Tired in the marrow of my bones.

Tired in the places my mother’s prayers used to live.

Tired in the breath I use to speak life into everybody but myself.

And I know I’m not alone.

There’s a particular kind of fatigue Black women carry. The kind that doesn’t show up on MRI’s or in Sunday morning altar calls. It’s the exhaustion of being expected to save everyone. Family, students, lovers, coworkers, entire institutions. Meanwhile, our grief goes unspoken. Our excellence goes unpaid. Our bodies break under the weight of their silence.

In Audre Lorde’s proclamation, “Traditionally, in american society, it is members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor.”

It reminded me of Jesus.

Not the sanitized, suburban Jesus. Not the blonde-haired, blue-eyed one draped across megachurch stages. But the brown-skinned, politically haunted, underpaid carpenter from Nazareth. The one born under occupation. The one whose entire ministry was rooted in saying: you matter, you belong, you are not forgotten.

Jesus knew what it meant to live in a world that refused to see his full humanity. And so do we.

Womanist theology tells me that Black women have always been both crucified and resurrected, but rarely by choice. We’ve been made martyrs without being asked. We’ve been told our strength is our gift, and our tears are our testimony.

But I believe something deeper: We were never meant to die for systems that would never die for us.

It’s time to reclaim a new theology. One where Black women are not always the saviors, but also the saved.

Where our worth is not tied to how much we carry.

Where Jesus meets us not as a master demanding more sacrifice, but as a brother sitting beside our grief, saying, I see you. I honor you. I’m with you.

You are not invisible. You are not too much. You are not alone.

And you don’t have to be everything to everyone in order to be worthy of rest, reverence, and resurrection.

Not tomorrow.

Not after the work is done.

But now.