The Grocery List in My Own Handwriting I Don't Remember Writing
I found it taped to the refrigerator yesterday morning, a grocery list in my own handwriting, eggs and gauze pads and the brand of ginger ale my wife likes when her stomach is bad. I do not remember writing it. I know I wrote it, because nobody else in this house would have thought to buy gauze pads, and the handwriting is unmistakably mine, cramped the way it always gets after midnight. But I stood there with my coffee going cold, trying to locate the memory of picking up that pen, and came up with nothing. She broke her hip six weeks ago, and between the home health visits and the medication schedule and the nights she cannot get comfortable, I have apparently started doing things my own mind no longer bothers to record.
I am thirteen years sober, and for most of those years I measured exhaustion the way I measured everything else in recovery, by whether I was tempted to drink over it. If the tiredness was not driving me toward a bottle, I assumed it did not count as a real problem, just ordinary fatigue a strong cup of coffee would handle. What that unremembered grocery list taught me is that exhaustion can get deep enough to start erasing a man from his own hours, not dramatically, not in a way anyone else would notice, just quietly enough that he writes a list and loses the memory of writing it before the ink is even dry.
Scripture does not treat this kind of depletion as something only the weak or the undisciplined experience. Jesus himself, in the middle of a ministry that never seemed to let up, told His disciples something I have read a hundred times and only now actually need. "And He said to them, 'Come aside by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.' For there were many coming and going, and they did not even have time to eat" (Mark 6:31, NKJV). He did not wait until the crowds finished needing Him to call that rest necessary. He called it necessary in the middle of the need, which tells me the gauze pads and the medication schedule were never going to stop long enough on their own to give me permission to rest. The permission had to come from somewhere else entirely.
Elijah's exhaustion ran deeper than mine, all the way to wanting his life to end, and God's response to him was not a pep talk or a new assignment. "Then as he lay and slept under a broom tree, suddenly an angel touched him, and said to him, 'Arise and eat'" (1 Kings 19:5, NKJV). He let the man sleep first. Then he fed him. Only after that did the angel of the Lord come back a second time with a reason attached. "And the angel of the Lord came back the second time, and touched him, and said, 'Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you'" (1 Kings 19:7, NKJV). The journey is too great for you. I have never once said that sentence about my own life, not out loud, not even to myself at two in the morning holding a bottle of ginger ale I do not remember adding to a list. I have always assumed admitting the journey was too great would be its own kind of failure. God said it to Elijah as a simple fact, not an accusation, and fed him before He said anything else.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten me a full night's sleep. I can tell myself accurately that plenty of husbands have carried heavier loads than mine, that six weeks is not forever, that her hip is healing on schedule and this season will end. Every sentence is true, and none of it has slowed down the particular fog that moves in around nine at night and does not lift until well into the next afternoon, because exhaustion was never actually a facts problem waiting on better perspective. It is a limits problem, and no amount of correct thinking has ever once manufactured the rest my own limits require. The psalmist names where that rest was always supposed to come from instead of from my own vigilance. "He will not allow your foot to be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:3-4, NKJV). I have been trying to be the one who never slumbers in this house, standing watch over a wife who needs real watching, and that psalm was never written to describe me. It was written to describe the One I have been forgetting is still awake on the nights I finally have to close my eyes.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that thirteen years of disciplined sobriety could never finish producing on its own. Jeremiah records a promise God made to a people worn thin by exile, and it is not conditioned on them finally earning enough rest through their own effort. "For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul" (Jeremiah 31:25, NKJV). Satiated, replenished, both words aimed at exactly the kind of soul that writes a grocery list it cannot remember writing. The writer of Hebrews describes a rest that is not merely a nap between hard days but an actual place believers are invited to enter, one that requires letting go of the compulsion to keep working at full strength forever. "There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest" (Hebrews 4:9-11, NKJV). Diligent to enter rest sounds like a contradiction until you have tried to rest while still gripping every outcome yourself, and discovered it cannot be done that way. Jesus names the actual mechanism underneath that kind of rest, closer to a lifeline than a technique. "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:4-5, NKJV). A branch does not stay awake worrying about the vine's strength. It just stays attached, and the strength is simply there, running through it whether it notices or not.
I went to bed at nine o'clock last night, earlier than I have in six weeks, and asked my sister to take the overnight monitor for once instead of assuming I was the only one who could. I still do not remember writing that grocery list, and I have stopped needing to. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which list you wrote in your own exhausted handwriting and cannot account for, which hours have started slipping past you while you keep standing watch over everything and everyone. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on you staying awake for all of it yourself, and He has promised a rest that does not wait for the crisis to end before it meets you. He will never leave you alone to run on a strength that was never meant to be yours to supply in the first place.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): Mark 6:31; 1 Kings 19:5; 1 Kings 19:7; Psalm 121:3-4; Jeremiah 31:25; Hebrews 4:9-11; John 15:4-5.
