This has been a whirlwind of a week. One of those weeks where I am grateful to have experienced it, but even more grateful that it is over. Yet in a moment of full transparency, as 2024 comes to an end, the events of recent weeks have revealed to me that 2025 will require a lot of prayer.

Proceed in prayer.

I’ve been slacking. Depression and unhealthy bouts of anxiety have all but removed me from the presence of both church and my church family. Mondays and Tuesdays have always been busy days but lately the busyness of those days has spilled over into the other days, while the stress and emotional exhaustion from the other days has carried into Monday and Tuesday. By the time Saturday comes, I am typically overwhelmed with trying to accomplish all the things that I did not do during the week, leaving me completely exhausted for Sunday. For more weeks than I’d care to admit, I have opted to stay home on Sunday, not just for the physical rest, but also for the emotional and social rest. As I have already confessed to my therapist- there is way too much on my plate.

There is a good side and a bad side to having ADHD. On the one hand, my ability to multitask is superb. Seriously, no one can compare! On the flip side, my ability to realize the fullness of my plate is severely broken. Whenever I can even sense the possibility of an opening in my schedule, I go ahead and add two or three more commitments to my plate and it always- always- leads to stress down the road. Fun fact- and don’t tell my therapist- but I just applied for something else. In this case, I don’t even know where I saw an opening but I surely did add something new. The commodity that we are not guaranteed, the thing that goes faster than anything else is the world, is the one thing that I too often take for granted.

Time is not on my side.

Unfortunately, that is the lesson that I learn the hard way by the time Saturday nights roll around. I’m always tempted to ask God for an eighth day of the week so that I can have six days to work, one to rest, and then one for church; however, that’s not how God works. He has given us all the same 24 hours in one day and seven days in the week; I just have to make it work. The concept of the Sabbath Day seems so good in the Bible yet how does that translate in modern times? How do we work for six days, then rest, and still have time to give God one day? That’s not rhetorical; I’d really like to know…

You see, piling items onto my plate helps me to escape the reality of the world around me and, in a very weird way, makes me feel safe. If my schedule is busy, then I don’t form relationships with others and then no one can hurt me. If I’m always on the go, then I don’t have time for any one person. My intimate-social avoidance works well in theory until the exhaustion finds me like a long lost friend and I crumble under the weight of everything around me.

I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. I’ve been avoiding so much and the more I avoid church, the weaker I feel, the weaker I feel, the more I avoid. It’s a debilitating cycle that wears on me with each revolution. And from where I sit today, I can already tell that God is calling me to confront these feelings of avoidance in order to remove them from my core being. This next season of my life will require me to face the uncomfortable and remove its power from my life.

I have to proceed in prayer.
It’s time to go.

Be blessed.