My yoke is easy and my burden is light

As I went to turn my light off, I saw Jesus looking at me from his crucifix, and his mother as well, with a soft smile, from a pastel portrait detail of an image known as Guadalupe.  I keep them by my light switch for a reason.
I gave a second glance this evening.  They were telling me something, so I stopped to listen briefly and kiss them goodnight.  "Be at peace.  Do not worry," she, and her son, said with smile more generous than her usual.

About sleep, she meant.  I have been going to bed late for a couple weeks now, and getting used to that pre-6am rise, and I am the most inglorious unrested person I have ever met.  I am working on it.  But, and I don't know if you can relate, when I get more and more behind on sleep, especially if I have significant responsibilities that require my being well-rested for adequate performance, such as teaching, my stress increases, my concentration decreases, and, in anxiety, nothing happens in the end about the sleep while my professional life seems to fall into a heap.




Brother Lawrence talked about once conceiving a great reverence for God in faith, and his subsequent spiritual life was all very simple and sweet thenceforth.  He simply worked to love God and remain in His presence.

I finally begin these days to understand something of "my yoke is easy and my burden light."  I am only required to do what God asks of me to do.  Not what I ask of me to do, not what my boss asks of me to do, not what I perceive my classmates or co-workers want me to do.  And doing only what God wants, really, is often incredibly sweet, and easy, and light, because of his support and his mercy.  Maybe it's in there, but there are those tastes when I let it all go except loving Him, and I taste that "peace that surpasses all understanding."  The anxieties about the rest fall away.  St. Paul in the Scriptures and countless saints after him exhort us to have no worries and remain at peace.  Padre Pio says, "pray, hope, and don't worry."  "God can only work in a heart at peace," Father Jacques Philippe writes.

And so it is.  Though I am exhausted.  Poorly timed 4 days before my 3rd graders will arrive needing to be caught up 2 to 3 grade levels in 1 year's time.  Still, my only commission is to remain at peace about my deficit and my weakness.  Because God can work in a heart at peace - even a very tired one - and my obligations to my 3rd graders comes only after that.  How sweet to be simple and surrendered enough to not be anxious, and let God come in, and do His thing.  Maybe he will help me get to bed on time tomorrow night.