I know what you’re thinking…

I know what you will think when I get started on my topic for today. Well, I think I know. I assume that I know. I have convinced myself that I know and that I am right. Which is why my brain has talked myself into feeling fear about saying what I need to say today. What I have told myself that what you will think, every last one of you, is “not that topic again! That girl seriously needs to learn how to manage this already. She clearly isn’t practicing what she herself has written about dozens of times already. If she is still struggling with it, why am I even reading this blog anymore?”. Or something to that effect.

I don’t know if you are thinking all that or not. There’s a teensy chance that I might be putting words in your mouth based on my own insecurities and expectations of myself to “grow up already”. Either way, after doing some reading and praying (read: pleading with God to relieve my anxiety) I decided that even if you think all those things about me, He is still asking me to write about my battle with worry. It helps me clear my head and every single time, I have heard from at least one person whom it has also helped.

So, yes. I have found myself in a fluster of fretting lately.

I am worrying about nothing and everything. From the smallest, most insignificant matter all the way up to the cosmic circumstances that may never even come to pass. In the past few months I have had some pretty big, legitimate things that tempt me to overthink, hyper-control and wring my hands over. But lately, some of those things have worked themselves out, or God has worked them out, and guess what? Still worrying!

The other day, it dawned on me that my worry is like an alien spawn; it needs a host. It can’t survive on it’s own so it attaches itself to random people, places and things that may or may not be worthy of the intense levels of worry glomming onto it. Instead of this alien life-force of anxiety shriveling and dying once it’s current host is unavailable, it just seems to moves on to something else for sustenance.

For me, it looks something like this: “Once this house closes/once this quarter of school is over for my kids/once we pay off that bill/once that job is secured/once I am declared ‘cured’ then I won’t have a thing to worry about! Then I will finally feel relieved and relaxed.” What actually happens, is that as soon as one of those stressors is resolved, my worry attaches itself to the nearest available host and continues to grow and thrive. Maybe even produce little babies of worry who branch out and find unsuspecting hosts like: if my husbands favorite team wins, if I’ll ever fit in jeans I wore when I was 30, and what I imagine readers are thinking about me. 🙃

I am guessing that this is why God instructs us not to worry about tomorrow, that tomorrow can worry about itself. He also may have observed over the course of history, that people down here are drawn to worry/fear/attempts to control on a pretty regularly basis. More than likely, I am not alone in wrestling with it’s recurrence.

But I have to say, that even though I am speaking of worry, my greatest enemy and signature sin de jour (or tous les jours=not just “of the day” but “EVERYDAY”), what I want you to walk away with today is something much bigger.

Author Anna Shipton pointed out something about King David, the dude from the Bible who wrote the Majority of the Psalms, and his sufferings that prompted most of them. Not only did David suffer at the hands of his enemies, one of which used to be his BFF, he also had a few other issues like adultery and ordering the murder of that woman’s husband. Kind of big deals. And yet, God used all of it to inspire David to express his remorse, his repentances, his despair and even his rage throughout this semi-schizophrenic rant of thoughts in the Psalms. He reminds me a little of myself in that he vacillates between faith and fear–between absolute confidence in God’s continual presence and inner groanings that question why God has seemingly abandoned him. Anyone familiar?

So, I guess that’s why, in spite of my fear that you all would think that Heather just can’t seem to get it together and that this whole “God-thing” she talks about ad-nauseum clearly doesn’t work, I decided to go ahead and write. It’s the reason I started writing in the first place: I was weak and sick. But I do believe, even on my hardest and darkest days, that He is strong. Shipton points out (In a book called “Streams in the Desert”), how deprived we would be had David gotten hung-up on his failures, tragedies and shortcomings and refused to write: “One stinging sorrow spared would have been one blessing missed and unclaimed. One difficulty or danger escaped–how great would have been our loss! The thrilling psalms where God’s people today find expression for their grief or praise might never have been known.”

I am sure I don’t have to point out that I am aware I am no King David and the impact of my words are nowhere near what we receive from him through God’s perfect Word, but I am grateful that I can follow David’s example by sharing my real, raw, broken, doubting self without it subtracting from the hope I carry in a God who sees and hears and heals. I hope you can find it in you to do the same.

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