Tired

In recent months, I have taken on more and more responsibilities in many areas of my life and ministry. As a single woman who is not working full-time, it becomes easy to say "yes" to everything. I am eager to spend my life encouraging others, filling needed positions, and pursuing the call of God upon my life. I know for certain that God has providentially ordained my single days, as long as they may last, for His glory and my good. He has been so faithful to remind me not to resent my role as a single woman, but to say with Paul, "I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls". However, there are certainly days when I am tired, overwhelmed by all the spiritual pressures and other demands that are clamoring for my time and attention. Days when I must retreat to the foot of the cross and learn once again to just love my Jesus, simply and purely, without any distractions of this world (even good and biblical distractions). There are times when I become consumed by my perceived "rights": a right to rest, to sleep, to spend time just hanging out and relaxing. These are not necessarily bad things, but in light of the Kingdom, I must always remember that my time is given to me by God to make the best use of and not become entangled with thinking that it belongs to me to spend on my own desires and wishes.

As I spend many hours each day reading hundreds of pages filled with graduate study materials, I have struggled at times to know how I want to spend my time right before I drift off to sleep. I still want to be near the Lord and prayerfully mindful of His presence, but without all the deeper intricacies that are in most of the books I am reading. So I recently began reading spiritual biographies in this time as I lay in my bed preparing for rest. One woman who I have enjoyed above most, is Helen Roseveare. She spent over twenty years as a medical missionary in Congo, all as a single woman. She was one of the most "spent" people I have ever heard of, and when I read her words, I am provoked to disgust over my selfish thoughts about the demands on my own time. The other night, a particular passage in her book, Living Sacrifice: Willing to be Whittled as an Arrow, gripped my mind and has stayed there for several days. As she shares some of the difficult and time-consuming circumstances that she encountered in her daily life as a servant of the Lord, she writes:

"Again and again, my heart cried out under the burdens...The emotional involvement of my aroused feelings had to be taken again and again to the Saviour. I had to learn that He cared for the students even more than I did. He demanded a holy church, and His will for each member was sanctification. I dared not lower the standards to accommodate one individual, or the whole would suffer. God invited me to give Him this part of my make-up, to love Him with all my soul, and to trust Him to work out His infinite purposes in His infinite love, even without my understanding.

Books - clothing - food - companionship - death - discipline involved all 'feelings'. There seemed so much to learn in order to love Him with all my feelings; yet this was only one part of my soul. The other, and perhaps, larger and stronger part, was my will. If I would learn to love God with all my soul, I would have to learn to give Him my will. That would mean giving Him the right to exercise control over it. I had to learn that I have no rights. All rights are His. How was I ever going to learn to live in the atmosphere of the prayer, 'Not my will, but Thine be done'?

My right to be considered, to have my opinion listened to, to give my advice, to make choices and decisions, certainly insofar as these related directly to my own life and the outworking of the visions He had given me, all seemed so essentially right and reasonable. It is against modern teaching and practice to deny any human being the right to be himself and to express himself. Hence the freedom of speech, and of the press, and many other avenues of self-expression have become precious and almost fundamental to our whole way of life and thinking. Psychologically it is sound. Intellectually it is reasonable. Practically, it may lead to anarchy and strikes and disruption of whole communities, though perhaps one might not say so (even in these days of free speech!). This is considered a small price to pay for a basic freedom.

However, spiritually, it is not God's way. He has a perfect plan for each one of us, a plan that fits into His overall purpose for the whole world. My individual liberty is safeguarded within His plan, insofar as I am free to choose to accept or reject it: but once I have accepted it, I must give obedeience to Him within it, and learn to say wholeheartedly, 'Not my will, but Thine be done'. If I truly believe in Him, I'll trust Him to desire for me that which is for my highest good, and to have planned for its fulfillment."

I pray that I can be more like this and die to my "rights", which are completely non-existent anyways! The apostle Paul, and Jesus Himself, were most certainly tired a great deal of their time on this earth. The weight of their burdens for God's people and for a lost and dying world could have consumed them, had they not always first sought to be refreshed and lifted up by the Spirit of a merciful and abundantly powerful God!