I Am Tired And It Has Not Started

It is the tenth of October and you are already worn out.

Not from the day. The day is nine weeks away. You are worn out from a day that has not happened, which is a sentence that sounds ridiculous until you have lived it, and you have lived it for years.

Here is what you have already done since the beginning of the month, and I want it listed, because nobody has ever listed it for you.

You have worked out who is coming. You have worked out who cannot be in a room with whom and what the arrangement will have to be. You have run the arithmetic more than once. You have had a conversation in your head with the person who will be difficult about the arrangement. You have thought about what the youngest one will notice and what the oldest one will say and whether anybody will mention the thing nobody mentions. You have started building a version of the day that keeps the largest number of people from being hurt.

That is nine weeks of work, and every hour of it has been unpaid, unseen, unmentioned, and mostly done while you were doing something else.

And then in December somebody will say you seem tired, and you will say it has been a busy few weeks, and both of you will believe that the tiredness started in December.

I want to say something plainly before we go on. You are not tired because you are weak about this. You are tired because you have been working since the first week of October, and nobody, including you, has ever counted that as work.

To them that have no might

There is a line in Isaiah about strength, and the important thing about it is who it is addressed to.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. (Isaiah 40:29, King James Version)

To the faint. To them that have no might. Not to the strong who need topping up. The verse is aimed precisely at the person who has already run out, and it does not ask how they got there.

Notice what is absent. There is no assessment in it. Nobody is asked whether the fainting was justified, whether they paced themselves properly, whether the tiredness is the right kind. The condition named is simply having none left, and that condition is the qualification.

I am not going to turn that into a promise about your December. Isaiah is not handing out a guarantee that the day goes well, and anybody who tells you it does is selling something.

You qualify for that verse exactly as you are tonight, and it is written into Isaiah 40:29 that having no might is the address rather than the disqualification. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that reach a woman on the tenth of October instead of staying a line she has heard read at funerals.

That is the ground. Now the part I actually want you to have.

You have been faint since the first week of the month and it was never held against you, and Scripture aims the strength at the ones with none rather than at the ones managing well. Isaiah 40:29 names the faint first, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the increasing that no amount of better organizing ever could.

The work nobody counts

Let me name the specific thing that is exhausting you, because vagueness here is doing you no favors.

It is not the cooking, the arranging, the buying or the driving. Those are visible, they take a known number of hours, and when they are done they are done.

What is wearing you through is the emotional forecasting. Months in advance, you run a simulation of everybody's feelings and try to arrange the day so that the fewest number of them get hurt. Who sits where. Who is told what and when. Which subject gets steered away from. How to give one person less without the other one noticing they got more.

That is genuinely difficult work. It requires holding six people's inner lives in your head simultaneously and solving for the least harm. If it were a job it would be a demanding one, and it would not be done for nine weeks without a break.

You were never doing something small, and the written word does not measure a person's tiredness against how visible the work was. Isaiah 40:29 speaks to whoever has none left, with no inquiry into the cause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names a hidden job as a real one.

And here is the part that matters most. A great deal of that forecasting was never yours.

Not all of it. Some of it is love and you would do it again. But somewhere in the last decade you became the person who holds everybody's feelings about this day, and nobody appointed you and nobody has ever offered to take a share, and it has quietly become the assumption in that house that this is simply what you do.

You have been carrying an assignment nobody ever gave you, and Scripture puts the increasing of strength with God rather than with a woman's capacity to hold more. Isaiah 40:29 does the giving from outside the person, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells the difference between what is love and what is only habit.

Naming one thing and putting it down

So here is what I am asking, and it is one thing, not the whole load.

Look at everything carried since the first of October and find one piece of it that was never actually yours.

Not the hardest piece. Not the one that would cause the biggest argument. One piece. Whether two people get on. Whether somebody enjoys themselves. Whether a person who has been disappointed by this day for twenty years is disappointed again this year.

Those are the sorts of things I mean. Notice they have one feature in common: not one of them is inside your power. You have been carrying outcomes that belong to other adults.

You are able to put down a thing that was never yours to hold, and it is written into Isaiah 40:29 that the strength is given rather than generated by holding on harder. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman lets go of one specific outcome that belonged to somebody else all along.

And then say it out loud. Not to the family. To an empty room, tonight, in whatever words you use: I am not carrying whether those two get on this year.

I want to be clear about what that is not. It is not giving up on anybody, it is not coldness, and it is not a decision to do less of the actual work. It is the return of one item to its owner.

You were never made to hold six people's inner lives at once, and the written word gives power to the faint without ever requiring them to hold more first. Isaiah 40:29 puts the increase entirely on God's side, and the Spirit of God is the one who carries what a woman has genuinely set down.