I am weary, O God; I am weary, O God, and faint (Proverbs 30:1).

O Lord, where am I going to find the emotional energy for today?!?  9:00 morning prayer meeting... 10:00 Life Group (knowing that one of the guys "needs to talk" through a laundry list of issues)... 12:30 telephone appointment, with some awkward international dynamics to consider... 13:30 pastors meeting, with a bunch of complicated and emotionally-charged stuff to talk about... 15:30 management meeting with one of our staffers who'll probably have a lot of heavy emotional processing to do, coming off the holidays... and then home at 18:00, dealing with my family who's going through a rough patch, emotionally, still adjusting to the post-holiday blues and post-American let-down.

I realize, of course, that this is a tremendous opportunity to serve -- to "do ministry" here in Amsterdam... But it feels like an awful lot for one day!  I'm already feeling burdened by responsibilities for leading the church into the New Year well, carrying the church's teaching load, keeping my own heart focused on the positive, encouraging others, etc... I just don't feel like I have the emotional reserves to absorb a day like the one ahead.

So I'm praying.  I'm asking for supernatural intervention.  I'm asking for GOD to carry the day -- not me.  I'm trying to apply faith... And in the meantime I keep plodding along...

This was an excerpt from an actual journal entry that I wrote earlier this month (with some of the names and details obscured, for the sake of confidentiality).  Like Agur's exasperated exclamation in Proverbs 30, I had come to the point of realization of who I was and what I could handle.  And in the face of such overwhelming circumstances, I had no other choice but to throw myself at God's mercy.  I had to drop any pretension of being powerful and in control of myself or anything else -- and I just had to cry out to God for His help.

In retrospect, I was essentially enacting the spiritual truths of Romans chapter 8, where it says, "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.  For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies... The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will... What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? ... In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us."

And you know what's crazy?  God really came through for me in surprisingly immediate ways, that day earlier this month, when I was feeling so weary and overwhelmed.  He must have known exactly what I could handle.  Both the guy who "needed to talk" and the international phone contact overslept and missed our scheduled appointments!  The staffer also ended up asking if we could postpone our first management meeting of the new year... Thus it actually ended up being a pretty manageable day.  Still full, but not overwhelming.  I really felt God's goodness that day.  I eventually got around to rescheduling all of the missed ministry opportunities and felt God's grace working through me in a lot of ways.

I guess we just have to give up sometimes and admit our exhaustion to God.  And let Him take it from there.