Tag: Anxiety

When My Anxious Thoughts Multiply Within…..

Published on by Marilyn10 Comments

I woke with a headache. It started at the base of my neck and before long wound its way up to my temples. I was acutely aware that it was a headache born of anxiety.

“When my anxious thoughts multiply within….”

Policeman are out in full force here in the city. Army men parade the streets. All the surrounding towns have loaned their safety units to Boston. Random checks are occurring in the subway and people clutch their arms to their bodies a bit tighter.

It’s part of the terrorist process. For the bombs don’t just terrorize for the moment, although their worst physical impact is felt then. Bombs and attacks terrorize far longer than the actual event. It’s like dominoes. The terrorist domino effect – where one thing happens and pretty soon you have a world spinning to try to keep the dominoes from crashing down.

I work in state government and we have received email upon email giving us resources, recognizing that even those not directly involved feel the ripple effect of the sadness and terror that reigned on Monday. Articles on grief and post traumatic stress flood my inbox. And I am grateful for the attention that the Department of Public Health is finally giving to what people around are experiencing.

But for me it’s not enough. For there has to be a faith element that wraps around all these resources. A recognition that the God who sustains and heals will continue and work through and beyond man-made resources.

And I find the answer in an age-old Psalm, sung for generations, sung to those in captivity, those in exile, those in war, those fleeing their enemies.

“When my anxious thoughts multiply within me, Thy consolations delight my soul”.* This is the missing ingredient to all the other resources.

*Psalm 94:19 “A text of this kind shows us forcibly the power of Divine grace in the human heart: how much it can do to sustain and cheer the heart. The world may afflict a believer, and pain him; but if the grace which God has given him is in active exercise in his soul, the world cannot make him unhappy. It rather adds by its ill-treatment to his happiness; for it brings God and his soul nearer together — God the fountain of all happiness, the rest and satisfaction of his soul.”~Charles Bradley, 1845

Related articles

When the Sh*t hits the fan!

Published on by Marilyn14 Comments

mythbusters.jpg

We love to watch the show, MythBusters. On MythBusters  Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman and their team use the scientific method to prove or disprove movie stunts, YouTube videos, rumours, myths, news stories, idioms or even their own personal curiosities. They tackle seemingly impossible hypotheses to see if there is any truth in them at all. My personal favourites are their attempts to test idioms.  In season 9, episode 3 they tested the plausibility of the English expression, “When the shit hits the fan”! A series of ridiculous experiments revealed something quite unexpected and it certainly made me laugh and gave me pause to think.

According to the online urban dictionary “shit hits the fan” when ‘things get chaotic or uncontrollable’ or it’s ‘the point at which an already unstable situation devolves into utter chaos’.

Our family has a long-standing attachment to the word ‘shit’—I know it’s shocking but true! My mom and dad never permitted us to use swear words or foul speech when I was growing up. The word ‘fart’ was even off-limits. In our home we passed gas. At the very worst we “tooted” or “cut the cheese”.

We never farted. That was crude and crass and completely unacceptable.

The only exception was the word “shit”…and that only if we said it with a Pakistani accent. Something about that combination made my dad start to shake. The little lines around his eyes would start up first and eventually his convictions would melt off his face into complete laughter. It never failed. Dad would laugh and mom would say his name, “Gary!” with as much as sternness as she could muster as if dad himself had used the offending language!

Later when Lowell and I moved to India we had other opportunities to use the word. In our experience in North India, shit is the expletive of choice for anyone who speaks any amount of English. It’s not really a cuss word. Shit is used to denote poop, plain and simple. The ancient place we rented on the banks of the Ganges River provided ample opportunity to use the word. Frequently the sewage backed up on our bathroom floor. Using the word was a way to secretly let off some frustration but it was also a way to communicate to our landlady what was going on! She understood that word.

The word shit isn’t just used to talk about sewer– it has a variety of uses in India. It was a word that sympathized. When I told our landlady that my dad had been in the church that was attacked by terrorists in Islamabad in 2002, her first response, with her hand quickly coming to touch my arm and her face contorting in sadness and sympathy was, “Ah shit!”  When I told her that Lowell had dengue fever, I got the same face with the same concern and the same word of choice, “Ah shit!” When I told her something funny that had happened in the market she would laugh and say, “Oh shit!” When I showed her the bathroom floor where the sewage had backed up she’d groan and appropriately exclaim, “Oh shit!”

So you can imagine my intrigue and my amusement with the episode on MythBusters where they try to prove the validity to that interesting expression, “when the shit hits the fan”!

The funny thing is after Jamie and Adam had gone to the work of creating their own blue simulated poo, making a testing site, setting up a fan and then throwing the blue poo into the fan, not much happened. It was so anti-climactic! The blue poo just sort of hit the fan’s protective grate and then fell with a disappointing thud to the ground. They made some changes. They made their blue poo more gooey, they increased the size of the fan, they removed the grate. Eventually they were not disappointed. The blue goo flew! The anticipated results were finally actualized.

It made me stop and think.

Sometimes we expect our stresses and our strains to be far more grand and far-reaching than they are. Our imaginations move into our fears and we become anxious and over-wrought. We dream up horrors and hells and we allow them to paralyze our souls. These fears keep us awake at night. They force us to the edge of our calm. We live in dread of the “shit hitting the fan”.

