Tag: fear

This is your 5 Minute Reminder to Stop Worrying

Screenshot_2020-01-07-08-50-32~2.png

 

I saw this today and thought, yep, that about sums up where I am right now. 

 

Now, I’m not sure if my theology quite  puts me at the place where I think God is deliberately setting me up, but I definitely think he allows me to get into places where I am not in control and all I can do is trust him. 

 

I have to tell you, I don’t like this place. When a problem presents itself, I am one of those people that wants to come up with a plan right away and then implement that plan right away, whether I have given it enough thought, prayer, counsel etc…I just want to be moving…forward…sideways…any direction, as long as I’m moving and not in a standstill. 

 

I am fortunate to have married the man I did. He is a great balance to me. His inner rhythm is at about half my tempo. Where I rush and scurry, he slowly ambers along. Where I finish the job quickly, though a bit messily, and perhaps not quite the way it was supposed to be, But it’s done! He methodically takes one step at a time, takes a lot longer than me, but ends up with a perfectly finished product that doesn’t need any tweaking. We balance each other well, because he can come to a complete standstill and sometimes needs a bit of nudging, while I need someone to rein me back a bit, hold on, let’s think about this a bit longer.

 

Right now we have two major areas in our life that need some solutions. Right now. Like, maybe yesterday. Or last month. 

 

And I am very impatient to see these areas fixed. Very impatient. It interrupts my sleep. It messes with my peace. I feel like I am on edge, unable to relax because these things are looming. 

 

In both situations, we can do nothing. We are waiting on other people to do their part, and we have no way of hurrying up the process. Though I am tempted to suggest some ideas, maybe if we did this, this, and this it would hurry it up? But really, that’s just me fretting. 

 

This past week, everywhere I turn, whether it be my daily bible reading, a church service, memes on Facebook…everywhere…the message says, over and over again. Trust God. Have Faith. Don’t Worry. And so, I say, yes, I am just going to give this to God and stop worrying. And then five minutes later I find my mind stuck in the same rut. Oh, yeah. Wait. I’m giving this over to God. Ok. 

 

This has not been one of those sunbeam-through-the-clouds situations where I say, Oh! I get it! I just need to trust that God is taking care of this, now I am going to stop worrying! No. It’s been more of a daily, every hour, turning it back over to God. Forgetting. Worrying. Turning it back over to God. Forgetting. Worrying. Turning it back over to God. If you get what I’m saying. 

 

Does this make me an imperfect Christian? Lacking in Faith? I don’t think so. No, I have not been an example of calm, unshakeable faith…but I have consistently been calling on God for help. God and I have had a lot of conversations about this. I feel an urgency to stay close and connected to him right now as my worries try to overwhelm me. I feel his hand on me, I know that not only is he working in the physical realm, but he’s also working on my heart, wanting to grow me in this area of faith. And that’s a good place to be. 

 

Last night I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t picked out our new Bible Memory Passage for the new school semester. This last semester we covered some of the basics with Psalm 23 and the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve already done my two other favorite Bible passages, Psalm 139 and 1 Corinthians 13. What should we memorize now? I flipped through my Bible and hit on the book of John. I love John. Especially the passages where Jesus prays for his disciples, and talks about the vine. I scanned a couple chapters and decided, lets do John 14: 1-6. 

 

So, this morning, I quickly looked at the first verse again, so I could memorize it and teach it to the kids while we were driving to school. 

 

It says,
“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.” (John 14:1)

 

And there you have it. My daily reminder to stop worrying, believe God is who he says he is, and he can do what he says he can do. 

 

I will continue to remind myself of this. Every five minutes if necessary.

 

Questions on the Nature of Peace

I just read a blog post on Peace Hacks. Here is the link: Peace Hacks The article was about the nature of peace. Is peace simply the absence of war? Are we truly at peace if we know that injustice is happening where we live? Can we truly be at peace if we make ourselves fully aware of how many people are actually starving to death, right now, while we sit here reading stuff on the internet?  