I am thirteen years sober, and for most of those years I measured exhaustion the way I measured everything else in recovery, by whether I was tempted to drink over it. If the tiredness was not driving me toward a bottle, I assumed it did not count as a real problem, just ordinary fatigue a strong cup of coffee would handle. What that unremembered grocery list taught me is that exhaustion can get deep enough to start erasing a man from his own hours, not dramatically, not in a way anyone else would notice, just quietly enough that he writes a list and loses the memory of writing it before the ink is even dry.
Scripture does not treat this kind of depletion as something only the weak or the undisciplined experience. Jesus himself, in the middle of a ministry that never seemed to let up, told His disciples something I have read a hundred times and only now actually need. "And He said to them, 'Come aside by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.' For there were many coming and going, and they did not even have time to eat" (Mark 6:31, NKJV). He did not wait until the crowds finished needing Him to call that rest necessary. He called it necessary in the middle of the need, which tells me the gauze pads and the medication schedule were never going to stop long enough on their own to give me permission to rest. The permission had to come from somewhere else entirely.
Elijah's exhaustion ran deeper than mine, all the way to wanting his life to end, and God's response to him was not a pep talk or a new assignment. "Then as he lay and slept under a broom tree, suddenly an angel touched him, and said to him, 'Arise and eat'" (1 Kings 19:5, NKJV). He let the man sleep first. Then he fed him. Only after that did the angel of the Lord come back a second time with a reason attached. "And the angel of the Lord came back the second time, and touched him, and said, 'Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you'" (1 Kings 19:7, NKJV). The journey is too great for you. I have never once said that sentence about my own life, not out loud, not even to myself at two in the morning holding a bottle of ginger ale I do not remember adding to a list. I have always assumed admitting the journey was too great would be its own kind of failure. God said it to Elijah as a simple fact, not an accusation, and fed him before He said anything else.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten me a full night's sleep. I can tell myself accurately that plenty of husbands have carried heavier loads than mine, that six weeks is not forever, that her hip is healing on schedule and this season will end. Every sentence is true, and none of it has slowed down the particular fog that moves in around nine at night and does not lift until well into the next afternoon, because exhaustion was never actually a facts problem waiting on better perspective. It is a limits problem, and no amount of correct thinking has ever once manufactured the rest my own limits require. The psalmist names where that rest was always supposed to come from instead of from my own vigilance. "He will not allow your foot to be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:3-4, NKJV). I have been trying to be the one who never slumbers in this house, standing watch over a wife who needs real watching, and that psalm was never written to describe me. It was written to describe the One I have been forgetting is still awake on the nights I finally have to close my eyes.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that thirteen years of disciplined sobriety could never finish producing on its own. Jeremiah records a promise God made to a people worn thin by exile, and it is not conditioned on them finally earning enough rest through their own effort. "For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul" (Jeremiah 31:25, NKJV). Satiated, replenished, both words aimed at exactly the kind of soul that writes a grocery list it cannot remember writing. The writer of Hebrews describes a rest that is not merely a nap between hard days but an actual place believers are invited to enter, one that requires letting go of the compulsion to keep working at full strength forever. "There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest" (Hebrews 4:9-11, NKJV). Diligent to enter rest sounds like a contradiction until you have tried to rest while still gripping every outcome yourself, and discovered it cannot be done that way. Jesus names the actual mechanism underneath that kind of rest, closer to a lifeline than a technique. "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:4-5, NKJV). A branch does not stay awake worrying about the vine's strength. It just stays attached, and the strength is simply there, running through it whether it notices or not.
I went to bed at nine o'clock last night, earlier than I have in six weeks, and asked my sister to take the overnight monitor for once instead of assuming I was the only one who could. I still do not remember writing that grocery list, and I have stopped needing to. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which list you wrote in your own exhausted handwriting and cannot account for, which hours have started slipping past you while you keep standing watch over everything and everyone. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on you staying awake for all of it yourself, and He has promised a rest that does not wait for the crisis to end before it meets you. He will never leave you alone to run on a strength that was never meant to be yours to supply in the first place.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): Mark 6:31; 1 Kings 19:5; 1 Kings 19:7; Psalm 121:3-4; Jeremiah 31:25; Hebrews 4:9-11; John 15:4-5.
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