If your soul feels restless and untethered, take a shower

You might be tired of everyone harping on and on about how difficult the year of our Lord 2020 has been, but the year isn’t over yet.

I sincerely hope the hits have lessened for you, friend, but they’ve only kept on coming for us. Without going into all the details of every little thing, let’s just say the last few weeks alone were more filled with blows than the whole year, or so it seemed.

At times it seems there’s nothing left that could possibly happen in this one-of-a-kind year. But if we’ve learned anything from this year, it’s how infinite the possibilities really are. So much has happened already, beyond anything we ever imagined.

It’s become a normal occurrence to feel at least a little restless and untethered. As the days stretch by I find my soul in this state of unknown more often than not.

With the uncertainty weighing on my heart for nearly nine months about what comes next. Will there even be a next, or will this state of living from six feet away be the world in which my son grows up?

It’s in the questions that we find the problem isn’t so much about the daily struggles or who’s going to change the diaper when we’re both in meetings. The problem is our focus.

One way I can tell I’m living restless and untethered is when a simple shower, a cleansing of the previous day’s troubles seems like too much. I don’t know how many days it’s been since I washed the itchy, greasy hair stuck to my head, but I can’t seem to make myself do it either.

At the start of the quarantine I’d just given birth and it’s natural to have a little dirty hair during that transition from baby on the inside to baby on the outside. I told myself every other day was fine to wash my hair. Then, it turned into every two days.

Then, three and four and five.

No one batted an eyelash or gave it any thought as I pushed my hair boundaries to their limit. But underneath it all was this thought going through my mind: It’s too much work to wash my hair. It’s too much time. It’s too much to ask for myself.

I needed to get back to mothering and other things. I didn’t have time to waste washing my hair.

I can look back, now a little removed from it, and recognize the signs that something wasn’t right. Something was off, even if just by a little, and it needed correcting before it got out of hand.

When this narrative in my head begins and I don’t put it in check immediately or very soon after, it slowly transforms. It changes from the weight of washing off, to checking my phone too often. It turns into endless scrolling and numbing behaviors to escape.

It turns into avoiding work I know I need to do, and it turns into turning away from my son when I know he wants me because it feels like it’s just too much.

When the small, big act of taking a shower, of cleansing and restoring myself of the grime and coming out fresh seems like it’s too much, everything else begins to seem like it is too. That simple shower becomes heavier and heavier.

My friend Jesus is the answer here. Jesus, who quietly and without judgement leads my tired feet to the bath. Jesus, who knows no sin and still chooses to wash my feet and soul and hair clean.

It’s in the moment my dirty hair feels like a two-ton weight stuck to my scalp that I know I need Jesus to lead me out of the cave I’m living in and into the light of His grace.

Maybe for you this looks a little different, more like letting the clutter take control of the kitchen table or countertop, or it looks like becoming so obsessed with clearing the clutter you can’t live your life until it’s gone.

Whatever way you present the problem outwardly, it is a reflection of a deeper problem where I become hyper aware of the day-to-day, minute-by-minute things and forget the bigger picture. It’s missing the forest for the trees.

Somehow, we’ve been sucked into a cycle of only focusing on the daily tasks and we’ve forgotten there is a life outside this pandemic, still to be lived.

Some days it might feel like we are still waiting for life to continue on from the pandemic, for the lost year of 2020 to finally end. But until we come to the realization that life does not stop just because we tried to press pause, the shower will continue to be too much.

I spent a lot of time this year wishing for things to be normal, and I still do. I spent a lot of time waiting for the quarantine to end, for the pandemic to end, for all the strangeness and harsh realities of this year to end, but I forgot that while I waited my life kept on moving without me.

I forgot that Jesus never wanted me to stop living in the middle of this worldwide experience. I forgot that He never left my side, I only turned away.

Let’s turn back to Jesus, friends, and remember we can’t press pause on our lives simply because the circumstances of them have grown hard and difficult and full of weeds.

Let’s wash our hair, our hands, and our souls in the goodness of God, that is ever present and unshaken.