Lazy?

Once upon a time, several of us were sick. The sickest we'd been in a long time. We were resting, sitting on the couch for a whole week, aching, feverish, popping a couple of tylenol, and then two hours later some aspirin, and two hours later some more tylenol. A friend told us what we needed to do was get outside and work. She said that her family had been sick recently and they didn't have time to sit around and recuperate because there was work to do. So they did it. She said they "sweated it out" and got much better for having worked through the illness rather than resting.

It makes some sense to me, theoretically, because sweating does eliminate a lot of toxins from the body. But boy oh boy, when you're so sick you can hardly get to the kitchen for a drink of juice, the idea of going outside to shovel gobs of snow sounds ludicrous.


When a person gets older and the body shows more and more signs of the corruption of sin (weakness, lack of endurance, less flexibility, longer time to heal, etc), how does a person know when her "laziness" is just an unwillingness to work and when it's lack of ability? I think that I've been lazy recently, and I've been trying to gather my oomph to overcome it. I've been giving myself speeches. I've been trying to work harder, move faster, be organized and efficient. And I'm not managing it.

Do I need to try harder? Or would it be better to recognize that, as I'm trying to learn new things, it's going to simply take some time? And that my body cannot DO the things it could do when I was in my twenties?

You know what? Ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago, I was asking these questions about my children ... and their readiness for learning. In the kids, I could recognize that sometimes I could spend a HUGE amount of effort trying to teach them something before they were ready, or I could wait until they were physically and mentally capable of something, and then the educational task would be a breeze. Loads of homeschool moms face this: should we bash our heads against the wall trying to teach cursive or phonics or long division or how to use the potty (hopefully not in that order!) or do we admit that the child is simply not capable of this right now?
And now I'm wondering the same thing about myself -- but on the downhill slope.