Looking tired...

The first time I heard the words  "You look so tired"  from a friend about a month go... I cried. I didn't feel offended, but acknowledged. I felt exhausted and just out of sync with my own life. Since then, I have heard the same words  four more times from friends and acquaintances that I barely knew. I think God is trying to tell me something. My soul is rested. But my body and my mind are not.

I stop to wonder why I am tired. You laugh. Today is the last day of school for the kids. For the last school year, the bus stopped at our house 12 times each day. By the time the last of the kids left for school, they seemed to be arriving back home. This school year seemed to fly by without me ever feeling like I was in sync with the schedule, the demands, the IEP's. The life of a parent of children with disabilities is a weary life...one relentless challenge after another..it's tough and it doesn't let up.
Feeling out of sync makes me tired.  I feel a lot like George Jetson.  

And this isn't a life I can just step off while I take a break. Adopting two medically fragile babies within one year has a way of throwing life out of sync..and I am feeling it. It is not my soul--it truly  is well with my soul, but it is with the stuff of life....schedules, laundry, interrupted sleep schedules,  home repairs, paperwork.  So, I am trying to eliminate the things that I can in our day to day living.

We canceled summer school for the kids...no more buses (besides our own) for a few months! In an attempt to get back in sync, we are going to try to just "be." Not so much "do." I long to sit and enjoy what it is I love about parenting and serving those with disabilities. Reality tells me that there will not be a lot of  "sitting" but I know that we have to take a break somewhere.

While I am tempted to worry about having all the kids home all summer and keeping them busy, I am also relieved. I wish I was entering the summer break with more energy and more sleep banked up, but that just isn't going to happen. I am anticipating it as a time to get back in sync...stepping on to the treadmill of life at a little slower pace. And maybe I can collect my thoughts, and line them back up so they make sense in my brain. The irony that having  unscheduled time to just hang out will bring order back to my life does not go unnoticed.  I am not asking for a balanced life...that notion was given up about 7-8 kids back...serving Christ with all your heart and soul and mind is not a balanced life. I am not looking for balance, but I looking for a good night's sleep...maybe more than once this summer.