The Sunday Night Funk

I don’t have research data, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person on earth to have experienced the Sunday night funk.

For most of the years that I worked, I spent the first part of Sundays in worship and then split the afternoon between rest and errands. When the evening set in, so did my funk. Here’s how it worked.

It’s Sunday night and the funk begins to edge its way in while I review the week’s calendar, finding the kinks in our collective schedules that needed special handling. “You need to pick up the kids from daycare on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.” “Thursday night, you go to meet the teacher night and I’ll make the track meet.”

The funk grows as I think about the more difficult meetings and stressful deadlines in the coming week. That pressure motivates me to open my inbox to see what new problems landed on my platter over the weekend. Maybe I can knock out a few replies, so Monday morning will be easier. Now the funk has become a heavy fog.

This would be about the time in the process that I get up and walk into the pantry. I stand there and begin my grazing. A few crackers. A handful of cereal straight out of the box. A few spoonfuls of peanut butter right out of the jar. Next I move to the refrigerator. Standing in the open doors, I begin to cool off as I eat some string cheese, surveying the leftover selection.

Now that I’ve fed the hungry funk, I can go back to the couch and work on some more emails or polish up that presentation. Except for the guilty feeling that I’m not paying enough attention to my family. Does it count as family time if we’re in the same room watching TV together while I work?

This may be a good time to mention that the Sunday night funk often infected multiple family members who weren’t ready for the weekend to end. Even the dogs seemed to sense the fun was over.

I would love to say that I conquered the Sunday night funk long before I retired. But the truth is I just found a few ways to cope with it. And here they are:

1)  Name it – by recognizing the pattern of my Sunday night bad mood, I began to call it “the Sunday night funk.”  Naming it kept me from wondering what was wrong with me.

2)   Intercept it – when I felt it creeping in, I would stop and find something different to do. Take a walk. Have a cup of a tea. Read a chapter of a book. This kept it from growing as fast.

3)   Allow it – if I fought the funk, it escalated. If I allowed it in, it dissipated. I knew it was temporary, so I could wait it out easier than fight it.

4)   Give it away – the most powerful thing I could do was live out some advice in one of Peter’s letters

Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you. [I Peter 5:7 NLT]

Had I been able to give all my cares to the Lord, I could have eliminated the weekly visit of the Sunday night funk. But like a child holding on to a load too heavy for her, I only gave Him part of my worries. I think the reason we don’t give Him all our cares is we think we should be more responsible than that. We err to think that we shouldn’t bother Him with the small stuff. He loves to carry our small stuff for us, because he cares about us. But He doesn’t do it unless we let Him. If I were working again, I would try harder to let Him have my Sunday night funk.