When Can I Stop Needing So Much?

Chemo is finally done. ALL done. It will be a few weeks until I can have a test to ensure the cancer is gone and I fully expect it will be.

The depression is also gone. Every day that I make plans or march happily through an ordinary day I remember how miserable it was to be unable to do that. I recently wrote to a friend that I feel like I'm waking up after missing the last three years of my life. It feels SO good.

This morning I read a post at Church Whisperer about self-reliance and it reminded me of an unhappy thought that has crossed my mind several times in the last weeks: I am eager to be able to take care of myself. I have been depending on so many people to take up the slack - care for my kids, feed my family, encourage me when I cannot come up with any encouraging thoughts on my own - and I'm tired of it.

I feel weak and needy on Sunday mornings. I know there is strength to be gained from worship and from conversation with the kind souls there but I want to stay home and hide until I can show up on Sunday feeling put together. Everyone else seems to have it together. They don't look like enduring an hour in the pew with their kids is going to make them cry or strangle someone.

I KNOW, of course, that weak and needy is precisely how God wants us to come to Him. I know that less of me and more of Him is good. My pastor suggested once that my need is a gift to the people who are able to help me.

I suppose I am not the only one who is torn between what I know is good and what I feel like I want. Must it be so complicated?