Church service
I’ve been in a funk for nearly a week. It is the low-level kind of a funk where I still function. No one but me can tell that I have the funk, but it sucks the joy out of just about everything. I felt like hiding from everyone. I felt like cutting my hair or dyeing it. I even did research into seasonal affective disorder and matched my feelings to the symptom list. I kept trying to wrap my head around it, re-frame it, describe it, talk myself out of it. None of that worked well. I was fairly certain that a large part of the problem was that I’d overdrawn my emotional reserves for several weeks in a row. But I was having trouble figuring out how to put anything back in.
And then I went to church. I wasn’t expecting church to help much today, because I spend the first hour wrestling with my own kids on a bench and the second two wrestling with an entire class of active four-year-olds. I was expecting church to be draining, not filling. The opposite occurred. I found myself filled with energy and hope and happiness, because I knew I was in the right place at the right time for the right reasons. There is one child in my class who has the same high-energy and distractibility of my Gleek. Handling him takes all of my attention, but it is well within my capabilities. He is the reason I was put with that class. I can give his mother, my friend, a break from managing him. I can give that same break to the other mothers as well. I know how desperately I needed that break sometimes when all my kids were home all day. I came away from church exhausted, but happy and peaceful.
There have been times in my life when I have routinely come home from church wondering why I bothered to go. Those were the years where I attended merely because I wanted my children to learn that church is what we do on Sunday. Sometimes there were years when church was my respite, my break from the rigors of 24/7 mommy duty. Now church is my chance to give to others the gift that I already received. No matter what, I’ve known that attendance at church is right for me and for my family. And even on a day like today when I did not get to listen to much of what was said there, I still come away more whole than I was before. Now that I am home it is like my head is clear and I can see the things I need to do to refill my emotional reserves. I can also see that the refilling has begun, I just need to keep up the good work.