When You Feel Like a Punching Bag

On prayer, when things are hard and you're "supposed" to be grateful

Photo by Hugues de BUYER-MIMEURE on Unsplash

It’s Thanksgiving week, and we’re supposed to be focused on our blessings. But people, I just need to call a spade a spade. In my world, it’s been a rough year.

My life is rich and beautiful and filled with blessings, and I’ve always been pretty good at rolling with the punches. Yes, X is a true thing, but here’s the silver lining, and there’s also Y and Z to keep it all in perspective.

Also, it’s easier to roll with the punches on the big things. Big things have a tendency to help us put little things in perspective.

But this year has felt like one sucker punch after another. PLUS the minor stuff. So I feel like I’ve knocked flat by Big Stuff and am now lying on the ground. And every time I try to get up, I get stung by a bee. In the past weeks, my internal narrative sounds like this: “Are you kidding? ANOTHER hard thing? I roll with the punches as well as anybody, but this is getting out of hand!” Death by a million pinpricks. With an occasional sucker punch for spice.

For instance: my teenager was hit by a truck last week. I spent hours trying to figure out how to talk about this, because there is literally no way to say that without it sounding incredibly dramatic, and in truth, he was really, really lucky. A helmet absorbed most of the hit; he has a mild concussion and a sore neck. There are blessings all around that, but this situation seems to encapsulate the whole danged year.

Virtually everything has felt hard. Hard to write, hard to concentrate, hard to discern, hard to carve out time for the essentials. As the year has worn on, it’s even been hard to summon the emotional energy to be the support, the listening ear, to my family, the people whose health and wellness are my responsibility. I’ve been sucked dry. Bone dry.

At the same time, I’m well aware how insignificant my “big stuff” really is. The world is on fire and my suffering barely registers on the scale. Even compared to the things personal friends are dealing with.

But there’s just so MUCH of it. Objectively speaking, I can exercise my intellect and list those silver linings, those Ys and Zs. But I can’t FEEL the blessings of God.

And the worst part is that I feel myself sinking into a state of jaded, simmering resentment, a glass-half-empty world view. A state I last remember characterizing me in college, clinging to teenage angst and playing the perpetual victim.

How does one pray at a time such as this?

For the past six months, what’s kept me functional has been my nature rambles. A friend of mine, a podcast aficianado, heard someone once talk about “stacking.” You do one thing that serves multiple purposes. In my case, my rambles do triple duty as exercise, work time, and prayer/spiritual centering/soul-food time. (Maybe that’s quintuple duty?) On my author Instagram account and my author newsletter, I share photos from those rambles—the places and times I feel closest to God.

But even that was taken away this fall by the sudden onset of debilitating sciatic pain that took over a month to clear. I could barely move around my house, let alone hike or bike or kayak. I know someday my body will no longer support such activities, though I try not to think about it. But confronting it before I hit fifty was disturbing.

When I was a kid, I used to lie awake for hours with my head crammed inside my window frame, staring at the stars and the pond and talking to God. Or more accurately, AT God. I told God everything that was wrong with the world and how to fix it. Teenagers know everything, you know.

But in recent years, I acknowledged that talking at God ≠ prayer. My brain is a constant buzzing beehive, and, having tasted a drop of stillness and contemplation, I crave more. The most authentic prayer, for me, has been to shut up and be still already. It’s become the whole focus of my prayer life: BE STILL AND BE PRESENT!

Actually, I grouse a lot about our culture’s debilitating fear of emptiness and stillness—our smart phone, 24-hour-news-cycle culture, find-something-to-fill-the-dead-space culture. I think everyone needs exponentially more silence than they ever allow themselves. I believe if everyone spent more time in stillness, whether they labeled it prayer or not, the temperature of our cultural conflicts would cool down considerably. I think we as Christians spend far too much time talking AT God instead of listening TO God.

And yet.

Last week, a friend called to catch up. When I’d poured out all the gloppy hard-ness of life, she said, “You need to just tell God, ‘I need a break!’ He knows it already, anyway. Trying to hide it from him doesn’t do any good. Yell at him if you have to. But tell him.”

I thought, Huh. I guess I kind of forgot: It’s not JUST about being quiet, is it? Sometimes you DO need to talk to God. Even if it’s more like yelling at him.

So I did. And you know, there’s something cathartic about just saying the thing that needs to be said. It helps reset things.

It’s not like everything went away. I took another hit just last night. But….

Oh, who am I kidding? This is where I’m supposed to insert fill-in-the-blank platitude to wrap up a very long post in a pretty bow. But the reality is, I’m in the middle of this and I likely will be for some time to come. I don’t have any answers. I’m just here to say sometimes, things really do suck. Even on Thanksgiving week. And I stand in solidarity with those who are standing in the middle of the muck, looking for light, just like me.