How to Renew Your Faith When Youre Dangerously Tired

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At the beginning of the month or week, we’re excited with the prospects of a fresh start. We make goals and resolutions and promise to be more organized, more involved, more productive, more, more, more.

But as the days goes along, most of us have long forgotten those things or we’ve become tired of trying. Maybe we aren’t seeing the progress we want to see. Maybe our prayers don’t seem to be answered. Maybe we’re just rundown. Maybe the last few days have just been hard.

The first thing everyone will tell us to do is to keep going and to keep fighting the good fight, but how do we practically keep moving our feet each day? After all, it isn’t easy to keep going if we aren’t seeing our prayers answered and we’re tired of feeling sick or sad or whatever it is that’s draining us.

We drink more coffee. Our bodies ache during the day. We make it to bed exhausted and we hope for more energy in the morning. Maybe we’re too tired to pray. Maybe we’re just tired of praying the same thing and not getting an answer. Here are four ways to push through the fatigue of everyday life and to keep honoring God daily.

Say Thanks

Even if you’re already having a rough year, there are a dozen small moments where God showed up in your life— in friendship and coffee, in laughter and dinners, in movies, in music and so on.

Count your blessings seems like an overused things to say, but it’s a good way to make this year and your days purposeful. Thank God for the spotted moments of grace, the good days and the smiles. You want this year to be remembered as orchestrated by God and not just something “to get out of.” Hold onto those moments. Say thanks for those days because they were God’s way of loving you in the midst of trial.

An easy way to do this is to start a blessings journal where you track even the smallest blessing from your day, even if it was just the hot cup of coffee in your favorite mug. A blessings journal allows you to look back and see that although you may feel physically and emotionally drained, God is lifting you up each day in big and small ways. That gives us the motivation and the energy to keep going and to keep fighting.

Celebrate

It’s easy to rush through the day and get it over with so you can start fresh, so you can “get more rest,” but instead, let it linger. Just as you gave thanks for those small moments of grace, celebrate rest. It may not always be a perfect rest. It may be interrupted by pets or babies or noise, but celebrate the few hours of rest that God allows because he created rest for us to enjoy and not just so we could be more productive citizens. Rest is a gift.

Also celebrate the successes in each day, just like the blessings journal. Celebrate the joy. Our lives are purposeful, not just passing. You may not feel like celebrating after a trying day, but laughter and joy from friends and family is an easy reminder that God is in control of our lives.

Have Faith

If God doesn’t seem to be answering your prayers, know that He is still there and still listening. Have faith that God is molding you into the person He wants you to be, and that might mean going through some rough times. But you’re not alone in that.

Remember that a person who exercises wants to quit because they’re tired but if they don’t, if they hang on for one more mile, they become stronger and faster. That’s exactly how our growth as a Christian works.

Have faith that God is pulling you through these hard moments as a measure of his greatness and a testament to His plan. This isn’t just for you to “get through.” It’s for His glory. It’s easy to want to stop trying because we’re tried, but it takes more to have faith that this is a way to become closer to God and a way to love Him more.

Wait

So much about Christianity is about waiting and if you feel like you’ve been waiting for an answer, a cure, a break— know that God delivers.

It’s easy to want to give up on waiting on God because it is tiring to hold fast to God. It is tiring to pray the same prayers. It’s draining to be physically sick and needing a cure. Keep waiting and don’t give up hope. God is faithful in waiting and His timing, His answers, are never late. Know that He has an answer for you even if you don’t see it yet.

We hear this a lot in Christianity, that we need to wait on the Lord, and it’s a hard lesson to learn, but it’s also a sweet one. It’s a way to come to God daily and rely on his grace daily because we are expectant. We are hopeful. We are waiting.

David writes in Psalm 130: “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in His word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning.”

That’s the kind of waiting we should strive for. It will take our whole body. It will be tiring. It will be more than even the watchmen do, but that’s how it should be done.