Are You Tired and Weary?

I did not really understand tiredness until I became a mother.

I had chosen a career before I had children and worked for fourteen years as a mothercraft nurse in childcare, hospitals, and a specialized parenting center.

I even traveled overseas and worked and lived in London as a nanny.

I married in my late twenties and continued to work for the next five years.

Our first daughter came into our lives on our fifth wedding anniversary.

Three and a half years later, our second daughter was born.

For the first eighteen months, she was a lovely baby, doing all the right things that good babies do. Then she metamorphosed into a toddler! From my working history, you would think I would have had it all together. Wrong! My second daughter had other ideas.

It was like a hurricane blew through our household.

My daughter’s multiple daily tantrums and not sleeping through the night were physically and emotionally exhausting. The sleep deprivation was debilitating.

Even now, there are chunks of time that I cannot remember, and they remain a complete blur. Those years were a very humbling experience, which I am sure God designed especially for me because it brought me to my knees and into a closer relationship with Him.

During this time, I learned there was power in God’s Word.

I started to claim the promises and gained great strength and comfort from them. There were days I would wake up in the morning feeling absolutely shattered, and I felt I could not go on. I would get out my devotional book and, with bleary eyes, force myself to read the promises until I felt I could continue another day as a mother and wife.

My daughter finally grew out of those toddler years and eventually learned to sleep through the night. As a family, we were recently reminiscing on those years and were able to laugh about it. My daughters are now in their late teens and seem not to be too scarred from my sleep deprived mothering skills. I still have my devotional book with the many Bible promises written down. The text in Isaiah 40:29 is still there because it is so precious to me.

I know I did not get through those sleep-deprived years because of my own strength. I have learned that God’s promises are an amazing power source that we need to tap into far more than we do.

Natalee McLean