I’m no athlete, but occasionally I think back to gym class, and to that brief period when I ran cross-country. I remember the times when I or a friend would stumble and fall, maybe twist a knee or an ankle. I remember those flashes of pain and the thought of, “There goes the rest of today…” as I wondered if I was really injured.

And I remember my teacher or coach saying what I imagine we’ve all heard a teacher or coach saying: “Walk it off. Come on, get back up. Get moving. You’ll be fine.”

I hated hearing that. Am I the only one? In the moment when that pain is still fresh and sometimes throbbing, that command made it feel…inconsequential. Unimportant. Like what I felt was being trivialized.

And you know what made it worse? That more often than not the coach was right. A few minutes of walking, and the pain ebbed.

We hear the same thing after something like a surgery, though from a different authority and in a different way. There’s no question of the gravity of the situation. Which means that the advice isn’t just to separate true injury from minor hurt–it has a far more important purpose. After something like this, our doctors and therapists give the same advice, “Get up, get moving,” because they know through scads of scientific data that it’s necessary to healing.

The longer we lie there, unmoving, the harder it is to move.
The longer we let ourselves drift, the harder it is to get going.
The longer we don’t, the harder it is to do.

When I look back over my last few years, I keep thinking, “It’s been a lot.” My family has dealt with life-changing diagnoses (both my own and everyone else’s), mental health challenges, treatments that knock me flat, surgery upon surgery upon surgery, job loss, moving publishing companies, graduating two kids…yeah. A lot.

And I’ll be honest. There have been some days in those years when the last thing I wanted was to hear “Walk it off. Get back up. Keep moving.” There have been days when I just wanted to not. When I wanted to curl up and just…do nothing. Days when I don’t want to read, I don’t want to watch TV, I don’t want to work, I don’t want to anything. Days when life just feels so hard that what I really want is a little break from it all.

Sometimes, for an hour or two, that’s fine. Take a nap. Take a walk. Sit in silence. Sometimes, that’s exactly the respite our souls need.

Then, it’s time to get up again. To move. To do.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who’d lost property to wildfires. Her parents had lost her childhood home, and she’d just learned that her father once again has a tumor in his brain. It’s a lot–I could certainly commiserate with that, and did. And then she said something that stuck with me: “I KNOW you understand. More than anyone else I know, you have been through an insane amount and STILL KEEP GOING. I know a lot of folks who have suffered, but the amazing difference with you is how much you just keep going. I admire you deeply and the courage that you display.”

That phrase kept coming back to me: still keep going. And as the words play through my head, I remember those moments over the last few years when I thought, “I’m so tired. I just want to…not. I don’t want to do anything. Nothing. I want to stop for a minute.”

Sometimes, when those moments hit, I just walk into the living room and sit on the couch. I close my eyes. And I soon realize that “nothing” holds no allure. It doesn’t help the overwhelm. It doesn’t revive the tired. It doesn’t fill the places that feel empty. So, instead, I follow that annoying advice from my middle school gym teacher, and I get up.

Walk it off. Get back up. Keep moving.

Now, that doesn’t mean just return to the hamster wheel. But it does mean return to the WORK–and by “the work” here, I mean the work we do for the kingdom, for the Lord. Maybe that means cooking a meal for our family. Maybe it means answering emails. Maybe it means writing a book. Maybe it means nursing others who are sick. Maybe it means teaching. Maybe it means offering a smile to someone in a checkout line. Maybe it means tending the earth and watching things grow. Or maybe, when energy permits none of those, it means sitting with the Word. Maybe it means praying. Maybe it means sitting with a loved one and talking, or just being there with them and loving them.

I don’t know what your work is. But I know that mine calls to me even in those moments of respite. I’m not good at being idle–but I will tell you that for me, intentional rest is for a purpose, and that’s to refill my creative wells so that I can continue pouring myself into my work. My writing. My designing.

Why? Because it matters.

And because it matters, it’s worth doing even when the doing is hard.

Back in sailing days, when a ship was out at sea and the wind stopped blowing, it was called “the doldrums.” I loved learning that phrase back in high school, because it’s such a perfect metaphor for some days or seasons, isn’t it? When the wind’s gone out of our sails. When going, moving, doing seems impossible because we’re lacking that force that usually speeds us on. But there was another phrase from this same era: “to sail by ash breeze.”

Ash was the wood that oars were often made of. The meaning here is that, when there’s no wind in your sails, you make the force yourself. You pick up the oars. And you move.

Don’t wait for circumstances to change–change the circumstances yourself by changing how you participate in them.

