When What Feels Like The End Is Just The Beginning
Monday I woke up feeling like, well, uh, a Monday. Not sure if the high from my Holiday weekend made Monday feel like a bigger dip—but it was all the dreaded things of Monday. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I preferred to pull the covers over my head. My inspiration to tackle the day felt low. And I had this low hovering cloud over my heart that was filled with lack. Thoughts like, “You’re behind.” “You’re not as good as…” “It will not happen for you.” “You have to do more.” Flooded my mind and actually made my heart heavy.
I grabbed my phone to look at my calendar, and there was a day full of appointments ahead. “I don’t want to get out of this bed. I’m not sure I can do it.” I told my husband. “I don’t know what’s wrong. Don’t try to fix it. I just don’t want to do this Monday.” He gently asked if he could pray as I rolled out of bed, threw on a hat and grabbed coffee as I had to get my daughter to school. My Monday didn’t end there. That was just the beginning.
Getting yourself into a “Monday” or out of a funk always starts with prayer. There are a few things I decided to do. I’ll share with you here. But pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is not a job you can successfully do for yourself. At least not consistently with longevity. There are some Mondays you just can’t find the strength.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Psalm 73:26
Starting here realigns our heart and mind with the truth of Christ which empowers our bodies to get up and do the day He has set before us. Start here. Always. Begin with Jesus.
Then what?
I’m not going to tell you I then had superpowers and a strong motivation to make the day happen. But I had enough to get to my first appointment. And there I sat across the table over a good cup of coffee and experienced the presence of God. My coffee date was with another woman who is new in my life. We simply sipped and shared snippets of our lives. It was honest and fun, life giving and somehow holy. God met me in this space, He lifted my spirits and inspired my heart and I almost missed it feeling “Monday”. But it doesn’t end there. That was just the beginning.
We had so much fun I was running late for my next meeting. I had gone dark on my phone to engage fully present only to open my phone with a flurry of texts that immediately sent me back into dread. My heart began to sink back into lack. “You’re behind.” “You’re not as good as…” “It will not happen for you.” “You have to do more.”
I won’t carry on with the play by play of Monday and all the highs and lows that occurred. You know the story, you have Mondays, too. In some ways it’s ordinary. And maybe that’s the part of the problem. Just an ordinary day not full of any particular high or low news. But in the ordinary, I found the extraordinary hopefulness of the saving love of Christ. The rescue of His grace that shined color on my black and white day. Here is what I refused to believe:
We can roll out on “Mondays” open handed, open hearted and with belief in his promises kept. God is for us. There is a choice to make. And it is what came next for me. Refuse to believe in what God is not—He is not in resentment, despair or doubt. You are not welcome to my Monday, at my coffee dates, in my car or on my text thread. And you can be sure that what you see rising is not the end. It’s just the beginning.