Today is a tired day. You know those days when the mind is mud. That’s today. I have to fight off trailing into crazy-town on the tired days because the fatigue wants to trick me into believing I’ll always feel the way I do right this second. Muddy.

Additionally, I’m losing hair.

I’m in that amazing post-partum stage where about 70% of your hair decides to detach from your scalp. Super. After Luke and Lane were born, my hair fell out when we were driving from San Diego to Tahoe (were we idiots?) with our three month olds in the back seat and a breast pump plugged into the cigarette lighter. I was obsessively combing my hands through my hair, producing alarming amounts of broken-off blonde. At one point, the car was charged with the smell of breast milk and  flamin’ hot cheetos (Steve’s roadtrip food), and my black yoga pants looked like I had been holding an alpaca on my lap for hours.

I had never felt crazier.

In the face of this tired-day and my hair loss and my craziness, I am thinking of Eudora Welty’s gorgeous short story, “A Worn Path.” It is the story of elderly Phoenix Jackson walking to town to pick up the medicine her young grandson needs for a throat injury he sustained from swallowing lye some years back.

The story is a journeying story . . . trudging, progressing, facing impediments and condescension, danger, poverty, a failing mind, barbed wire.

It is also the story of persistence—of the culmination of a thousand small steps, over and over again—and the victorious rising from nothing to something (“phoenix”) that is possible when we somehow manage to keep believing. . . . even in the face of radical hair loss.

If today is a tired day for you, perhaps you might get your hands on a copy of “A Worn Path.” Consider: Trudging can be a revolutionary miracle if it’s what we can manage. Trudging can get us down the worn path to the altar of prayer, receiving God’s grace for today.

Here I am again, God. Crazy as ever. Walking the worn path of need. Walking the worn path of your love.