Restless

Recently being sick I had some long restless nights. I couldn’t find a comfortable sleeping position to save my life. It didn’t stop me from tossing and turning in hopes that I could find the rest I so desperately sought. At times, I would find myself walking through the house simply hoping to have some magic epiphany that would help my restless body.

But being restless sometimes isn’t limited to being sick. Sometimes restless finds me in the middle of an afternoon when my mind hasn’t ceased its cycle of worry. Or, in the evening when the stress of the day starts to cascade into my mind when the world has slowed enough for me to absorb it. Sometimes it hits when a friend is suffering and I’m no expert at fixing my own suffering, much less anyone else. And I feel powerless to fix it.

It’s like your whole body is in a big bubble but no matter how hard you try to squeeze out of it, you’re stuck. Hit it as hard as you want, but you’re stuck. That makes the restless feeling much more intense and sometimes, this results in lashing out. You just want someone to care, someone to fix it. You’ve tried with all your might, you’ve cried out to God, you’ve tried to apply temporary fixes. But nothing works.

The human mind and heart wants resolution. It wants immediate attention. And sometimes the things that make us restless have settled in like a stray dog that you’ve let in to get warm. It seems like it’s here for the long haul and maybe you just need to accept that it has adopted you. We can try to throw it out and only end up having it almost knock us down when we open the door. Try as we may, it seems to have taken up residence.

I try to fix things on my own. I want to control the narrative so that I can control the outcome. But the way I sometimes try to cure the restlessness only leads to more feelings of frustration, and brings about an ending that still doesn’t cure it. I sometimes imagine myself having a restless fit. What’s a restless fit? Well, it’s akin to a hissy fit. I imagine waving my arms in the air, stomping my feet, and yelling at the top of my lungs. Maybe, just maybe, that would fix it.

The reason that none of that works is simple. The Bible tells us to be still. Be still because the battle isn’t ours to fix. It is ours to learn from. It is ours to garner strength from. It is ours to go through, not around. A nail doesn’t go around the board, it goes through it. Instead of a hissy fit, a restless fit, or any kind of fit, I need to be still. I need to close my eyes and release the burdens. I need to place them in the hands of the great physician. And let them go. Then and only then can I lose the restlessness. I am powerless to change peoples minds and hearts. But God isn’t. I am powerless to control the future. But God holds it in His hands. I am powerless to make the impossible possible but God can.

I think about a lesson I learned in yoga. We don’t realize sometimes how much tension we are carrying around until we make a conscious effort to relax our muscles. The teacher told us to close our eyes and start looking for any muscle that we were holding tense and just release it. It’s a lot easier said than done because sometimes I would let the muscles relax only to realize that, almost unconsciously, I had tensed the muscles up all over again. That’s sort of like what it’s like trying to cure the restlessness. I let it go but really only so far. Because it’s mine. It’s mine to deal with, mine to fix. It may feel good to release a little bit of that feeling and put it in Gods hands. But Lord help me sometimes I foolishly think that I might can just work it out on my own.

It takes a concerted effort to let go and let God. The bumper sticker makes it sound so easy. There’s nothing easy about letting go of the things that cause the restlessness. But you can’t just let go of some of it and give God some of it. You have to hand it over and move out of the way. You have to step out of the boat and put your feet on the water. And that’s hard because human logic says it can’t be done. Human logic says it is impossible and it won’t ever work out. But God. But God says He works everything together for our good if we only believe. Sometimes we do that and things still seem to be falling apart. It’s not instant gratification so surely God must have failed. But the night gets darkest before the dawn. We’ve got to take our hands and our will out of it.

It’s hard to let God be God. It’s hard to trust the unknown and just have faith that it will work out. But faith without actions is dead. Sometimes the only action we need is the simple action of handing it all over. Hand over the restlessness, the hurt, the pain, the joy, the fear, the happiness. All of it. Like my great aunts, Dana and Gladys, would do with scraps of fabric. In a pile on the table, it didn’t look like much. I couldn’t imagine what they could do with stuff that seemingly didn’t go together. Give them a while of sewing those pieces of mismatched fabric together and you could see the fruits of their labor. They’d work on it diligently and when they were done, they’d spread it out where you could see the finished product. You couldn’t help but stand in awe of turning junk into a treasure. That, my friends, is what God wants to do to us. The fabric didn’t jump up and run away, resisting to be sewn. The fabric was still. And the results were beautiful.