I Know We Should Go And I Have Nothing Left

You know. That is the difficulty.

If you did not know that getting them outside would be good, this would be simpler. You would just not do it and there would be no ache in it. But you do know, you have known for years, and you can list the reasons better than anybody who might tell you.

And you cannot produce it. Not tonight. There is nothing there when you reach for it.

So you have ended up in the worst arrangement available, which is exhausted and guilty at the same time. The tiredness stops you going, and the knowing turns the not going into a failure, and the failure takes energy of its own to carry, which leaves you slightly more tired than you were.

I want to do something in this article that the rest of this site depends on.

I want to genuinely permit you not to go.

Not as a technique. Not as reverse psychology that secretly hopes you will get up. If every article here says twenty minutes and none of them ever says you may rest, then the permission in all of them is decorative, and you would be right not to trust any of it.

So: you may rest tonight. That is a real option and there is nothing under it.

An angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat

There is a passage where a man who has just done something extraordinary collapses under a tree and asks to die, and what heaven sends him is worth reading slowly.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. (1 Kings 19:5, King James Version)

An angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.

No rebuke. That is the first thing. This man is running away, he is talking about dying, and he has abandoned the work, and there is not one word of correction in the whole scene.

And what arrives is not instruction. It is not a plan, it is not encouragement, and nobody tells him what he should have done differently. He is touched, and he is fed, and then he is allowed to go back to sleep. He sleeps again after this, and is fed a second time, and only much later is there any conversation at all.

Food and sleep, twice, before a single word about the work.

That is God's assessment of what a person in that condition needs, and it should settle something in you about what your condition actually requires.

You are permitted to be fed and to sleep before anything is asked of you, and heaven has never once opened with a correction to somebody who is empty. First Kings 19:5 sends food and rest to a man who had abandoned the work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that plain rather than sentimental.

The smallest possible version

Here is the practical thing, and it is deliberately not a walk.

If you have got nothing, do not go for a walk. Sit outside your own front door for ten minutes with them.

The step. The path. The bit of pavement outside. You do not walk anywhere, you do not organize anybody, you do not need to have decided anything. You take whatever drink you were going to have anyway, you open the door, and you sit down on the step.

They will do something. Children do not need a destination to be outside; they need to be outside. Somebody will find a thing, somebody will sit next to you, and none of that requires you to run it.

And this counts. Fully. It is not the reduced version of a proper thing you failed to do. Sitting on a step with your children while the light goes is a real evening outdoors, and in ten years nobody will remember whether you walked anywhere.

You are able to be outside without going anywhere, and it has never once needed to be a walk to have counted. The written word gives food and sleep before it gives instruction, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a parent do the smallest possible version without shame.

Or rest, and let that be the whole of it

And here is the other half, which I promised and am now keeping.

If ten minutes on the step is more than you have, then rest.

Go to bed early. Sit down and do nothing while they watch something. Let the evening be a write off. That is a legitimate choice made by a person who knows their own resources, and it is not a small defeat.

Because you are not a machine that produces childhood experiences, and there is no ledger anywhere in which tonight is being counted. The reason that matters is that guilt does not get you off the sofa. Guilt takes the last of what you had and spends it on feeling bad, and then there is definitely nothing left for tomorrow.

Resting tonight without a fine attached is the thing most likely to make tomorrow possible. Not because that is a clever strategy. Because that is how tired people work.

First Kings 19:5 puts sleep and food ahead of every other consideration, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with somebody who does nothing this evening.

You are able to rest without a fine attached, and it has never once been the case that tonight was going on a record somewhere. First Kings 19:5 answers exhaustion with rest rather than a plan, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a parent who goes to bed early.