Chapter 5: Rest
New Year’s Eve 2025 I confirmed that I was pregnant with our second baby, but not in the way most receive their confirmations. I was in the emergency room with Flu B after my toddler was also seen in the children’s ER for the same illness. They confirmed that I was 5 weeks pregnant, and so far everything looked fine. I went home excited, exhausted, sick. We brought in the new year in bed and I practically missed the countdown.
This wasn’t at all how I intended to bring the New Year in. I had just grabbed a faith based planner to start the year off on the right foot. I had agreed to do another year-long Bible reading plan with one of my good friends. I was planning to be apart of the 5am club, waking up early to spend quiet time with the Lord, before getting my day started. I had so many plans.
But there I was lying in bed, I could barely keep my eyes open. Hours turned into days and days turned into a week of me being sick as a dog. When I finally recovered fully and returned to work I became the punchline of a joke because everyone knew all that I had gone through, and it seemed like life wasn’t letting up. “You need to have one of those elders from the church you go to, come anoint your house with oil!” For me, it wasn’t much of a laughing matter because I was in fact tired of not being able to just live in peace and joy, of always having something going wrong. I wanted to nestle in the blissful news that we were finally pregnant after trying for a while. Nevertheless, there I was working, barely recovered, wondering if this was apart of God’s sense of humor.
If you’ve ever been through a season where you’re hit with so much one after another, where there’s no space to breathe before another shoe drops, you’re not alone.
Life moved forward and I was sick almost all day everyday, this time with morning sickness. I wanted so desperately to live in gratitude but how could I when the exhaustion kept piling on and the nausea made it difficult to keep anything down? We’re now at the beginning of February. I had some pretty busy weeks at work to keep myself occupied, but after an event one evening I was on the way home in the middle of rush hour traffic on I-20 and felt the urge to vomit. I tried to hold my composure but I couldn’t. Emergency lights on, cars honking at me, traffic speeding by shaking the car, and I couldn’t get the car in drive fast enough. I called my aunt and drove down the highway slowly; I told her I wasn’t going to make it home, maybe I needed to pull over and call an ambulance. On the way I was forced to stop 4 more times. Later that night my husband did in fact call the ambulance because I never got better. I was so dehydrated the next day I was seen in the ER for fluids.
I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was trying to prioritize intimacy with the Lord every morning, to be intentional about stewarding my time well. But there I was again, lying in bed. Things not going according to my plan. I didn’t realize it at the time, but God was slowing me down, there were important lessons He was showing me I still couldn’t quite grasp.
Now it’s the beginning of March, I’m 4 months pregnant but still have morning sickness I couldn’t quite shake. And somehow I found myself…you guessed it…sick again. This time around with a nasty upper respiratory infection. I had reached the point where I could no longer keep up with the Bible reading plan, I was no longer apart of the 5am club, and I had hit another breaking point.
I remember my husband coming to check on me and I broke down. “Why is this happening?! I never get sick! Now all of a sudden I’ve been every couple weeks! On top of all that I’m still struggling with prioritizing quiet time with God. If He wants me to pursue intimacy with Him why keep putting me through this?! Everytime I fully recover I’m somehow sick again!”
I couldn’t catch a break…or at least that’s what it felt like…
While recovering, I listened to a podcast where a pastor talked about Psalm 23. I was slightly familiar with it already because it’s a pretty popular Psalm and I grew up hearing Cissy Houston sing “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want…” The pastor pointed out that verse 2 says, “He makes me lie down in green pastures”
He makes me lie down in green pastures….
is that what was happening here?
I went from recovering from a car accident, to recovering from illness 3 months in a row…clearly He was sending me some sort of message in all this.
Last week I explored how my busyness was an idol for me, after reaching my breaking point, I was starting to reflect on how much of that was true for most of my life. Rest was a concept that was foreign to me, it was something I didn’t quite understand. Why did I need it. What purpose did it serve?
I continued to reflect. It was only a couple years earlier I was dealing with a pretty severe case of PPD after our first daughter. I recalled the weeks I spent with my Granny in the hospital and helping take care of her before she passed, my aunt and I giving her CPR while waiting on the ambulance to come, getting her breathing again only to realize those would be her last. I remembered the months my mom was sick and how I took her to every doctors’s appointment and every treatment and I was there with her in every moment I possibly could be. And I realized that after she passed, I never stopped moving. Don’t get me wrong, if I had to do it all over again I would in a heartbeat, it was an honor to take care of the two closest women in my life and be there with them as they took their final breaths. But I realized I truly had not known what rest was in years.
I understood that being still did not mean to stop all efforts, so why were all of my efforts being thwarted? Now it’s early May, and I woke up in the middle of the night with a vision of something I needed to journal- a processing map of sorts. At the top—To be a disciple of Christ, under that—take up my cross, under that— 3 areas of my life which needed to be crucified. The Lord was taking me back to the basics, the fundamentals of being a Christian. If I take up my cross and die daily, I will love the Lord better and love others better. I focused in on the first area, control. The Lord was telling me in my heart there was something I was still missing there. So I journaled, there in the middle of the night at 2am, and fully fleshed out everything in my life that dealt with control. I felt the Lord speaking to my heart, we were going to take this one step at a time, one day at a time. Out of that time with Him, reflection questions started to pour on the page, questions to ask myself every morning, mid-day, and evening to keep me grounded in Truth. I called them my “heart inventory.”
Was this why I broke my fibula? Why I was sick every 2 weeks? Was the Lord making me rest? “He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.” Psalm 23:2-3 ESV The Lord was doing more than just making me slow down, making me rest, but He was taking me through this to restore my soul.
In the moment it felt cruel, but on this side of it all, it feels like a kindness. Had it not been for Him forcing me to rest, I would’ve never slowed down enough to hear Him, my striving would have just looked a little differently.
He was preparing me by making me rest in this very important season I was in, because there was more He needed to show me. Join me next week as I explore how an unexpected turn in my pregnancy lead me to realize surrender was one of the biggest lessons that was in store.