It was just about a year ago that I got the phone call that told me I had a tumor in my brain. We were at the office, packing up copies of Love in the Castle Library, which would release the next day. After getting the news, after telling my husband and crying over it, for a long moment I just stood there in his arms.

He asked something like, “What do you want to do right now? Go home? We can do this another day.”

I didn’t have to think about it long. “No,” I said. “Let’s finish up. The books still need to go out.”

He thought I was a little crazy. But I wasn’t.

Because the books still needed to go out–they represented work I believed in, work that needed to be done. Readers eagerly awaiting that story, an author who was depending on us. So I chose to obey the old advice. Get up. Keep moving. Not because it was trivial but because it wasn’t. Not because it’s what I felt like doing, but because it was what I had decided beforehand to do, and this news didn’t change the importance of it.

And it’s what I’ve been doing since then too.

I keep moving. Not because there’s no value in stillness (we all need rest!), but because the work is still good and still needs to be done. I keep moving, not in an attempt to strive and struggle my way past the circumstance, but because the circumstance doesn’t change the fact that God has blessed me with gifts and then calls me to steward them. I keep moving because I’m called to run the race until I reach the finish line, and that is, I pray, still a long way off–so I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

It’s okay not to do in every moment, every hour, every day. Of course it is. There are limitations that do come with the things we go through. But even in those times, we can still do something.

Find that something. Take it in your hands. And get up. Keep moving.

Your circumstances might not change…but then, they might. Because you will.

I live in the Appalachian Mountains (the part that pronounces it APP-uh-LAY-shun, not LATCH-uhn, thank you). My house is in the middle of a forest, trees towering all around. Here, we can track the drift of the seasons quite easily, as leaves first bud in a splendor of white and yellow and pink, then spread a curtain of brightest green over the hillsides, then darken to emerald, then move into a fire of red and orange and yellow, then drift away into brown and the gray of bare limbs.

Those changing seasons never fail to make me smile in appreciation. But they’re a slow crawl, over the course of the year. The landscape doesn’t do rapid changes–and if it does, it’s usually a bad thing. Trees downed by a storm, gullies carved by a flood.

The other day, though, as my husband and I were walking the beach during our vacation, I realized that one of the reasons I love escaping to a place like this for my holiday is because literally every morning, it’s new.

The tides are constantly changing, and changing the beach with it. One day it will be still and calm, the tide will be out, and the beach will be wide and solid and undisturbed. The next day, the waves will be frothing, the wind will be whipping, wiping out any hint of human footprints, and the tide will be carving cliffs into the sand. When we set off from our rented house, we can see glimpses of the ocean from our upper decks, but we have no idea what the beach will look like. Not until we trek along the wandering path over the dunes, evading cacti and burrs and swatting at mosquitos, and then finally emerge into the loose sand.

Will the beach be wide or narrow today? Is the tide in or out? Soft sand or hard? Windswept clean or still bearing yesterday’s footprints? 

It’s new. Every morning, it’s new. And if you stay down there long enough, you can watch it renew itself with every surge of the tide in and draw of it out. And as I walk the waterline, those verses fill my head each and every time. 

“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.”
~ Lamentations 3:22-23 (ESV)

Perhaps it’s strange that I ponder the steadfastness of the Lord thanks to a landscape that’s ever-shifting. Perhaps something as capricious as a tide shouldn’t make me think about His faithfulness. Or maybe it’s the contrast that makes the truth so bright.

Maybe it’s because, as ever-changing as this landscape is, it’s also everlasting in its changes, a cycle that doesn’t stop. And isn’t that like the Lord? He doesn’t always speak to us in the same ways, He doesn’t always answer prayers in the way we expect Him to, He doesn’t always give us the same thing in each season…but He’s always there. Always working. So big that He holds the universe in His palm, so exact that He knows how to speak to each heart in the way that will best help us.

His love never stops. And while in some seasons we might sense it like those towering trees or rolling mountains–always there, surrounding us–I think quite often we experience His love like a tide. Sometimes it’s surging high, sometimes our perception of it ebbs. But like the tide, it’s always there, always cycling, always moving. Like the tides, it never ends.

And like the landscape carved by those tides, we can let Him make us new every morning, just as His mercies are.

I love that these verses are from Lamentations, a book literally about grieving and mourning and calling out to the God that hasn’t forsaken His people, even when His people have forsaken Him. It’s in the midst of those tears that the prophet gives us this promise.

Great is His faithfulness. Morning by morning, new mercies are there for us to behold.

What do they look like today in your life?