January was a rough month for me. My youngest son broke his arm the first weekend of the year. The following week a slightly romantic relationship ended. Then I was really sick for a while and just when I started to feel better, my mom was in an accident in my car. Thankfully no one was hurt, but my car was out of commission for a while.  I remember lying down in my bed one night with the weight of stress on my shoulders and realized that I was exhausted.  So I did something that I don’t do often: I slept.

And I don’t mean that I went to bed for the night. I slept. I went to bed early and woke up late. My boys made themselves cereal and watched cartoons when I went back to bed a few hours later. I stayed in my jammies for a few days because I just didn’t have the energy to get dressed. I was exhausted. And I’d learned that sometimes when life gets to busy I need to take a nap.

Why You Should Learn to Rest

Being a single, homeschooling mama of two boys is a lot of hard work. Add the fact that my oldest is all over the autism spectrum and that both my boys are in a limit-testing stage and I’m just overwhelmed. Usually I would just go and go until I crashed.  After years of crashing and burning I decided to try something different. I decided to learn to rest and to take a nap when I needed it.  Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. When we rest we give God room to work in our lives. I am very good at trying to fix everything and everyone around me. Basically I’m good at getting in God’s way.  In January when I was sleeping a lot I had the chance to see God work some wonderful miracles in my life. Things that I know would not have happened if I’d been up running around making a mess of things.
2. Resting gives other people a chance to help you out. The control freak in me always wants to be in control. I’m sure can’t relate to that right? Being too tired to move. And being without a car forced me to lean on the people in my life that are always trying to help me out.
3. I took some time to heal. The reason that stress hits me so hard often is because I’m not given my body time to heal. One year I walked around with a serious sinus infection for 3 months because I was just too busy to take care of myself. In the end I was in so much pain that I was screaming every 5 minutes. I ended up having to take double doses of super strong antibiotics and pain pills to get better. When I start to feel sick I’ve learned to rest a little bit more.
4. Resting also gave me a chance to get my priorities in order. When I stopped being able to do everything, I realized how much I was trying to do that wasn’t really important. Once I was {finally} well rested I was able to focus on what was really important. I spent more time with my boys, relaxed a little on our schoolwork and cut way back on how often we were away from home.

 The next time you feel a little overwhelmed busy mom, try taking a nap. even if it doesn’t sort things out you’ll have gotten some extra sleep.

~LaToya ,  Learning to Let HIM Lead