Keeping up at camp

AARON CRANFORD — STAFF

Sure enough, after just a week with my campers, I was already starting to feel the work weighing me down. Fatigue was getting to me. I wasn’t as present for the kids as I wanted to be, and there was still a lot of the summer left. 

After just a week with my campers, I was already starting to feel the work weighing me down.

Praying has always helped me whenever I’m dealing with something in my life that seems challenging. So I began to pray about the fatigue. One way of praying that I like is to think about a passage from the Bible or Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures that gives me a more spiritual perspective. This time, the idea that helped me was “God rests in action” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, p. 519). The young kids were constantly full of energy, and it occurred to me that they never worried that their energy could be limited. It was so easy to see that their energy comes from God—an unlimited source. This helped me realize that my energy also comes from God, not from getting more sleep or working less. God is limitless, and therefore, we also naturally express limitlessness. 

During this time, I was reading all the way through Science and Health, and a passage I encountered helped take this idea even further for me: “The scientific and permanent remedy for fatigue is to learn the power of Mind over the body or any illusion of physical weariness, and so destroy this illusion, for matter cannot be weary and heavy-laden” (p. 217). I really understood that Mind, God, has absolute control over my body, and since God wasn’t giving me fatigue, I couldn’t experience it.

My energy comes from God, not from getting more sleep or working less.

This realization shattered what remained of my fear of fatigue and enabled me to continue working energetically with my campers for the rest of the summer. They had fun, and so did I.