The idea is, are we at peace, or are we simply choosing to ignore the problems around us so that we can feel comfortable.

This has made me think about Peace, and about burying my head in the sand. First of all, I’m going to go ahead and give my definition of peace. For me, peace is knowing that I am right with God. My sins are forgiven, He loves me, I look forward to an eternity with Him. That is the true source of my peace. When my world seems to be unraveling, that is what I cling to.

But what about peace in my world? Right now I do not feel like the world is at peace. The news shows a very rigid divide between political parties. It feels very much like people are choosing sides and drawing lines in the sand, preparing for battle. I am horrified as I watch people make moral decisions that defy logic. I am truly frightened when I see laws being passed that erode my parental rights. I am completely boggled as I look at the upcoming presidential election. I’m not even going to go there right now.

I look around and think, maybe we should move. Surely there is another country that isn’t as crazy as mine. But, if you read the news, you quickly learn that every single country in the world has got some pretty serious flaws.

And then there is all the suffering going on. Religious persecution is a very real thing, happening all over the world. Poverty at a level where people are starving to death, this is happening right now. Human trafficking is everywhere. Prejudice, injustice, foster kids in need of care, domestic violence, homelessness. All these things are happening right here, in my city. And I sit in my house, occupied with the very tame jobs of washing dishes, cooking meals, entertaining children.

What is my responsibility as a human being, as a Christian?

I find that when I read the news regularly, stay up-to-date with all the horrors that are happening,  I start feeling very anxious, afraid. Unsettled. Overwhelmed. I don’t like feeling that way. And so I withdraw. I stop reading the news. I stop engaging. I want my peace back, and so I turn my back on the world’s problems, ignore them.

Is that right though? Throughout history, time and time again, change has occurred when a person, a group of people, say, That is enough. This is wrong. We must stop this. Isn’t it our responsibility to be one of those people?

But there has to be a balance. I am a wife and a mother. I have a job to create a peaceful atmosphere where my children can live in a calm, safe environment while they are developing mentally, physically, spiritually. It’s hard to create that environment when we are focusing continually on all the bad things in the world.

Let me try to sum up the problem here. I am actually looking at two kinds of peace. Peace with God, and peace in my city/region/state/country/world. How do I address the lack of peace in the world without letting it disrupt my spiritual peace, and my own little haven of peace that I’ve created in my home?

I do not want to be someone who turns a blind eye, ignores the problem, pretends it isn’t there. Nor do I want to live a life of worry and fear and stress as I get overwhelmed, feeling like I, alone, can do nothing to change what’s happening around me.

I was hoping that as I wrote this, I would come up with some conclusions. I think instead I have just defined the problem really well for myself. But, that in itself, is progress. I guess I will have to write a Part 2 for this piece when I get some insight.

 

Psalm 139 and School Lockdowns

psalm139

When I started 8th grade, I was in the north of Haiti, attending a little mission school. At that time there were probably less than thirty students in the whole school. We had three classrooms, with 6th, 7th and 8th all sharing one classroom with one teacher. That year we had a new teacher that we had never met. She was a volunteer missionary teacher, probably in her late 50s. An American who had decided to take on the challenge of living in Haiti and teaching a small classroom of English-speaking students. I can’t remember her name. She was only my teacher for about a month and half before the country broke out in a war of sorts and all the Americans were evacuated to the States. But, despite the fact I knew her for such a little time, and probably wouldn’t even recognize her in a picture, she left me a humongous legacy. The first thing she had our class do was memorize Psalm 139. She didn’t give us very long to do so and after we were able to recite the whole Psalm in front of the class, she presented each of us with a brand new Bible. I remember it was a golden brown, hardback Bible with gold lettering. NIV. It was a beautiful Bible. But even more beautiful was having Psalm 139 become a part of my memory, a part of my thought process, a part of who I was. Over the years that Psalm has formed a foundation of how I see myself and how I see God. “Oh Lord, You have searched me and you know me.” I am known, fully, completely, by the living God. “You know when I sit and when I rise.” Nothing in my life is inconsequential to him. “You perceive my thoughts from afar.” God is listening to my thought processes and it doesn’t scare him off…I could go on through the whole Psalm, verse by verse, an amazing testimony to how loved I am, how cared for, how completely I am in his sight at all times.