But what if the shit just sort of plonks against the grate and nothing much happens? What if our worst fears are never actually realized? Or when they are realized we see it wasn’t as we thought it would be? Perhaps we’re stronger than we thought we’d be. Perhaps God was more Present than we thought He’d be. Perhaps our support structures held more than we thought they would.

I think about all the time I’ve spent dreading, fearing, and imagining the worst. (I’ve written about some of them: Better Widow than a Wife, When Fear Proves Love). I’ve spent hours blowing up my anxieties, like balloons for a funeral. I’ve wasted more hours trying to think up ways to protect myself from those same dreaded outcomes.

Like Jamie, on Mythbusters, I’ve donned perfect protective gear to safeguard against the flying poop.  More often than not, it never hits.

I’m not entirely sure what the answer is. I do want to live more fully in my now, in my here. Hopefully the pathetic results of Adam and Jamie’s test will remain with me and tutor me. What they worst feared didn’t actually happen! Jesus didn’t use the expression, “when the shit hits the fan”, but he did teach on imagined future dreads.  He wanted us to live today!

                So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

Tripping on Cobblestone Streets

Published on by Marilyn11 Comments

“If I should say “My foot has slipped,” 

Boston is known for its cobblestone streets; former cow paths really, filled in with cobblestone as first horse and carriage, then automobile, came along. It’s one of the things people find charming about Boston.

As someone who lives here, they are at times charming – and at other times annoying. While a hallmark of the area, they are hard on the feet. My shoes wear out quickly, uneven on one side of the heel, causing discomfort in my legs. Or I don’t see a change in the level of stones and my ankle turns.

It’s easy to trip. Lost in my thoughts, thinking I’m steady on my feet, I trip and I curse.

I want to cry. My foot has slipped and I think I’ll fall. I do that silly, quick look around that we humans do when we stumble, knowing that my thoughts are obvious to anyone who studies human behavior “Did anyone see me?” There’s someone at least two blocks away — I’m safe from having to acknowledge to another my human frailty. I right myself and I keep going. My thoughts, previously calm, turn anxious.

It happens a lot. And because I am who I am, I quickly draw the parallel between my tripping, my stumbling, and life.

I trip a lot in life. I lose balance. I stumble and sometimes I fall. I lose my way, tripping in the process. Anxiety increases as peace decreases. And I hate it.

“If I should say “My foot has slipped….” These are words from the Psalms that I learned long ago. But to be faithful to the Biblical picture painted by the Psalmist I must finish the verse. It’s not enough to just acknowledge that my foot slipped, that I’m embarrassed and frustrated.

“Thy loving kindness, Oh Lord, will hold me up.”

It’s an important ending to the verse, an important addition to my thoughts. I steady myself and take a deep breath. The cobblestone streets are still in front of me, they will not go away. They are a part of living and working in this area.

Life with its trips and stumbles is not going away. But thy loving kindness, Oh Lord, will lift me up. 

But there’s more: Continuing to walk, I remember the ‘more’ “When my anxious thoughts multiply within, your consolations delight my soul”. The tripping in life, the stumbling and falling is bound to happen, and with this comes anxiety. These verses acknowledge my inevitable slipping and God’s loving kindness; my related anxiety and God’s consolations.

“If I should say “My foot has slipped”, Thy loving kindness, Oh Lord, will lift me up. When my anxious thoughts multiply within me, your consolations delight my soul” Psalm 94:18

The Space Between

Published on by Marilyn23 Comments

blossom-834630_1920

The weak tea in a Styrofoam cup accompanied by two signature Delta airline ginger cookies tasted like a feast. I was sitting on a plane en route to Boston after a short layover in the Atlanta airport. We had boarded at 6:40 in the evening and at 9:30 we were still sitting on a plane that had lost its antiseptic smell long before and was now beginning to reek of dirty socks.

Anticipating smooth transitions and a quick flight I had not changed from my business grey dress and high shoes; shoes that magically transformed me from short to tall, demanding only a blister and achey feet as payment.

Everyone felt the tension when the flight attendant first announced that we would be delaying take-off. He “hoped we’d understand that it was not safe to travel in thunder and lightning”. 

We understood.

A couple of minutes after his announcement, rain of Noah’s kind began pouring down. The tiny oval-shaped window gave a limited view but it was enough to see pelting rain and lightning. The thunder was loud and ominous, adding its stamp of validity to the words of the flight attendant.

And we were enclosed in the space between. There was no where we could go and nothing we could do. We weren’t in the middle. In the middle we at least would have known we were going someplace. We were in the space between.  I was cold and achy and I was in the space between.

The spaces between. Spaces of insecurity and restlessness; spaces of tension and anxiety; spaces where we want to know the answers. Spaces where we ache from shoes too tall or circumstances too big.

The resigned, the practical, the matter of fact would tell me “There is nothing you can do, you just have to wait it out.” And I know this is sound advice – to a point.

But perhaps in the space between I am provided with the best possible context for praying.  Prayer for restlessness to be replaced with rest, tension with peace, anger with calm.

A crowded plane of people growing increasingly perturbed and anxious set the stage for this space between. My heart was the actor, my words a prayer. A prayer that in this space between I would remember there is One whose authority is over all space and time. And in remembering, rest.