Exhausted

I love watching the three kids sleep. Throw their daddy into the equation and it’s perfect. 

They amaze me. Even at 30,000 feet they can snooze with the best of them. 

Eyes shut. Mouth open. Even breathing. A snore or two.

It’s perfection. 

It’s funny what a mom will find as perfection. In this moment...on this flight...I have found it. 

They are exhausted. A couple more than the other two I think, but nonetheless, it’s exhaustion. And my oh my, it is the best of exhaustions.

It’s the the Caribbean heat exhaustion. These Tennessee born and bred kids have been a bit too close to the equator for two weeks.

It’s the never miss a minute of the day exhaustion. You might miss something if you close your eyes. You only have 14 days. Not a minute to lose.

It’s the constant community exhaustion. Sleeping literally cheek to cheek with 21 young adults/college students. Eating at a table for 27. Talking about God, His story, and how we fill a role. 24/7.

It’s running 90 to nothing for days so children will laugh and feel loved and come to know what it looks like to live like Him. 

It’s deep. It’s tough. It’s safe. It’s relational. It’s a lot of vulnerability. It’s happy and it can be sad, all rolled into one. 

And it’s exhausting. But a good exhausting that we will choose again and again. 

Why?

Because we have been called to love as we go. And years ago, God sent us to Saba and we went. We went thinking it was for Michael to go to med school. But the star of the show wasn’t the future doctor. 

It was God and what He had planned for us and a bunch of people on five square miles in the middle of a sea. 

If you’d told me I’d teach a bunch of Caribbean kids and one day teach a lot of their kids, I’d laughed big.

If you’d told me I’d love a bunch of college kids and they’d teach me more than I’d teach them, I’d laugh even bigger. 

If you told me that I’d have three kids that had “honorary” citizenship on a little Dutch island many many miles away from home, I’d doubted that. 

If you told me that my marriage would face trials and survive and my partnership with a good looking doctor would be a method to a beautiful relationship between an island and a school in Nashville, I’d called you crazy. 

But God has been laughed at and has been doubted and He has even been called crazy. 

Yahweh. Messiah. Emmanuel. 

Those names seem more fitting when we look at the greatness of His simplistic weaving of stories as they ease into what He has planned and promised. 

I didn’t plan and decide anything. Neither did the doctor. 

He made me a Daughter. 

He made me a teacher.

He made me a med school spouse and then a doctor’s wife.

He made me a mom.

He made me in His image, and then gave me His Spirit. 

He made me His. 

His.

Imperfect but given perfection through His  plan and redemption. Through His son. 

He loves me. He energizes me. He humbles me. He turns my heart and clears my mind. And He makes me happy and holy all in one. He exhausts me. 

He is so so good.

And as His, I am thankful. 

And He makes my exhausted children hungry so I have to push the flight attendant button and buy some food now. 

An island and three kids later...His story continues.