Saints, I am, like many of you, fatigued. The stress of ordinary, mundane life is enough to make one feel weary. Throw in that many of us are undergoing additional stresses that come with health concerns (our own or those of a loved ones), financial worries, or relational tensions. Then pile on with a pandemic that not only has threatened our physical well-being but also our communal life together (both as a church and in the wider community), and it is no wonder that our hearts cry out, ‘Enough!”

In times like these, I have to go to others to find the words to express what is going on in my internal life. Tish Harrison Warren in her New York Times weekly column (it’s behind a paywall) addresses this sense of fatigue, drawing from C.S. Lewis.  She writes,

Some of this feeling is compassion fatigue, but some of it is plain old fatigue. In C.S. Lewis’s classic book “The Screwtape Letters”, a demon named Screwtape is coaching his nephew on how to effectively tempt and damn his “patient”, an Englishman. “To produce the best results from the patient’s fatigue,” Screwtape writes, “you must feed him with false hopes.”

He encourages his nephew to assure the “patient” that his hardship is nearing an end:  “Exaggerate the weariness by making him think it will soon be over.”  He diabolically instructs him to “let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it ‘for a reasonable period’ - and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last.”

Here’s Lewis’s point:  Fatigue can produce either impatience and anger or gentleness and kindness. But add disappointment to our fatigue - that sense that we cannot go on any longer and we thought we wouldn’t have to - and we become the worst versions of ourselves.

“It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger,” Screwtape says, “but unexpected demands on a man already tired.”

We’ve all borne a lot of demands over the past 18 months. And we’ve had it. No more.

I don’t know about you but that sums up much of my thoughts and feelings as of late. Warren goes on to discuss the questions that plague us:  about schools, health care, gatherings, mandates, surges, variants, etc. The fatigue and the questions are like a bright light that shows us clearly the hard truth that life is always uncertain and our control over what happens to us is actually quite small and weak. That is part of being human. But if we look closely, there is evidence that God is at work. There are pockets of joy to be found if we will, in faith, lift our weary heads and eyes off all the gloom. But that is the way of the Christian. Our whole story is one of that strange mixture of joy and sorrow.

So what do we do when the suffering seems to continue with no end in sight? I leave you with Warren’s conclusion.

We grieve. We admit we are worn out. We do what we can to help...we take up the practices of patience and perseverance amid uncertainty. Perseverance isn’t simply a “grin and bear it” stoicism, much less a call to deny our frustration, disappointment or anxiety about what lies ahead.

Instead, the Book of James presents perseverance as an artist, with our own souls as its medium. Perseverance, James writes, must “finish its work in us” that we might become “mature and complete.” It forms and shapes a kind of wholeness in us that comes as a gift:  We don’t know what the next hour brings, but God can be trusted because we’ve glimpsed the end of the story. So now, in the present tense, with all its grief and frustrations, we can bear whatever comes to us, even if it lasts longer than we’d hoped.