Worth the Wear

“There has to be an easier way to do this,” I told my husband yesterday as I finished hour three of school planning. “Some mom somewhere has figured out how to plan her semester without losing half a week and the majority of her sanity.”

“There probably isn’t,” he responded. “But you got it done.”

“Except for what I have to finish tomorrow.”

“Done-ish.” And then he took one look at me and threatened to send me straight to bed.

And it’s not just school planning that’s wearing me out.

It’s birthday week. It’s de-Christmassing the house. It’s laundry and dishes and groceries and walking the dog and wiping off the cat counter because Blythe insists on eating Oswald’s wet cat food with her paw but then the pâte gets stuck on her claws so she ends up flipping food all over the laundry room. True story.

Mostly, it’s that when our lives are full of people who matter, sometimes we end up feeling a little worn out. Or a lot worn out. I’ve heard it both ways.

Here’s the thing I’m learning: some things are worth the wear.

I love my husband and our five kids. Most days, I love homeschooling said kids. Other days, I have to explain the same math problem in five different ways while my child hysterically informs me that he’ll never be able to understand it.

I love taking people meals. I love re-decorating the house. I love baking cookies and bread and brownies (although the eight layer cake the twins requested for their birthday was a bit much). I love having people in my home (especially my sister). I love going running in the early mornings, watching the sun turn the desert pink. I love clean sheets and clean counters and clean towels.

I love all these things, even if at the end of the day they make me want to go to bed at seven pm and not get up again for a week.

And it is okay to acknowledge that I love all these things and that they still wear me out. As my husband likes to say, “Adulting is hard. You don’t have to love it. You just have to do it.”

And sometimes even the things we love are hard.

I think somewhere we’ve bought into the lie that if we make the right choices life will be easy, that doing the things we love should come naturally, effortlessly even.

If we’re paying attention, experience tells us otherwise. I can’t help but think of that line in The Princess Bride: “Life is pain, highness,” the man in black says so succinctly. “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

If we life fully by loving well, we open ourselves up to being hurt, we invite the possibility of pain. This is reality. When we are truly alive, there is going to be wear and tear.

This week, my mother-in-awesome was at the hospital with my husband’s twin for eleven days in a row. An hour away, one of my dear friends had two overnight hospital stays as she battled chronic illness. On the other side of the state, one of my childhood Indonesia-uncles checked into a hospital for an indeterminate amount of time after flying halfway across the world to get medical care. His family is now staying in a city they don’t know, waiting for results on tests they don’t want their husband/dad to be having to take at all.

Hospitals are exhausting, disheartening, discouraging. And not one of those people would choose to give up or give in.

The Man’s mom would never leave her son to fend for himself. My friend won’t just give up on taking care of her body. And my uncle’s family would never begrudge the care that he so desperately needs.

Each of these people put themselves in situations that will flat wear them because they love passionately, and that means they would rather give up comfort and sleep and time and decent meals than give up on their son or their father or their husband or even their own bodies.

Most of us won’t have to count the cost in the same way. At least not yet.

But we still see the repercussions of the choices we make in our every day lives.

I love my family, therefore I’m going to go make Tiny his birthday cinnamon bread right now (even though I’d rather go to bed).

I love teaching, therefore I’m going to put the time in to lesson plan until my fingers are multicolored from color-coded pens and my back aches from bending over my lesson planner.

I love my husband and my friends and my home and, yes, even this base, so I’m going to do what I can to serve well and purposefully (and sometimes that means knowing when to knock off, take a bath, and decompress).

The things we love will wear us out, so we learn to choose wisely. We learn to prioritize. We learn to give grace. We learn to ask for love for the things that matter—because otherwise, how will they be worth the sacrifice of our time, our energy, our bodies?

So I’m asking, as we start off this year, what do you love?

Is it worth the wear?