying and transformational love is truly enough.

Giving Up Superwoman

Everybody movin' so fast
Makes you feel like you’re already part of the past

Ray LaMontagne, Airwaves

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.
Paul, in his letter to the Colossians


I want to be Superwoman.

Reality check. 

I will never be Superwoman.

At least, not the one I envision in my head. I am an independent female with opinions and goals and responsibilities and relationships. But I also have chronic pain and fatigue. I’ve been trying, I realized, to be the exact same person as before my condition, and that’s just not realistic. I’m finally seeing this. It’s taken months (years?) to even see that I can’t do it all. Even if I didn’t have fibromyalgia, I still can’t do everything I think I should be doing. No one else expects me to do it all, have it all, be it all. I’m the only one who expects Superwoman status from myself. 

I’ve been wanting to see fibromyalgia as something I can tell to pipe down, to take a quiet time, to take a backseat. This is my life, after all. But fibromyalgia is a loud beast. It insists on being heard. I find myself being the one to take a backseat, to take a quiet time. It’s pretty weird, having to revolve life around something like this “invisibility cloak” of a condition. It’s not always obvious that I’m not feeling super. I can usually function pretty well and get through the day. But other days, usually weekends, I need a lot of downtime. I’m not good at having fibromyalgia, and it will probably never be easy to work to around.

I’m getting better, though, at adjusting my expectations because of fibro. Such as learning to ask for help. This is really hard for that Independent Female I mentioned earlier. Even with my husband, who is the kindest, most thoughtful man ever-he helps me with things before I even think to ask. Being chronically ill is a pride-buster, for sure. I am currently working through being able to widen my circle of people I would ask for help. That is a big step for me. I’m like a two-year old screaming: “I WANNA DO IT MYSELF!”

And of course, I’m working through asking God for help. How true for all of us, though, is that? Whatever our circumstances are, we always need to be working on asking God for help, for strength, for encouragement, for grace, for peace, for healing, for compassion. If we’re not ill ourselves, someone we know is sick or in pain. We are all in need, of things only God can give us.

It’s so hard to step back and remember that no one needs me to be Superwoman. It’s ok to adjust my heavy expectations for myself, and just live and do what I can, and try to do those things well. I will practice taking stock of where I’m at physically, admitting I need help, and definitely celebrate my ordinary and shining victories, small as they may seem. I will celebrate an afternoon of shopping, an evening of hanging out with friends. I will enjoy every moment of cooking a meal or dusting the bookcases. This seems to be a higher calling, a more realistic expectation than demanding super-human feats from myself.

Morning Glories

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
    for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go,
    for to you I lift up my soul.
Psalm 143:8

Every weekday morning is the same. I wake up when it gets light or when the upstairs neighbors start moving around. I then roll over and bury my head back in the pillow after glancing at the clock to see how much more sleep I can wring out of the morning.

The alarm goes off at 8 am. I turn it off, knowing it will go off again in 5 minutes. I snuggle deeper in the blankets. After a few more rounds of this, I finally throw the covers back and stumble into the bathroom for a quick shower, the daily baptism into being human for another day. If I was not too tired the night before, I would have laid my clothes out-one less thing to do in the 30 minutes I give myself to get ready and out the door. While I slap on some makeup and use a brief diffuser on my mane, the Husband of the Ages makes a breakfast smoothie of berries, kale, flax, and coconut milk. I’m out the door by 8:47. Ben always walks me to the car and waves me off down the street.

These are my mornings. Made of rituals of squeezing out more rest, delaying the inevitable rise out of delicious cozy sleep and deep blankets. Usually the thought of coffee, “nectar of the gods,” as an old friend called it, is enough to inspire me to thoughts beyond my blankets.

If only every morning included one of these. 

I have never been a morning person. Clearly. I have always enjoyed lounging in bed for hours on weekends, happily drinking coffee or crunching down toast or having an indulgent read in pajamas. All while getting to wake up slowly. Delightful. Life-giving.

The last few years, though, have intensified my lack of enthusiasm for mornings. Along with the usual reluctance, I now face the dreaded aches and pains that fibromyalgia throws at me each morning.

I wake up and take stock of how bad it is
today, curled up and eyes closed still. Mind fogged with sleep, it comes to me in waves of awareness. Damn. Another bad day. The aches pin me down, the deep pains spread through me like branches on a tree. It takes everything in me to move, to throw back those covers, and face the day. When my feet gingerly touch the floor, more aching pains shoot through my feet. Ah. Here we go.

Once I get moving, I can usually keep moving. The hot water, as hot as I can stand it, wakes me up and releases my tight muscles. The concealer under my eyes helps me feel like I don’t look like a cast member of The Walking Dead. Ben’s Wonder Smoothie gets me to have some breakfast when otherwise I would only have coffee.

These routines--simple, yet hard as ice sometimes--prove to me that once again, I can do this. I can do this thing called fibromyalgia. Every day when I get up, knowing my feet will sting and that my body will feel like lead, I am beating it. Every day that I grab my car keys and head to the door, I win. And even on the weekends and evenings when I‘m hard at rest, I am still beating fibromyalgia. I have my evening rituals, too-British murder mysteries, hanging out with friends and family, easy dinners, sometimes a walk around the block or a ride on my stationary bike, working on reading through the top 100 novels list.

All these things help me live life in the middle of figuring out fibroymalgia. Because we all need to find our calms in the storms, eyes in the hurricanes, don’t we? Finding those activities, those routines that make our hearts sing, instilling courage and hope and consistency in the darkest of times, well, that’s when you know the hard things won’t beat you.