Tired of Being Bone Tired

Alicia Wright

I remember dropping into bed achy and exhausted late one night, just moments after helping my husband reassemble our bed and slide a fitted sheet over the mattress. We had just moved to a new home (with four small children in tow) and I’d reached a level of exhaustion I felt I genuinely could not ever top. I think somewhere in the background of my mind I assumed that moment — in which I was too tired to find a flat sheet to layer between myself and the comforter — was the most tired I had ever been and the most tired I ever would be. I just needed to get through a few days of unpacking, and the rest and recuperating to come would bring physical healing. Just a few months before, I had begun experiencing some strange physical symptoms that my doctor hadn’t yet been able to explain, but I had never been one to stress over aches and pains. I assumed we’d get it figured out soon, or more likely, the symptoms would just pass over time as I focused on an even healthier diet and more exercise (and moving from one home to another is certainly exercise!).

Looking back, I’m not sure if I want to laugh at my past self or step back in time and give her a long hug. I knew nothing of the coming chronic pain and illnesses that would just keep rolling like a snowball downhill, collecting more symptoms, diagnoses, and heartaches as it slid. One thing I am absolutely sure of: I was wrong about that moving day being the most exhausting day of my future life. These days, even on a “good” day, I wake up feeling more achy, more exhausted, and more overwhelmed than I did as I dropped into sleep that evening years ago. I live in a constant sense of bone tired. My tired bones have metaphorically borne children who have borne tired grandchildren, and they have borne even more tired great-grandchildren. All of them live together in my body, making up a painful commune of achy, exhausted neighbors who remind me of their disgruntled existence every morning as I slowly swing my feet onto the floor.

I know I’m not alone in this feeling because I’ve heard it reflected back to me by nearly everyone I’ve ever met with chronic pain or illness. We’re all dragging ourselves slowly but surely through a society that’s barreling past us at breakneck speed, and the only thing that feels worse than exhaustion is experiencing exhaustion while watching everyone around you overachieving. Our world moves at a rapid pace with most people running from place to place, while us chronically ill folks feel like we’re stuck in one of those strange movie scenes where there’s a whirlwind of colorful movement swirling around someone who’s standing completely still, watching it all happen in slow motion.

But if we look past the chaos and towards Jesus in the middle of our forced stillness we’ll see that He didn’t follow this brisk pattern we see around us. I don’t think we ever see Him in a hurry at anytime in Scripture. It’s certainly true that the world itself moved at a slower pace back then, but there still seems to have been plenty of desperate and busy folks running around Him, making His pace look slow and deliberate. From stopping in His path to ask for a blind man who’d been shouting after Him to be brought through the crowd, to pausing from the rush of a stressed father who wanted Him to hurry and heal his daughter on her deathbed so He could find out who had touched Him and encourage her in her faith, or sleeping in a boat through a raging storm — He did everything with deliberate purpose. A purpose that I’m sure at times felt grating to His disciples, friends, and desperate crowds in need of healing, food, and hope. He took one step at a time and found in His days the extra moments needed to share an intentional compassion with everyone He met. So when He told His followers “Come to me and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28), we get the idea that He knows what He’s talking about, but I certainly wonder at times what it means to be more exhausted than we ever thought possible and yet find rest in Christ.

We’re usually quick to jump to the spiritual conclusion here of eternal rest in Jesus once we come to Him for salvation and then move on. And to be fair, if we only take one thing away from this invitation, let’s make it that thing. The necessity of eternal salvation absolutely trumps everything else we could consider as a possible application of Jesus’ words, and its gift is incalculable. If you haven’t yet come to Christ and asked for it, please do so! God has promised to reward those who look for Him (Hebrews 11:6) and He’ll never turn anyone away who comes to Him (John 6:37).

But I think we could also infer that this invitation isn’t extended purely to those who don’t yet believe in Him. Every aspect of the gospel has some application to our daily lives, and the rest we find in Jesus is something that matters eternally, but also something that matters today when our bodies ache, our heads feel the fuzzy cloud of brain fog, and our hearts can’t quite reach the hope we want so badly.

