Tired In A Way Sleeping Does Not Fix

You slept seven hours last night and woke up with nothing.

That is the part nobody has an answer for. Everybody who has ever advised you has assumed that tiredness is a debt and sleep is the payment, and you have been making the payment for about two years and the balance has not moved.

So there is a second kind of tired, and you have it, and there is no word for it that does not sound like an excuse or a symptom.

I am not going to tell you what it is. I do not know, and anybody who tells you confidently over an article has not met you. What I want to do is smaller and I think more useful, which is to find what a person in that condition is actually able to do about going outside, and then to say that whatever that is, it is enough.

Because at the moment every piece of advice you read is addressed to somebody with a reserve, and you have not had one in two years.

I am weary with my groaning

There is a psalm that does not resolve, and it is worth knowing that it is in there.

I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears. Mine eye is consumed because of grief; it waxeth old because of all mine enemies. (Psalm 6:6-7, King James Version)

I am weary with my groaning.

Notice there is no lesson attached to that verse. It is not building to a turn. It is a description of a condition, written down and kept, in a book full of people who mostly get somewhere by the end.

You are not the only one whose account got written down without a resolution attached, and it was never required that a description arrive at a conclusion. Psalm 6:6 states the weariness plainly and leaves it standing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as company rather than as a verse to get past.

And notice the specificity. The night, the bed, the tears, the eye getting old. This is somebody counting the hours, and the counting is recorded rather than corrected.

You have a God who kept the counting rather than tidying it, and it was never a complaint that had to be dealt with before anything else could happen. The written word keeps a whole psalm of unresolved exhaustion in the collection, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a place to stand rather than a place to leave.

What is actually available

Now let me do the arithmetic, because nobody has done it with you honestly.

Twenty minutes out with children requires: a decision, shoes, coats, a door, twenty minutes of managing, and a return. That is six things and each one costs.

What is available to you today may be one of them. That is not a moral fact. That is a description of a person with no reserve, and the correct response to it is not encouragement, it is a smaller unit.

Here is the smallest one that still counts. Open the front door and sit down on the step.

You are able to do the smallest available thing, and it has never once been a lesser version of taking your children outside. Psalm 6 keeps the exhaustion in the record without asking it to produce anything, which is exactly why the Spirit of God does not hand a woman with nothing left a six part instruction.

And children come out to where their mother is, without being asked, because that is what children do. So the sitting is not a consolation. It is the whole thing, done at the size that fits.

And if today is not even that

Now the part that matters most, and it is the reason this row exists on this site at all.

Some days it will not be that either.

And on those days, do not go. Not as a defeat, not as something to make up for later. Being this tired is not a failure, and staying in is not a smaller answer than going out.

You are not condemned on the days you stay in, and it was never a scoreboard that any of this was being kept on. The passage records a person too weary to do anything and leaves no requirement attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a day indoors as clean as a day outdoors.

I want to be plain about why that has to be said. A site that tells you to get outside and cannot also tell you that not going is fine has not given you permission, it has given you another thing to fail at. And a woman with no reserve does not need one more of those.

So: the step if there is a step in you. And nothing at all if there is not. And neither one is a verdict on you.

You have permission for both, and one of them has never once been the disappointing version of the other. Psalm 6:6 lets a person be weary in the record without a single instruction attached, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a house on the days when nobody goes out at all.