26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in
barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable
than they? 27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
Jesus - Matthew 6:26-27
I will readily admit that I stress a lot. My natural instinct in a difficult situation is always to worry - to imagine what could go wrong and think the worst. I don't enjoy this experience, and neither do others around me. I hate it when I can't concentrate on what people are saying because I have all my worries running through my mind. I resent the fact that it makes me look unhappy and perpetually in a rush. But most of all, I dislike the fact that it just consumes so much of my time and my energy. It takes away from my whole life - sleeping, eating, studying, relaxing... everything is affected. It certainly doesn't add anything to my life - instead, it damages my normal existence.
In the lead up to an event that has been causing me a fair bit of stress and worry, I sat down with my mentor, and she tried to get me to talk through my worrying and what its like. I came up with this metaphor - not perfect, but gives you the basic idea of what I feel worrying is like.
For me, worry is like this enveloping cloud. Each little detail is another wisp of white, and as they gather all around you, they blind you to the bigger picture until you can't see what you're doing or where you're going. It's not until you step outside the cloud, that you see what which way the wind is blowing and whether your cloud is a storm cloud or a fluff ball. We need to step outside our worries and look at the bigger picture of what God is doing, and what his purpose is in this stressful time.
1 comment:
I strongly agree that we need to look at the bigger picture of what God is doing, and I have often found it helpful.
Sometimes even though I might have lost badly, I find it easy to find understand why it may have happened. For example, I may have learned an important lesson from the experience or it may be clear that it what occurred as necessary for someone else to benefit. What I am finding challenging at the moment, is dealing with the times with the feeling that I have already learned everything that I can learn from the challenge and that God should just let me on to the next stage.
I have been in situations where a difficultly has started to consume an unacceptable amount of my life. When I encounter a difficult situation my natural instinct is to engage the problem, to find an option that I can acceptable.
But not all problems have solutions and not all solutions can be found by me. This is something I find extremely difficult to accept and I usually respond by pushing myself harder to try to create a solution and pushing everything else to the side.
I suppose perspective can help, but not if the problem is more important than those which are pushed aside.
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