45 A SICKLY SABBATARIAN Heidie Raine I get stress sick. More eloquently diagnosed, at the end of every major season of my life, the culminating blows of final exams and state meets reduce me to spiked fevers, puke buckets, and a Benadryl-induced slumber. It’s a tradition I’ve grown accustomed to, knowing not to schedule anything for the first weeks of Christmas breaks or summer vacations. I will inevitably be cocooned into bed, tissues crumpled about, melted popsicles staining my wrinkled sleep shirt underneath sweat-strung sheets. It’s my body’s reset button—a systematic recharge. Self-imposed exhaustion splintering into ailments. Endurance: purged. Equilibrium: restored. The weekend following my junior speech season, I blocked out a Saturday to go prom dress shopping. I awoke that Friday to nausea beating in my gut, temples throbbing at the rattle of the fan. Even so, it was the only free time I had. 24 hours after my face went flush and my intestines began to curdle, I found myself in the passenger seat of my mother’s black suburban, swallowing teaspoons of applesauce on our way to the shop. I left with a gown too small for my normal figure but sized perfectly for my particularly trim, still-puking-skinny frame. The dress barely zipped on prom day. I often contrast myself against my healthier peers, wondering how they can welcome spontaneous Waffle House runs and embrace the penalties of late assignments, shrugging off forgotten meetings with apathy, leaving each season rich in memories and adequate in performance. I scrutinize them, hard, viewing their slothfulness as the gravest sin. So I flee it. When people ask how my day has been, I respond by regurgitating the checklist of all I’ve accomplished, determining my mood by what tasks remain. And then months later, I toil as Robitussin streams through my system, agonizing to capitalize on the free time by finally reading Jane Eyre as my vision blurs sideways. I do not nap. It’s a waste of time. * * * At a missions conference I attended in 2018, John Piper spoke on the balance of work and rest. He shared the words of nineteenth-century preacher Robert Murray McCheyne who worked himself to a preemptive deathbed at 29 by destructively, unrelentingly, ministering and studying. McCheyne uttered his famous ‘horse quote’ days before his death, which reads: “God gave me a message to deliver and a horse to ride. Alas, I have killed the horse, and now I cannot deliver the message.”
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