I am really struggling today. I could blame it on fatigue because our neighbourhood mosque has really beefed up their P.A. system for Ramadan and the local Marabout is either preaching or playing Arabic music until 11pm and then the kids are sent out with pots and pans at 4 am so that people can eat before sunrise.

Or it could be the adrenaline marathon that I have been running for the last couple of months between taking courses, hosting a team from Canada, running a leadership retreat, getting the boys back in school and finishing my course work. (I am too tired to even appreciate that I did well on my courses.)

Or it could be the emotional rollercoaster of dealing with a seventh grader’s anxieties about starting into “high school” (middle school and high school are combined in one building here) coupled with the realization that life is so cheap here if you or someone dear to you has a heart attack the cardiac clinic will admit you to watch you die. (Maybe that is just the reminder that we are all really on God’s medical plan no matter how much we would like to hide behind the wonders of medical science and technology.)

Or it could be the concern of school starting and there still not being a teacher for my fourth grader’s class—we are blessed that there is a temporary solution filling the gap for the first few weeks, but we could really use prayer for the right person to come.

I guess I could really use a vacation but I don’t really feel like I deserve one having let all my regular duties slip while I covered “extras” in the last couple of months. Not to mention, that it really isn’t going to happen anyway because of travel warnings in country and the increase expense of visas and travels out of country.

I can relate to the Psalmist:

Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell. Then will I go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him my Savior and my God. Ps 43:3-5

It is so good to know that we aren’t alone in our struggles and that we don’t have to stay there.