This year I have been memorizing scripture with my kids on the drive to school every morning. We did 1 Corinthians 13 in the Fall and this Spring semester we have started on Psalm 139. Every morning I hear the verses, over and over again, and it is a wonderful way to start the day. It’s also very sobering. “Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely Oh Lord.” Yikes. God is very aware that I yelled at my toddler today for spilling yogurt all over my jeans. Sorry Lord, please help me to be more patient! But, as I remind my children every day before they jump out of the car to go to school, God Knows You Completely, and He Loves You Completely!

These past two weeks we’ve been working on the verses, “If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” I’ve been pondering what that means today, and I realized it really ties into something that happened this past week.

On Friday, during the school day, I got a call from our kids’ high school. .They were informing us that due to rumours that had been going around about possible gun violence, they had decided to put the school on a soft lockdown. All authorities had been notified and they were taking care of the issue. Ok. Unfortunately, we have had this call several times. We live in a rough neighborhood and even if something potentially dangerous happens close to the school, they put the school on a soft lockdown. I texted my husband to keep him informed, said a prayer for safety, and then really didn’t think too much more about it. Then a while later my daughter texted me from school. She said that the school had been put into a hard lockdown and she was scared. Unfortunately, she was in a large classroom at the time with a substitute teacher who was not really equipped to handle the situation. The teacher did not inspire confidence and my daughter was feeling very nervous. I told to her follow the teacher’s directions and I was going to see what I could do. I called the main office, but of course, it was a hard lockdown so they weren’t answering phones. I then asked some friends of mine to please pray, and I texted a teacher I know at the school, explaining my daughter’s situation, asking if he could find a way to send someone over to that classroom to help out the substitute. I checked in with my daughter again, and she said that the class had calmed down and things were looking better.

In the meantime my son was with the high school forensic team at a competition at another high school. My husband had been volunteered by our son to drive the team to and from the other high school in our van, so he was there as well. They were being told that due to the situation at our high school, they could not drive the students back until everything had been resolved. They had been told that someone had fired a gun. Lots of rumours were flying all over the place. And I was sitting at home, clutching my phone, not sure what to do except pray. Long story shorter, everything got resolved before the end of the school day, no one was hurt, life continues on. Aside from a residual stress that lingered for a couple days, all is well.

Later, thinking back on it, I wondered, should I be more freaked out about this? I can’t seem to muster up any fear. Is that odd? I don’t think so. There is evil in this world, but evil doesn’t keep God from seeing, from being present, from having power to act. “Even the darkness will not be dark to you…” How can I be afraid when I know that God is intimately involved with every single detail of my life, of my children’s lives. “…All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” How can I be afraid when God is in control? Does this mean that bad things will never happen to me and my loved ones? No. We live in a sinful world. Free will for me, means free will for those around me. There are no guarantees, except that God will always be with me, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” The only guarantee, the best guarantee we have is that God will never leave us. And if God, who loves me completely, is here, what else do I need?

Our family has been called to live here in this neighborhood. We have been called to put our kids in the public school system. We pray daily for safety and peace on the schools. We have been blessed greatly in our time here, the opportunities and experiences our children have been able to have so far have been amazing. Though the world is a dangerous place these days, we refuse to live in fear. “If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”

God is good.

 

P.S. Just to make sure this is real. Knowing God is in control, not living in fear; this doesn’t mean I don’t have my episodes of being afraid, and it doesn’t mean that crazy stuff doesn’t stress me out. It does. But, when I am afraid, when I’m feeling the stress, I can come back to scripture and remind myself of God’s presence, his love, his involvement in my life, and somehow, it rolls off my back, and I can keep going.