Dear friend,
I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me. If you treat me this way, please kill me right now, if I have found favor in your sight; and don’t let me see my wretchedness.”
I have been thinking about how the end of a day can feel lately, when there is nothing left of you by the time the house goes quiet, not even enough to feel glad it is quiet.
I want to name that plainly rather than move past it. Being burned out from parenting is not the same as failing at it, though I think it often feels indistinguishable from the inside. You are tired in a way that a weekend does not fix, because the tiredness is not only in your body.
In Numbers 11:14-15, Moses tells God directly that he cannot carry the people alone, that the weight of it is too much for one person. I notice God does not tell him he should have been able to. God gives him seventy others to share the load instead. The text does not treat his exhaustion as a failure of faith or love. It treats it as true.
I am not going to offer you a plan this morning. I only want to sit with the plain fact of it before we go any further. What would it mean to let this be true without adding shame to it?
A prayer
God, You see how depleted she is by the end of these days, and how alone that tiredness can feel. Meet her honestly in it, without asking her to pretend otherwise tonight. Amen.