It is Labor Day in America.
Labor Day here comes in September. Back home in Kenya, we celebrate it in May, and 1st May has always carried another little flag in my heart because it is also the date of my parents’ wedding anniversary.
This year, they celebrated fifty years together.
Fifty.
Five whole decades of choosing one another through whatever life decided to throw at them.
But that is not actually my point.
My point is that today, on Labor Day of all days, I woke up late.
And I mean properly late.
I slept until the sleep was finished in my eyes.
No alarm winning a wrestling match with me. No dragging myself through the first five minutes of consciousness trying to remember what planet I was on.
I simply woke up.
And immediately, the part of me that believes every crisis requires Caroline to report for duty tried to clock in.
We are in deep trouble over a few things right now, and my natural tendency is to wake up and start solving.
Call somebody.
Write somebody.
Calculate something.
Google something.
Make a plan.
Make a second plan in case the first plan dies before lunch.
Run.
But this morning I told myself:
No running.
You missed the 5:00 a.m. prayers.
Take an hour now and speak to God.
So before I began fighting circumstances, I decided I would first fight in prayer.
Cancel every plan of the enemy.
The plan for hopelessness.
The plan for fear.
The plan that whispers that because I cannot see what comes next, what comes next must therefore be terrible.
The plan for an unexpected future that has God mysteriously edited out of it.
So I pulled my legs off the bed.
This was important.
Because I knew that if any part of my body remained horizontal for too long, there was a very real possibility that this spiritual retreat would become another sleeping session.
And now that would not be resting.
That would be laziness wearing a prayer shawl.
I planted both feet firmly on the floor.
If I had three feet, all three of them would have been planted there.
Of course, my brain had a perfectly reasonable scientific argument.
You need more sleep.
You went to bed around four in the morning.
You were doing your teenager’s hair in a style you had no idea your hands possessed the creativity to produce.
You are supposed to sleep eight hours.
You have barely had six.
All true.
And on top of that, the hairstyle had somehow become the birthplace of a terrible argument between me and her father.
You know those arguments that begin somewhere around hair and, before anybody understands what happened, have travelled through seventeen unrelated subjects, crossed two international borders and are now threatening the Constitution?
That kind.
It went south.
Very south.
We all went to sleep hurt.
Nobody talking to anybody.
And in the morning, even though my body wanted more sleep, my internal clock had already woken up because I am accustomed to being up at five.
So I sat before the Lord.
When I have a dream that I believe carries discernment, I normally go back through that dream in prayer.
I pray over every part of it.
I cancel what needs to be cancelled.
I receive whatever instruction needs to be received.
But above everything else, I pray that the Lord will align me and my family with His will.
His ancient paths.
His way.
Not simply give us what we want, but lead us where He wants us.
And somewhere in that hour of prayer, I knew something very clearly.
George and I had to talk.
We could not stay where we had gone to bed.
Angry.
Wounded.
Silent.
There are moments when silence is wisdom.
And there are moments when silence is dangerous.
This was dangerous.
The day before, I had watched The Impossible, the film about a family caught in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Watching that family being torn apart by water, bodies injured, buildings collapsing, people disappearing, death everywhere—and yet each of them desperately searching for the others—did something to me.
And I felt the Holy Spirit pressing a strange picture into my heart.
Imagine, in the middle of that tsunami, one spouse suddenly saying:
“Before we continue looking for the children, I would like us to discuss something you did three years ago.”
No.
Even if the matter was legitimate, this was not the moment.
Even if someone had cheated.
Even if somebody had been terribly hurt.
When the other person is barely holding onto a tree while an ocean is carrying houses past them, this is probably not the time to open the adultery file.
Why?
Because in that moment, there is a greater emergency.
Survive first.
Find the children.
Hold my hand.
Do not let go.
And suddenly I could see us.
The issue that had exploded between George and me was real.
The hurt was real.
But compared to some of the waters our family is presently trying to cross?
It was a distraction.
That word landed heavily.
Distraction.
For several days we had been praying fervently together.
Seeking God.
Standing together.
Fighting hopelessness with Scripture.
Trying to hear the Lord clearly.
And suddenly we were too hurt to pray together.
Too offended to speak.
Too bruised to reach across the bed.
Prayer is intimate.
Unity is intimate.
A family seeking God together becomes a unit.
And if the unit can be fractured, everybody becomes easier to fight individually.
I sat there after praying for about an hour.
Then I noticed something.
The snoring had stopped.
😂😂
The man was awake.
Now came another spiritual battle.
I had to speak first.
Pride, unfortunately, has not yet received the memo that it is supposed to be completely dead in me.
Sometimes I think it has died, only for it to sit up suddenly like someone in a Nigerian movie.
So I gathered every nerve I had.
“As the head of this family, where do you feel we should go from here?”
Time ticked.
Six years went by.
Okay, maybe not six years—but it was a long, long time.
Long enough for me to wonder whether I should check if he had heard the question.
Long enough for pride to whisper, See? This is exactly why we don’t do things like this.
So I waited.
And then he pulled me into his arms.
He kissed me.
And he prayed.
That was it.
It was around 12:30.
Nothing outside our bedroom had changed.
The problems had not disappeared.
No miraculous email had landed.
No financial mountain had dissolved.
No door had suddenly swung open.
The tension of our circumstances was still pressing hard enough that at times I felt as though it could tear every fibre inside me.
But something had changed.
We were holding each other again.
We were praying again.
We were one again.
And suddenly I understood my Labor Day assignment.
Sometimes the most important work is not running.
Sometimes the work is stopping.
Sometimes the work is apologizing.
Sometimes the work is swallowing pride.
Sometimes the work is saying, “Sweetie, we have got to talk.”
Sometimes the work is realizing that you are fighting over furniture while the house is flooding.
And sometimes the greatest act of warfare is two people who are hurt choosing to reach for each other anyway.
The Bible says:
“Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”
— Ecclesiastes 4:12
That third strand matters.
God between us.
God above us.
God holding together the places where both of us are too tired to hold on properly.
So this Labor Day, I am resting.
But I am also working.
Not the frantic work of trying to control tomorrow.
The deeper work.
The work of guarding unity.
The work of returning to prayer.
The work of refusing hopelessness.
The work of looking at the people God has placed beside me and remembering:
We are not the enemy.
We may be in a storm.
We may get knocked down.
We may cry.
We may disagree.
We may even spend a night facing opposite directions.
But we will turn around.
We will reach again.
We will look again.
We will try again.
We will pray again.
We will rise again.
And somehow, deep inside me, beneath the fear and beneath everything I still cannot fix, I know this:
We will win again.
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