When you’re exhausted and your brain feels lost in a swirl of fog and chaos from pain and suffering, it can be tough to focus on the thing Jesus called “the good portion” (Luke 10:42). We tend to think of ourselves as spiritually productive when we’re deep in a Bible study that’s revealing new and exciting truths to our souls, or when we’re getting those 3–4 chapters in every day so we can triumphantly say we read through the whole Bible in one year. 

But pain puts us in a position to reinvent our understanding of what it means to dig into the Word, because for many of us we simply can’t ingest the Word in the ways we used to. If you’ve ever tried reading through Leviticus when you have a migraine, or memorizing passages from Hebrews while your legs spasm with nerve pain (or insert whatever chronic pain you experience here), then you’ve likely figured out that you can’t study the words of God the way everyone else does. If you’ve been forced into a slow-paced body and slow-paced life, then your intake of truth must change pace with you. The rest you find in Jesus has to come in a way that your body can meet in all its weariness and exhaustion today.

I spent the first few years with chronic illness trying to stay on top of my Bible reading and prayer like I had when I was healthy. I had words from the church reformer Martin Luther playing on a ghostly repeat in the back of my mind: “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” The first time I heard that quote it had energized me to spend more time in reading the Word and praying. It brought home the importance of pausing my busy life to take stock of whether I was going it alone or working out of a rest found in Christ. But as the years wore on and disabilities began to set in, those once encouraging words began to sound more like a despairing condemnation. I was living a new life while still trying to superimpose the patterns of the old life on top of it, and I was failing miserably.

I don’t remember what changed my view on the subject — maybe it was just a slow breaking down of my expectations as I lived each difficult day, or maybe wisdom I picked up from others in similar situations — but I began to take just one small thing from Scripture at a time and hold onto it. Sometimes half a psalm read in the morning over a cup of bad coffee (good coffee takes too much time and effort to make these days), a verse that came to mind as I mentally searched for somewhere to rest my unsettled mind, or a truth that I needed to hold onto halfway through a hard day that had me wanting to crawl under the covers and just sleep the rest of the way through.

When my legs — mushy with the muscle ache that comes from the previous evening of nerve pain — stumble into the bathroom, I see a phrase framed on the wall that says “Your mercies are new every morning…” (Lamentations 3:22–23). I force my groggy mind to consider: what does that even mean right now? Are the mercies of God offered to His people through the prophet Jeremiah thousands of years ago the same mercies He offers me today? And the Spirit replies that they most certainly are. That’ll wake you up if the bad coffee didn’t do its job. What kind of God looks at billions of people throughout millennia of civilization and offers every single one of them the same steady mercies throughout all of those years, in every society, at every moment in time? What kind of God holds out compassionate love and eternal hope to every single person who, through rising and falling civilizations, feels the bite of the despair described in the book of Lamentations? What sort of hope is this that can steady the human heart in days of sorrow, fear, despair, hopelessness, or exhaustion? It must be an indestructible hope — one that’s anchored to something we can’t entirely comprehend, but that we can feel in our own bodies today, because we can look back and see that He’s held us up through years we felt we’d be unable to continue, and in situations we knew could destroy us if we’d been left alone. This God who has been enough for every believer before me has been enough for me too. If that’s the case, then this day of exhaustion that feels like too much cannot be too much, because He will bring the rest I need to make it through.

If we can, it’s always good to dive deep into the depths of the Bible and read a whole Gospel in one sitting or memorize the whole of Romans chapter 8 (arguably the best summation of everything we ever need to know and remember about the gospel), but sometimes it’s better to take a phrase and pray over it. Pick it apart and look for ways it makes this moment of bone-tired existence a beautiful moment to be alive. We talk about “meditating” on Scripture, but when we have the ability to run helter-skelter through every day, we rarely make the time to really meditate on sentences or small phrases of Scripture. 

Tonight as I slide between the sheets and my exhausted head hits my pillow I reflect with a little humorous irony on the thoughts years ago that what I felt then was the most tired a living person could feel. I was wrong. But that’s okay because my exhaustion has rest tonight (thankfully between both top and bottom sheets) in the rest of Jesus. I’m going to fall asleep turning over the phrase “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew‬ ‭11‬:‭28‬). I’m going to pray over it, try to remember other passages that help illuminated its meaning in ways I haven’t yet realized, and consider ways I can find rest in Christ even if I don’t have rest in my own body.