Because your battery life is important, too

I don’t always pay enough attention to the battery life of my phone.

And it turns out that I also don’t always pay enough attention to my own battery life.

I recently ventured out to Atlanta for a work trip and had quite an interesting experience. Living in Dallas and then Orange County and then back in Dallas, I don’t typically use public transportation much—or ever, really. I had to use the bus system once when I was in Portland, and I ended up getting a ride back to my hotel from a stranger because I struggled to get on the right bus in the first place and then missed the stop at which I was supposed to change buses on the way to the convention I was attending, so the ride with the stranger seemed like a better option. I also let another stranger from the convention take me to the airport the next day.

I lived and wasn’t kidnapped, so it’s fine.

If you’re not from Atlanta or haven’t ever been there, you might not have heard of the MARTA, but it’s a train (I think they might have buses, too) that starts at the airport and has a bunch of stops to different places with multiple lines. To someone more familiar with public transportation, I’m sure this sounds like no big deal, but I’ve taken the DART train in Dallas maybe once in my entire life, and the bus I took when I was at Texas A&M went from a stop near my apartment to campus, so it was fairly simple.

I don’t know my way around the Atlanta airport, so it took me a sufficient amount of time and many questions to people I didn’t know to find out where exactly the MARTA stop was. My plan was to take the train all the way to the end of the line and then take an Uber the remaining six miles or whatever it was to my hotel. It seemed like a smart idea at some point in time.

And then real life happened.

When I got off of the plane, my phone was at 44 percent battery. That seemed sufficient enough. I purposely didn’t use my phone much on the 40-minute (or something like that) train ride, but somehow it was at 6 percent when I got to the final station. I immediately opened the Uber app to arrange for my ride, and it said the driver was only a few minutes away. But apparently getting to the pickup location at the station was more complex than the driver expected, and he got lost. He called me to let me know that he was trying to get to me but that it might be better to get a different Uber.

Not an option—I was at 1 percent battery at that point.

I knew that I didn’t have time to call for another Uber, so I asked him please not to cancel the trip and still to come pick me up. I left the app open to follow him and make sure that he was still on his way (and also so that I could know when he arrived), but I was pretty nervous that the phone would die at any second.

I felt really helpless. I was in a big city I know nothing about, and I couldn’t even consult the Google for anything because my phone would for sure die if I opened anything else.

In what I still deem as a miracle, my phone survived until the Uber arrived. As soon as I got in the car, though, it died. I threw up all of the praise hands to Jesus to thank Him for me not having to resort to asking a stranger at the station take me to my hotel, because I was pretty sure that there were some people in the area who likely weren’t as trustworthy as I would hope that they would be.

I realized something about myself—I was more concerned about the battery life in my phone than I’ve ever been about the battery life in my own life. When my phone got down to 1 percent, I wanted to give the phone as much rest as possible so that it didn’t expend all of its energy. But when I get down to 1 percent, I don’t always allow myself the rest that I should.

It’s easy to get going so fast and take on so much that we forget to take care of ourselves. It’s common to love others as much as we can but then not love ourselves enough. I know that I’m often guilty of this. But the percentage left in my phone isn’t as important as the percentage left in me.

Thankfully, I did get to take a vacation with my parents and sister and spend some time at the beach in Florida. We used to come here a lot when I was a little kid, and I came again about five years ago. It’s nice to be back. It’s a different beach and lifestyle than I got accustomed to in California, but it’s still peaceful and relaxing.

I’m excited for when I get back home, too. There are so many changes that have been going on in my life in the last couple of years—and especially in the last couple of months—but it will be nice to be back in the classroom and get back to a sense of normalcy.

I love people—and I mean that. I think it’s truly important to be there for people and to make sure that they feel valued and loved. But I’m also learning (yet again) that it’s absolutely essential to make sure that you feel valued and loved by yourself, as well.

I guess all of the reminders about getting enough sleep at night are actually pretty legit. After all, you don’t want to be struggling and feeling like you’re constantly operating at 1 percent.

And you want to make sure that you’re fully charged when you get to where you need to be.