hollowed out

I am exhausted. This evening during a session before dinner, suddenly, it occurs to me that I have nothing left to give. I've run myself ragged, I've been wrung dry.

Suddenly, weeks of giving of myself (and yes, I'll be the first to admit I do it imperfectly)--I just can't do it anymore and I'm sure I'm about to collapse. These past few days have been about goinggoinggoingoing...so much so that I haven't been able to keep track and record of my own self. I've been listening to students and walking alongside them in their processing and hardly finding time for my own--and somehow bits and pieces of myself have become lost along the way--a radioactive element decaying and losing its own parts. Unstable.

From my journal: "I'm rubbed blank. I feel like a gourd. Hollowed out. Metallic spoon--scooping out flesh."

...so...poetic.

This is the lowest point of these seven weeks, with only five days to go. I don't even feel tired. I can't feel. I just am tired. Exhaustion has overcome me--my very self. And this is the scariest thought--and the greatest lie of the devil--that God can do nothing more with me here in Kenya.




And I know now it was a lie. Because what I didn't know while I was sitting, feeling brittle and like a heap of smashed eggshells, was that that night I would stand on the beach and the wind--so gloriously and overwhelming powerful and straight from heaven--would breathe new life into me. I could not know, then, that after that, I would run around with some of the GP boys throwing rocks and dry leaves at our teammates' windows and scuttling away when they opened said windows (I'm mature, I swear).

In short, I did not know, at that point of lowness, that He would restore me to my very self--and He still is. To be restored to our selves, in the fullest and most perfect sense--that is His life's work in us.