What to Do When You Get Halfway Through The Day and Want to Give Up

Don't.

Photo by Hendrik Kespohl on Unsplash

So, you started your day well. You got off on the right foot for once. You prayed, read your Bible, exercised (maybe), drank some coffee, and ate breakfast. And you feel generally good about the way things are headed. So you get dressed for life, suit up and launch out into the World. Maybe at first things continue to go well. You get in The Zone at work or in school, working on a project with hyper-focused and creative abandon, a sense of joy and purpose. Your colleagues are impressed by both your work ethic and your spirit of comradery. This is very nice.

All this movement and productivity and meaningfulness has prevented you from falling into various maladaptive coping mechanisms that usually trip you up and certainly trip up your colleagues: smartphones, doomscrolling, addictions, gossiping, and so on. So there’s layers to your feeling of moral satisfaction right now. Not that you are gloating or feeling self-righteous, but it does appropriately feel good to know that you have avoided certain moral pitfalls.

So anyway, it’s a really nice day and you’re feeling fulfilled and meaningful and loved by God and loving to your neighbor and then WHAM!

It hits you.

You get a medical bill in the mail informing you that you accidentally saw a doctor, repeatedly, outside the insurance network, and so all the bills will not be covered, totalling into the thousands (not speaking from experience here. Totally hypothetical).

Or you get into a conversation with someone and say something really stupid, and try as you might to correct the stupid remark, you can’t quite salvage your tongue’s decision. And it gnaws at you.

Or some utterly trivial, insignificant thing out there in the universe will remind you of something traumatic or at least troubling in your past or your mind, and before you know it, your mind is off to the races spinning out infinite numbers of What If? scenarios or replaying bad situations or agonizing you with worst case possibilities. And you can’t make your head stop.

Or you have a conversation with someone who’s leaving the faith and you know there’s nothing you can really say to them or do for them except pray and love them and that feels so insufficient, even though it’s terribly powerful. And you come away feeling helpless and powerless.

Or you are scrolling on social media and you see an absolutely horrendous account of child abuse and neglect written about in a local newspaper and you feel like your gut and your heart and maybe your soul will never recover.

Or a billion other scenarios. I’m seriously tempted to keep running them out. But I’ll stop. The point is, life hits you with all these things that just slam you. When you think you’re having a perfectly healthy, blessed day and then it all seems to come crashing down. Your health fails, your mental health fails, your spiritual health falters, your relationships are tested, your virtues are tried, and so on. And when these times come, and they do, (they keep coming, in my experience) the chief question is what to do.

One response, one I am most inclined to, is the turtle response. To pull my head into my shell and pray to God for rest. Oh, I’ll pray to God for the particular circumstances that are bothering me, too. But that will be the extent of my action. Beyond that, I freeze and huddle and hide and wait and hope and pray that tomorrow things will be better. That I’ll wake up and the mental clouds will be gone. The medical billing will sort itself out. The relationships will resolve their tensions, and so on. This, in my experience, is rarely how things turn out. Occasionally, in the case of mental health conditions and physical exhaustion or illness, a good rest is precisely what we need. There’s something valuable to be said for that. But most things in life are not reset at midnight. They linger. And often enough, I’ve had my own mental demons haunt me through the night as much as through the day, giving me no relief even in sleep.

Besides, there’s another majors problem with the turtle response. It assumes that it’s morally justified to throw the rest of today away if the challenge is hard enough. And I don’t think that’s true. Now, I’m leery of those who would too flippantly claim that we must treasure every single moment of being as sacred in an intense act of mindfulness. I think we have grace to relax and delight in existence leisurely. Yes, we should take seriously the passage of time and count our days, but we should not make time so holy that we feel a sense of guilt if we don’t efficiently feel the sacredness of every moment.

In any case, my point here is that in the tension between a flippant disregard for the gift of time and the over-sacralization of time lays a morally responsible use of time to God’s glory. Which means, among other things, that when you get stuck, as I have many times, in the middle of the day, and tempted to throw up your hands and call for a redo tomorrow, your obligation is to find some way to crawl forward, as best you can. Sometimes that crawling might look pitiful to an outsider. Very well, that’s not theirs to judge. Your judge is Christ. Your task is faithfulness. Start crawling. Do the next thing.

And as I’ve stressed in my writing before, in On Getting Out of Bed and in many articles, this must start practically. Getting up, eating, calling a friend or pastor or therapist or all of the above, going for a walk, showering, exercising (so I’ve heard), watching a favorite sitcom or movie, and so on. Taking action. And ideally, taking action that aligns with what you would be doing if you weren’t weighed down. If you had planned to finish a project, finish it anyway. What’s the worst that can happen? You fail? Perhaps, but you will have made a good go of it, and that will be valuable. Were you intending to go out with friends? Don’t cancel your date! Go out anyway, even if you feel anxious. Carry your anxiety with you. You may find that it dissipates while you fellowship. And if it doesn’t, well, you were going to be anxious anyway. This way you did something you valued while being anxious. That takes courage.

I don’t write all these things from a position of sage old counsel, as one who has mastered all this. As I said earlier, I struggle with the turtle response many times, which betrays a lack of courage, a timidity in me that I am working to expunge with the work of the Holy Spirit.

Each of us will experience these days many times through our lives. And we need to be ready with a mindset of resilience and flexibility. If we assume that our joy, courage, and confidence is dependent upon our day going well—on God blessing us in these obvious ways—then we will be crushed and disappointed when the inevitable challenges come our way. Cultivating resilience and flexibility (which are based on the virtue of courage), allow us to face these challenges trusting that God’s love doesn’t go away when suffering comes. His blessings are eternal. We can have hope in his promises that this present suffering is worth enduring, for he works all things together for our good, as hard as that is to believe at times. So we cling to hope, and don’t beg for night, but accept each moment of the day as a gift.