"Warning: Your System Might Be at Risk"

This is the message that keeps popping up in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen, telling me that some part of my computer system is not correctly updated and might be vunerable.

Similarly, I think my body has been trying to give me the same message this week - "warning: system at risk!" Since getting back from the US last Tuesday, I have been awake past 3 a.m. at least three different nights. My mind starts racing, I stumble out of bed to pray, or check email, or plan lessons, and then inevitably end up taking a sleeping pill to try and eek out some few precious hours of sleep before heading to work. I think insomnia is a blinking warning sign in my psyche that there are some undealt-with issues that need my attention.

This week I have over 200 assignments to grade - everything from journals to research papers to random late assignments, etc. It's hard not to think I should just crawl in a hole, pull the gigantic stack of papers over my head and hibernate until spring! More seriously, though, I have been feeling such enormous stress and anxiety about all the things I am supposed to do on a daily basis (does this sound familiar? Haven't I written about this before?!), that I know I need to relinquish some of this load to the Lord. Relationships that are stagnant, ministry opportunities that are overlooked, correspondence I want to keep up, teaching well, eating well, exercising, laundry... That old phrase, too busy not to pray, came to mind, and I remembered that, once upon a time, I was able to look at my work as worship to God. I've even stuck post-it-notes reading, "I'm grading papers for the Glory of God," to my notebooks! I need to remember this again.

Why is it so easy to get out of balance? Why is it so easy for me to think that I am capable of doing everything that's asked of me? - I'm not. It's an illusion that I can ever possibly have everything taken care of, functioning well. And that isn't what God calls me to do. He calls me to submit to Him. But I wiggle and squirm and wrestle with Him instead. And so I end up awake at 3 in the morning, hearing God asking me to talk to Him.

I've been debating all week about whether to post what's below. It's a bit rawer than what's been up here lately, but since I've been such a slacker at posting here as much as I once did, I thought I'd go ahead and do it. Forgive me if it sounds doubtful or negative or fed up or angry. We feel this way sometimes, don't we? Consider it an insomnia-Psalm.