Before We Settle into Inward Weariness...
Out my window they were singing again this morning, those little birds that deliver sermons without words. They were singing once more, persistently and full throttle, absolutely tireless in their refrains.
And it pierced my heart again, pierced right through the heavy weariness that had somehow crept in, unexpectedly. Songs from little bursting breasts convicting me that weariness is never warrant for stifled songs. Weariness is not something we're to sink into but to sing through.For, as their songs remind me, the Lord is not weary.
The Snare of Weariness
Sometimes we fight big fights in our spiritual lives and win vast victories only to find that after the giant wars are still the subtler and the less dramatic. Inward weariness is one such snare.We are always at war and the enemy of our souls cares not whether we lose our inner fire in a single moment or over slow decades, employing even our stooping shoulders as his strategy.
Weariness. It’s such an insidious intruder because we feel its company is so justified. After what I’ve faced? After what I’ve seen? After what I’ve walked through? Of course I’m weary, we counsel ourselves. Of course the Lord would sympathize and understand how I feel, we reason.And we sink into the shadows like they’re our reward.But these shades of weariness are not our reward. He is. And He is anything but weary.
The One Who Never Wearies
When Jesus steps into the room, His very being utterly contradicts our fainting souls. He is the least weary person alive with eyes shining vibrancy and gushing life. I search those eyes only to find torrential, swelling, profuse life in every direction – entirely challenging my inward weariness.
I bring my lists of what it tiring me, long as I imagine they are, and He looks at me steadily, unmoved.My weariness is not fruit of strenuous circumstance but fruit of disconnectedness from these Eyes.
In His eyes we see the everlasting God who never wearies, with understanding unsearchable (Is. 40:28). Yes, the One who searches the deep and understands all things is paradoxically the least weary person alive. And that’s just it. We stoop and stagger beneath what we know and what we’ve seen, and the more we know of life and the world, the heavier our burden and more weary our legs beneath us. Even with one another, our familiarity with those we’re closest to can set in like a heavy weight. We think we have a right to weariness because of our lists of what we've known and seen.
Then Jesus steps in and our sentiments flee. He alone searches the underbelly of all things, knowing what lies at the ocean floor of wickedness and what is hidden in the deepest treasuries of His goodness -- and all that lies in between. He knows the end from the beginning of the story with understanding unsearchable. And, unlike us, even with all of this knowing, He never grows tired or faints.
The Man who is a Crossroads
Every sight of that Man who bore that cross is a crossroads for the soul. The fact that He Himself possesses not a trace of inward weariness and my own soul is hunched over beneath the burden of faintheartedness is in itself a crossroads. And I hear Him so tenderly appeal to me,
Why have you befriended something so foreign to Me? Why have you opened your door to such a thief?
Always compassionate, He knows a foe when He sees one. His compassion is not directed toward my harbored weariness—the nursing of this faintheartedness. Rather, He looks compassionately toward my forgetting to keep steady my gaze into His eyes, the One who renews the fainthearted with one word and one look of His eye.
It isn't that we're never to grow tired. It's that when we do, we're not to accept it as our portion but to lock eyes with our unwearied Lord and be renewed.
I don’t have to know what He knows. I don’t have to understand what He understands. It is enough for me that He knows all things and is not weary. And as the little messengers outside my window remind me, an uplifted heart and gaze upon Him is all I need.
And then He does what He alone can do. He takes little lives that wait upon Him with expectation and He imparts His own abounding life to them. He fills them with songs way beyond themselves--with an endurance far exceeding them--contradicting the whole weary world with signs of unstoppable life....And we, His beloved ones, mount up with wings of breathtaking flight.
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.
Is. 40: 28-31