sometimes, anxiety and worry can feel like darth vader is on the approach, hearing the death march all the time and feeling like darkness is hanging over, for too long....
i heard a message on worry/envy recently that spoke so deeply to where i have been before. worry. and envy.
"worry and envy are evil twin sisters, while worry is the passive one...envy is the aggressive one."- ryan kelly
while worry is passive and builds anxiety and fear....envy is really just the aggressive form of it. it revolts, it resents and wears bitterness and anger when things don't go it's way.
as i listened to the message, i was reminded about how silent and deceptive envy can be. no one has to know about it. you can keep it in. and hide it. and while you think envy is making the person you envy the enemy. you are wrong. it is making God the enemy. i had never looked at it like that before. i know discontentment tells God you aren't thankful and you don't trust. but i had never thought of envy that way. my envy of another person makes God an enemy by telling him he has wronged me in not giving me what they have. and then it compounds the sin of questioning God's plan for me, not just complaining to myself but to God and seriously trying to tell the creator of the universe what to do and what for. it sounds so silly when it's written out like that.
i have struggled with worry my whole life. an anxious child from birth i'm told. nervous tummy aches, anxious nail biter, it's just my make-up. it's also my bent. towards worrying and not trusting God to really know what He is doing. questioning things in my life, why they happened and never understanding their purposes. then our daughter died. and it went into overdrive. yet, in His grace and mercy and lots of prayer and reading and others speaking into my life with Truth, i have tried to reconcile and confess that that way of living is wrong and why it's ok to question God at times and search Him, to really live a lifestyle, radically challenging God and His ways ALL the time with complaining and negativity and bitterness and anger and clinched fists and mistrust is just not right. it is not fruitful, it is not healthy. and it is NOT the gospel.
it actually spits in the face of the gospel.
Ed Welch says "There is a close connection between what we fear and what we think we need..."
what is it that you think you need or will never have or be taken away from you?
worry is the act of trying to control things...passive and waiting, it searches for things to hold onto and never stops because things change and people die..we live in a fallen broken world. worry will always be one thought away....
so enters envy. your daughter dies. you almost die. you can't have any more children. your world stops. and you look around and women all around you keep having babies. girl babies. and you can't. envy.
you see others prosper financially and go on vacations and get new cars and new clothes all the time while you struggle with paying bills month to month and putting food on the table. envy.
your friend's husband works 9-5 and is available to their family in so many ways while your husband travels non stop and you never see him. envy.
you see others master the art of homemaking and crafting and ordering their day and chores with such finesse while you burn cakes and have dirty toilets and misplaced socks because there are 5 loads of laundry waiting for you in the hall and you struggle with how to get it all done every day. envy.
"most work in this world is motivated by envy"...
if you think about that, it is dangerously waving big red flags of motive checks, that kind of work.
why we do things should not be for others or to keep up with others, it should be for God and our family's best. not performance but with joy, serving and loving what we've been given.
it is true that i struggle greatly with fear and anxiety..once something that seems the worst thing possible on your fear list happens, your mind just keeps telling you "i told you so, and wait for more...it's coming..." an already anxious little girl heart is transformed into a bigger girl heart with more room to worry. i also see, that any ongoing depression can many times be rooted deeply and deceptively in the garden of fear....
a conference on fear and anxiety, this last weekend with the amazing tara barthel, reminded me how much fear and anxiety is self-focused and not God focused. we are in the boat, yelling at the Lord to look at the waves and stop them...yet, not seeing Him at all as the mastermind that not only created and made the water that crashes but is King over them and can speak them down and stop them with a breath...we are questioning his active goodness in our life, we are questioning his own goodness...tara this weekend said...when we fear, "we question not just the good things he has or has not done for us BUT the Good that HE IS." alone....
i was also reminded of the body and soul being one..and that depression and anxiety and fear and worry affects our body and the body affects the mind in return....
what can we do to combat this stuff? practically speaking?
i learned a couple years back about the concept of "staying up late" and "night owl" which i had long considered ME time, when the house was quiet and NO ONE needed me, i would stay up late hours and do whatever i wanted...read, get on the internet, watch tv into the wee hours, eat a box of cheezits or leftover cake. because i felt like i deserved it. it felt like i was stealing away time for me...yet, when i was awoken by little ones crying and needing me, after only two hours of sleep, i soon realized that my mood and body were now paying the price for my selfishness and my family were really the ones on the receiving end of paying for my selfishness, with my emotions all over the place. tired and wanting to sleep all day or feeling unmotivated or down or lazy, came from behaviors i was practicing by justification as a stressed out mom, yet i was keeping the cycle alive and making it worse every day. did i struggle with the thoughts anyways? yes, but did i help myself depriving my body of sleep and preparing myself for the day to come? not one bit. the day soon frazzled with emotions and worry was being eaten away hour by hour and i had nothing to feed it. i was bare.
