Do you rest one day a week?

Here are my flowers – together. As a beautiful bouquet :-D. Aren’t they pretty?

I don’t hold firmly to not working on the Sabbath, in the sense you might initially think. I do, however, make sure Sunday is set aside for a day of rest. In this crazy, busy, social anytime of day or night culture, this is hard.

I’m not legalistic about this, but I do try really hard to keep Sunday as a day to do only what I really want. If I don’t feel like checking email, or working on the computer, or doing laundry. Then I don’t. But there are times that doing something plain, simple, and normal – like doing laundry – is relaxing to me, then I’ll do it on Sunday. Sometimes I get to Saturday morning and absolutely check-out. then my day of rest becomes Saturday. Sometimes I need two days – one to start relaxing and one to feel relaxed – when that happens, I’ve gone too long without taking a break. I’m at that point.

I actually have been here for a bit. Unfortunately there are many side effects of too much stress for me. One of them is, I am learning, the whole gluten issue is very related to stress. I have wondered if this was true for the last three weeks, this weekend it has been confirmed. When I am stressed, tired, not had enough rest, and just done. I can’t handle gluten, as in I can’t even touch it! Three weeks ago, I opened a package of cookies and moved them from their container to a plate. Over the next couple hours I remember thinking I didn’t feel great, but thought it was because it was a Friday night and I’d been at the church with lots middle schoolers. [total reason for a headache, don’t you think] Anyway, the next morning my face was puffy and my eyelids were swollen; over the last three weeks I’ve had lingering headaches, that icky all-consuming tired feeling, my elbows ache, my hands, hips, and ankles hurt; I’m crabby; my words don’t come out of my mouth correctly; and my stomach is just icky. Vince asked me repeatedly the first 3 or 4 days if I’d eaten gluten. I was sure I hadn’t but didn’t understand what my problem was, he was sure I had. I had a doctor appt and asked – she said she didn’t want to believe it was true, but she has noticed if she’s run down that gluten in the air/touching hands briefly tends to be a weak spot. I still didn’t want to believe it. Well, today is the end of the three weeks. There are symptoms & body signals I have learned that happen at 3 weeks after I get gluten. I believe it now. UGh! How dumb!!

The up side to this. I do not have a choice, I have to figure out a way to reduce stress. I don’t want to live this sensitive to gluten. It’s in too many places. I’m actually pretty excited about this. I always feel guilty for wanting to slow down; but there is a “valid” reason now. :-D.