This Tired Is Not About Sleep

Tonight we are making instant noodles, and we are going to make them into an actual meal, and I am not going to apologize for the packet.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Boil the noodles in slightly less water than the packet asks for, so the broth ends up stronger. Two minutes before they are done, drop in a big handful of frozen greens straight from the bag, spinach or peas or whatever mixed vegetables are in the freezer. Then crack an egg directly into the pot, let it sit still for a minute, and stir it gently through so it sets into ribbons, and give it another minute so the egg is fully cooked and there is nothing raw left. Use the seasoning packet if you want it, or use soy sauce and a spoon of any hot or savory paste in the refrigerator. A splash of sesame oil or a lump of butter at the end makes it taste like somebody meant it. It costs almost nothing, it takes six minutes, and it is a real bowl of food.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the noodles.

It is a tiredness that sleep does not touch.

You slept. Maybe not well, but you slept, and you woke up carrying it anyway, and you have been carrying it for a while now. It is not in the legs and it is not really in the head. It is lower and heavier than that, and you cannot point at a cause, and nobody has asked, and if they did you would not know what to tell them.

And so you have not called it anything. You have just been tired, for weeks, in a way that does not have a name.

The prayer for people who cannot find the words

There is a line in Psalm 61 that is written for exactly this state, and its genius is what it leaves out.

From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I. (Psalm 61:2, King James Version)

Notice what is missing. He never says what happened. There is no explanation, no cause, no account of events. He says the heart is overwhelmed and he asks to be led somewhere higher, and that is the whole prayer.

That is a mercy for a person in your condition, because the usual assumption is that you have to be able to describe a thing before you are allowed to bring it. This psalm removes that. Overwhelmed is enough of a description. It is admissible on its own.

You are permitted to bring this without knowing what it is, and God has never once required a person to name a weight before He would take hold of it. Psalm 61:2 has a man ask to be led higher without ever explaining himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an unnamed thing sayable in an ordinary kitchen.

You have not been unclear, and heaven has never once needed a better account than the one you have. It is written that his heart was overwhelmed and he cried from the end of the earth, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in the room where the water is coming up.

Naming it is not the price of relief

Now let me say something about the naming, because the instinct here is to solve the thing by identifying it, and the hunting has been costing more than the weight does.

There is a reasonable instinct that says: if I can work out what this is, I can deal with it. And sometimes that is right. But sometimes a person carries something that has no single cause, or has a cause too old or too tangled to lift out cleanly, and hunting for the name becomes another job on top of the weight.

Sometimes this kind of tiredness is grief that never got a funeral. Sometimes it is a long stretch of holding steady for other people. Sometimes it is the accumulated cost of a hundred small things that individually did not qualify as anything.

You are carried whether or not the thing ever gets named, and God has never once made an explanation the price of help. Psalm 61:2 says lead me to the rock that is higher than I and gives no account of what happened, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts a person who cannot say what is heavy.

You do not have to sort that out tonight, and it is not the condition of being helped.

Tiredness with no name attached is not a verdict on how strong a person is. It is a weight that has not been set down anywhere.

You are carried in this whether or not you can explain it, and God has never once withheld help pending a diagnosis. The passage asks for a higher rock rather than for an explanation, and the Spirit of God is the one who lifts a person who cannot say what is heavy.

You have been holding something for a long time, and holding it is what has cost you and not any weakness in you. Psalm 61 is written from the end of the earth rather than from a place of clarity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets a person exactly there.

The packet is not a compromise

Here is the practical part, and I want to be very clear about it.

On a night like this, the noodles in the packet are the right food. Not the fallback, not the failure, not the thing you settle for. There is a version of cooking advice that would tell you to make something nourishing from scratch, and on a night when a person is carrying something they cannot name, that advice functions as one more thing to fail at.

So: packet noodles, an egg, a handful of frozen greens. Six minutes. That is a hot bowl of real food with protein and vegetables in it, made by somebody who had almost nothing left, and there is nothing second rate about it anywhere.

The egg and the greens are the only additions and they take no extra time at all, because they go into the same pot.

You are eating a real meal tonight, and God has never once measured a bowl of food by how much effort it cost the cook. Psalm 61:2 has help arriving to somebody at the end of the earth without any conditions attached to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the word compromise out of a six minute dinner.