I exercise just enough to satisfy my doctor at my yearly visits. But when I do, I prefer a ballet barre, because I’ve always loved a good plié. When I focus on leaning into it with the right technique, something inside me shifts.

She was quoting to me the exact same chapter from the exact same book I so often use to help people understand boundaries. In the hour we spent together, my counselor said nothing new to me, nothing I myself don’t regularly say to others. And yet it was hugely helpful.

That dread of looking into a calendar so overflowing that the obligations are scribbled all over each other. That thousand-tons awareness pressing down that it can’t all be done, at least not well.

Life is hard. Why make it even harder? I don’t like stress, I hate what it does to my husband, and I fear its affect on my children. So it’s tempting to create protective barriers that ensure my preferred calm life rhythm and give the illusion of a “balanced” life. Isn’t that what we are taught to value?

Hurting

I tumble into bed with knots in my stomach and grief in my throat. Dear people with good intentions lost in labyrinths of longings and allegiances. I love them. I can’t fix it. I can’t sleep. I can’t…

After a wonderful whirlwind of a summer, the kind that tempts me to list it all to earn your empathy for why I am this tired, I find myself questioning the decision to join this physically strenuous journey to a people whose language I don’t speak.

It happens again. That same, crippled communication where both of us are delivering well-worn lines, both of us aware that we are trapped here. Neither of us wants this. Neither of us knows how to break the cycle.

Like the pressure of a slowly approaching tropical storm, this was a year of gradually increasing weight on my aging shoulders. Too much for one so clumsy in life, still learning to be an adult despite the spiderweb of lines on my face.

I have informed my Maker of this on countless occasions.

More than any other verse in the Bible, this one has preserved me through all kinds of seasons in life. It is still my retreat, my protection, and my reservoir of beauty. To my easily frazzled soul, torn by the many voices of responsibilities, this Scripture has become my oasis from where I sift through the demands from outside the garden, as well as my own loud emotions.