Exhaustion

TRANSCRIPT: Good morning, Five Minute Families. I saw a social media post the other day that said, “Fight FOR your family, not WITH your family.” That sentiment is one of the reasons we bring you this devotional spot each week. We want to empower you with practical skills and suggestions to better engage with your family through the norms and storms of life. With some recent health issues, not including but complicated by the pandemic, we began to contemplate more in-depth the concept of exhaustion. Did you know that there are different types of exhaustion? And, yes, the kids can feel them too. Often, with our kiddos, we think a good nap will fix it all, and occasionally it does, but the reality is that each if us reaches different types of exhaustion at different times, and we need to be mindful of one another. Just to quickly list the five types of exhaustion we are discussing briefly today, they are: Physical Mental Emotional Social and Purpose-lost Let’s think about Elijah. In 1 Kings 19 we see that after he had prophesied for the Lord for years, through famine, battles, and drought, his life was threatened. He reached his limit. He became fearful and exhausted. What type of exhausted? Well, while the Bible doesn’t explicitly say, but we know the angel of the Lord gave him food to keep his energy up for a forty-day trip, so he was likely physically exhausted. He slept - an extra awful lot - so he was probably mentally exhausted.  Yet again, he had been the Lord’s demonstration of His awesome power, and still the people rejected God and him, so he was likely dealing with emotional and purpose-lost exhaustions. And, finally, the people he had been trying to reach day in and day out for all of his ministry as well as the people who fought against daily would have easily caused him to reach a level of social exhaustion. So, families, what does all this mean for us? How do we apply that to our everyday lives? Let’s think through five common areas families face. 1.    Stereotypic