Fourteen years ago, I suffered heat stroke in sight of the finish line of a community race I’d been training to win.
It was 80 degrees, with high humidity, and I’d trained for months in unusually cool-for-summer 70-degree mornings. I had my time goals for each mile — my “splits,” as they’re called in the running world — written on my hand. My brain locked onto those times, and I achieved most of them until the last mile when I began losing my mind. I learned later that this is a common thread among those who suffer heat strokes: they ignore the signs their body is giving them to stop. When the stroke occurs, the body has already offered up many signals — many cries for help — to pause, to slow, to drink water. Finally, when provided no relief, the body shuts down.
There was no space for me to hear the warnings, to pay attention to what my body was telling me — my mind was fixed on those splits, on the attempt to win.
We are embodied.
Limited.
Full of dreams and passions for abundance and yet requiring 7-8 hours of sleep and 64 ounces of water daily to function well.
We have eternity in our hearts, and yet we can fracture an ankle, suffer a headache for days, and scrape the skin right off our shin in one fall.
This story returned to me as I faced this past year that held significant surprises … and significant life hurts. For a while, as I fielded those, I kept the pace. Daily dinner for nine, groceries delivered on time, texts replied to on the same day, expectations from others met. My mind was once again fixed on my splits, albeit unknowingly.
And then my body said “uncle.”
Month after month I found myself sick – each time, with an explanation, until there were no more. Friends just came through town a day after they cleared the stomach bug, so of course I got it next. I prepped our family of nine for a cross-country trip and then we drove it. Of course, with little girls waking in the night in new homes and disrupted schedules, I was bound to get sick. But after several months of recurring sickness and waning explanations, I realized that you only do kindergarten or your first year of college (where your body is like Velcro to all the new exposure) once, but my body was still acting as if I was there. I had still been watching my splits. Still serving dinner around the table, and still taking family trips, and still bringing meals to friends in need, ignoring my own needs. The temperature rose, life got heavier, and I still paced.
But I’ve had enough years of living with the repercussions of ignoring the warning signals God sends to invite us to forfeit our ideals — our splits —that the Sara who once pushed through until she landed in the medic tent couldn’t do that anymore.
So I stopped watching my splits and gave in to the tired. I paused the “yes’s” to help friends and ordered take-out and went to bed early, even amid teenagers whose hearts open after nine thirty pm. It was the best decision of my year.
Tired can be a gift, friends.
But many of us are living like I lived in my twenties and like I ran in that race — we press through tired. We ignore it. We charge through the limit it gives us.
God encased us in flesh.
He gave us wrinkles and grey hair and a need for sleep and sunshine and water and bathrooms. Is it too much to consider that He uses our bodies to reach us — telling us when to pause, slow, or sleep?
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.” (1 Corinthians 6:19 NIV) We all would agree He cares about this temple, this holding place for Him, but He also uses it to teach us … to reach us.
Is your steady mid-afternoon fatigue telling you a story? Could it be God is using it to reach you — to reveal to you how you’ve handled your limits, as demonstrated in how you’ve handled your fatigue?
So many of us run our Christian race like I ran that women’s four-miler all those years ago: eyes on the splits, convinced that we know the goal, idealized against hearing and receiving the gentle, persistent warning signs of God to re-align us toward His way.
We press on, but not in the way Paul intended in Philippians 3:4 when he said, “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” We press through, ignoring the way God made us — requiring sleep and water and rest and sunlight — to achieve a prize that often makes us feel better about ourselves, but we use language as if it’s in the name of God.
Perhaps we’ve not seen or named this struggle with our limits. Maybe we’ve not noticed the way it drives us.
Taken from The Gift of Limitations: Finding Beauty in Your Boundaries by Sara Hagarty. Copyright © March 2024 by Zondervan. Used by permission of Zondervan, www.zondervan.com.