Over the centuries, people have found God in the most troubling of times, and stories of martyrs and saints can give us great strength to get through our own lives, but goodness gracious is it hard to pray with a cold! There is a nobility of presence that we may experience in our own suffering, knowing that Jesus, who was and is God, suffered as well. There is no suffering that God does not know, and God meets us wherever we are spiritually, emotionally, physically, or mentally. And so it shouldn’t be all that difficult to pray with a stuffy nose and a bit of a headache. But for some reason, it is.

Sometimes it’s the little things that get us down more than the big things. As a priest, I have seen people face their chronic illnesses or even their deaths with courage and grace that can only come from the Holy Spirit. It seems a superhuman feat to be able to look death and suffering in the eye and not cringe and fall away. Yet I have seen, time and again, people come through some awful experiences with renewed vigor and hope, even if that experience is the realization that they will die very soon. I am constantly amazed at the strength we are given by the Holy Spirit to make it through these times.

What seems to get people down, though, are the little things: someone cutting them off on the highway, a rude person at the supermarket, a simple mistake at work, putting your foot in your mouth. Sometimes we have big regrets, but often the small ones weigh us down. A friend of mine had a bad day because his coffee maker was on the fritz. Another friend was all down in the dumps because a book’s release date got pushed back. My daughter has to go to bed at 8:30, so she had to stop playing with legos, and that was the worst thing in the world. And I can’t seem to pray, man oh man, when I’ve got a slight headache from coughing too much.

Now, it’s important to remember that many of these things are really simple problems that we can very well get over. Books get delayed, coffee makers don’t always work, and some of the work of anyone who is religious, and certainly the work of any Christian, is to die to our daily frustrations and live in the deeper waters of a calm, even faith in God. The more we pray, the more we go to God and seek out the Holy Spirit in the world around us, the less frustrating our lives become. We are “led beside still waters” as we deepen our lives with God. If I can’t pray when I’m sick, that’s fine. God is still present with me, even if I can’t feel him through the bits of coughing and sneezing. In other words: don’t sweat the small things.

But it is the small things that sometimes push us over the edge. We can sometimes handle great weights of grief and responsibility, but it’s the little things that break the camel’s back. Our lives fall apart with that one, last, final straw. That’s when we can’t take it anymore. I remember, when my children were babies, that I could get through a whole day with very little sleep, and I could manage all sorts of frustrations – as long as I had silence. If there was a dog barking, or my daughter woke up and started mumbling (not even crying), or the refrigerator made a strange noise, I would lose it. That’s what was too much. Caring for my little one during the night, well, there was a nobility and a purpose to that. But reading theology or writing a sermon, I needed complete silence or else I would freak out.

This is a lot to say that we have to be kind to ourselves. We often have grief about our own grief. I was sick the past two days – nothing serious, just a head cold – and when I tried to turn my thoughts to God, I just got a bleah feeling. And so I started beating myself up: what? You can’t even manage this? All it takes is a bit of a headache and your relationship with God is severed? Or there are times when I’m feeling great in my faith, that I’m following Jesus just fine and dandy, but someone cuts me off on the road and I’m filled with anger and resentment. Is my faith so weak that all it takes is someone in a rush to dash it all to pieces? Aren’t I stronger than that?

There’s a bit of pride there, certainly, but there’s also a bit of yearning for depth. We can beat ourselves up anew for having pride, but I think it’s more important to focus on how much we want to love God, but can’t always do so. We are human, after all, and sometimes our anger gets the best of us. We are not always in the midst of a mountaintop experience with Jesus. And I don’t know about you, but being sick makes me mighty mopey. My wife and I have a joke that we should never make important decisions about our selves and who we are as people when we’re sick or haven’t slept. None of the small stuff means, however, that we’re being unfaithful, or that we don’t have a deep relationship with God, or that we’re not being good Christians. It means that we’re human, that sometimes our fallen nature gets the best of us.

Getting through the little things isn’t about courage. We don’t need to look the little things in the eye and say, “Not today!” What we need to do is to forgive ourselves, to forgive our humanity. God’s forgiven our humanity; why can’t we?

And what does that look like? Well, sometimes it looks like apologizing to others, when appropriate. Sometimes it looks like apologizing to ourselves. Sometimes it looks simply like a silent word to ourselves that we should accept what God has already offered up to us: love without strings attached, which is grace. Maybe praying when we’re sick is harder than we expect it to be, and maybe that’s just fine. Let it be hard. In a way, that’s one of the strangely wonderful parts of life.