"How many different sinful actions and attitudes come from anxiety?..If anxiety could be conquered, a mortal blow would be struck to many other sins..." - John Piper
i was reminded this weekend too of how our body reacts to adrenaline. and when we fear, our primal instinct is that our body makes adrenaline...ironically, when we are stressed and tired and overwhelmed, we reach for coffee and cokes to get us through the day, to keep us going. the caffeine in return speeds up our heart rate which then sends a signal to our body that reads the jazzed up heart rate as fear and it sends adrenaline. and thus our body is reading fear. when really it was just a starbucks hazelnut latte or a sonic vanilla coke (yes, my guilty pleasures and go to tonics) feeding my system fake fear. it told my body and heart that a huge bear was chasing me and my heart rate told me that i should run. yet it was just liquid fear. a lie. but my reactions and perspective on things for that day were not true, they were based on java veins and a cola diet.
all this to say, i truly believe that we cannot run from the suffering and anxiety of this world, BUT we can be advocates for our body and mind in a physical way just as we are for our hearts in a spiritual way..from my own cycle of experiences, i have learned that we do our best to feed it sleep and rest when needed and put good things in it that nurture and replenish our body rather than deplete and ravish it unnecessarily. the world will tell you that it is your right to do things like stay up late and have me time, you deserve it and you've had a hard day and you deserve to relax...but in my own experiences with this, it's a ticking time bomb that goes off about 10am the next day when i've lost my patience and my temper and i want to cry in the corner because i am so tired and sleep deprived and foggy brained, all that "me" time till the wee hours of the morning has turned me into "all about me" the rest of the day and i cannot function and thus begins the revolving door.
...time management, sleep, rest, good nourishing foods, avoiding fake calm even though it's easier to fill up on it to soothe right away... these are tangible things that we can do to help. science proves so...
our spirit needs a different kind of help. one that is other worldly, steady and unchanging. one that is not us and has nothing to do with us. but another. a Someone who keeps the world turning and sits on a Throne of all things...only He can calm our deepest fears and steady our anxious hearts...when we try to control that part, we focus only on the things that trouble us and we drown in a mind sea of worries, left and right, taking up so much space in our minds that there is no room for anything else...
"When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching. You watch God weave his patterns in the story of your life...you begin to see him work and your life begins to sparkle with wonder. You are learning to trust again." - Paul Miller, A Praying Life
we must write out our fears and list them, put pen to paper and make them real...have you ever done that? have you ever listed your fears? seems easy...until that clean white fresh piece of paper is staring at you. and you think, as i did, "um, i fear LOTS of things..where do i even begin?"...but if you can name them, it begins to take away the power of them on your heart....i once wrote my fears down, a few years back...folded each tiny piece of paper up and tucked them away in a little handbag up in my closet and "gave" them to the Lord and tucked them back away, totally forgot about writing them down and last year i found them....re-reading them took me back to a time when i wore that fear and worry like a heavy cloak..yet in the now, i saw how He had taken care of those fears for me in answered prayer, closed doors and new beginnings, provision and guidance and friendship that had forged sweet fellowship with him that i could have never expected...
so i say, let's name our fears. "take them out of the gray, be specific" tara suggested...write them down and tuck them away. bury them in your backyard or burn them in your fireplace, find a tangible way to get a hold of them and then get rid of them....when we give our fears a name, they are easier to face and work with...we can then shine light on them and put them next to Truth, almost in a side by side battle..and see what wins out.
"fear wears us down, we start to loose perspective and we feel defeated and despondent" tara said this weekend...she quoted paul miller as saying, "my prayers became a confused mix of wandering and worrying..." and "defeated weariness comes just before cynicism.."
in 1 peter 5 we are told to ..."Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time, he may exalt you BY casting all your anxiety on him because he cares for you..." the verse does not say BY but clearly that is the HOW part, the practical application part...
Martin Lloyd Jones said "we listen to our emotions and fears instead of God through his word..." we must use his word to shed light on the falsity of most of our fears...
i love what tara was saying about what Christ has to say to us, i have it written in my notes and i am not sure if she paraphrased or if it might have been c.s.lewis who said it..but it's wonderfully comforting...."i have derived the world of it's power to ultimately harm you...." he did that, he won the battle already on the cross, conquering death. we can be overcome with so many things, sad and terrible things can happen and we will be affected by living in this world...but ultimately harm us? NO, we must remember that we when we feel like little david standing up against the giants of this world and culture, that He who is in us is bigger and greater and is THE true conqueror of this world and this life. Praise God ! because without that hope, i'd be lost...
look what happens to our shadow of little ole' us when we stand in his light....while we are still small and frail and weak, we become GIANTS of faith!!
"The God of ALL grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.." 1 Peter 5:10
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