Exhausted my gift.

Sometimes I wonder if I have exhausted my gift. How to put this to words is past what my being is able to make visible, but in these words I grapple to adhere to the things I have thought and felt in the last years, especially the last two.

One night my freshman year at Taylor, I spooned Ivanhoes with a friend and poured out questions, asking again for direction and this friend to pray for me to pick my major -- social work or teaching. As you know by now, I went with teaching, and it was because of this night. Because God came down and anointed and called me so particularly it was undeniable.

But here I sit, five years later, and wonder if it is time for me to pack it away in a beautiful box, and put it at rest for a while. I charged into teaching full of creativity, enthusiasm, and spirit. Ready to serve, to be a catalyst of new ideas, to chime into the chorus of activity in my room, and bring love and life to my students. But now I am tired. Weak-boned. Exhausted. Ready for the chair, the corner of the room, and the sheltered place to hide.

I leave the day with a heaviness often weighting my heart. I feel myself grow an arms length from my students. I am exasperated at the thought of doing "one more thing" -- one more duty, one more class, one more study hall, one more meeting, one more activity, one more leading. I am spent. I don't know if this is just personality, or if it is me altogether. Perhaps I need more quiet in the storm, more shade from busyness and more personal time to digress. Perhaps it is me, but either way, I am spent.

In the book "Echoes" by Kristen Heitzmann, she prints the phrase "Used up by God" to adhere to the man giving everything of himself to God... and then needing time and space to heal again in the quietness, safety, and communion of God and his people's presence. He wasn't backing away from his gift, but simply spent for a time.

I wonder if this is me. If I am simply spent for a time. I am "used up by God"; I know it, I feel it, I touch it. He has juiced me with bursting colors, but also suctioned my well dry. Like Jeremiah's bones. So I wonder if it is time to step away for a while. To let my gift rest.

My gift could display in so many forms. In the classroom, the campground, the women's focus, the home, the Young Life stage, the Kenyan plain. I don't know what form next. But I know it needs a rest. Another place? Another classroom? Another setting altogether?

I am mulling in these thoughts, mucking through scenarios, and scratching through for hope. I leave my broken bones to the Lord. His breath, his spirit, may one day blow through again. But these days I am tired, my 'soul sags' (my personifying phrase echos it best), and I wait. Perhaps I have exhausted my gift for eternity, perhaps for a time, perhaps not at all and it just needs a new field to fly in. But exhausted it is, still.