“I need to sit on you”
Nearly all winter long, I’d heard the complaints on Facebook. Entire families were coming down with the crud. Schools were reporting large numbers of students missing, sidelined by illness. And all winter long, I gave thanks that it had passed us by.
On Saturday last, it began. Boy Two, our Tornado in Blue Jeans, started to drag. Tornadoes, we know, don’t “drag.” They – well, they do that tornado thing. And he most definitely was not doing “that tornado thing.”
Rats.
By Monday night, it was Little collapsed on the couch, looking pink. Sure enough. The thermometer crept up, and then there were two.
“Two down,” I opined to my FB friends. “Praying no more will go. F. Nightingale suit getting wrinkled.”
For four days, The Tornado languished. Just as I felt he was ready to go back to school, Boy Three turned pink, the thermometer crept up, and then there were three.
“Seuss expert #3 is down for the count. Florence (as in Nightingale) is on site, wielding juice, Popsicles, Motrin, and a thermometer.” Friends offered prayers.
Meanwhile, with College Kid home for his not-so-spring break, I was feeling out of kilter, off my stride as the laundry piled up, the back door once again slammed at all hours, and someone looking suspiciously like the CK invaded my coffee beans. It was impossible, I noted silently, to walk anywhere without stepping on a sickie or the CK’s clothes.
In the worst of it, overwhelmed and miserable, Little would come. “Mama,” he would cry, clutching his blanket, “I need to sit on you!”
It was this request, this cry for comfort from my small, feverish boy that ran quietly through my mind this morning on my way home. Wasn’t I, too, overwhelmed and miserable? Exhausted, and not just from the emotional strain and the topsy-turvy schedule? Hadn’t the enemy rushed in like a flood, stirring up trouble and sowing discord in this time of weakness?
Hadn’t I felt isolated, alone, depleted with little to give and nothing to say? Defeated? Silenced? Yes. I had. So much so, in fact, that I’d stayed beneath the covers today, unable to muster up what it took to rise early and trot off, backpack slung over my shoulder, to begin a fresh column. Instead, it was mid morning when I finally settled at a small table with a lamp and turned to God’s Word, coffee in hand, for solace.
“Jesus, I need to sit on You!”
Sometimes, in the midst of stress and strain, turmoil and exhaustion, “sitting on Him” is all we are able to do. Indeed, it may be all that He requires. Just as Little’s cry summons Mother’s resources, attention, and affection, so, too, our cry summons His.
Are you weary? Discouraged? Defeated? There’s room on His lap for you. Come and sit, won’t you?
“Come, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” – Jesus, friend of the weary