Like most of us, I had experienced a number of challenges in life by the time that I reached my mid-thirties. I had graduated from college, moved away from my childhood home (and state), gotten married (and divorced), experienced additional failed relationships, bounced back from heartbreak after heartbreak, and, after a number of years, returned to my childhood home. Yet, even with those challenges my life has always been pretty good and blessed, which, in some ways, made me feel thoroughly unprepared for the onslaught of strange symptoms that suddenly took over my body the year that I turned thirty-six, and, unfortunately, have in some shape or form continued for years, with no discernible end in sight.
I later on discovered that the strange symptoms that I have been experiencing appear, at least in part, to be due to anxiety and stress. Anxiety and stress? When doctors began talking to me about that and I began researching the symptoms that I was experiencing and website after website was pointing toward those two culprits, I just could not believe it. I had successfully navigated years of school full of exams, projects, presentations and speeches (ugh! I have never been a person who liked public speaking, but if it was required then I put on my big-girl undies and did what needed to be done), dealt with financial concerns, been unemployed for extended periods of time (with bills that needed to be paid), and more. But I had never experienced anxiety and panic attacks and their associated symptoms until that year.
Now, as someone who grew up in church, received Jesus’ beautiful gift of salvation when she was sixteen, and has a mother who is so saved that my first memory of her was likely of her praising the Lord, I am familiar with today’s scripture: “Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you” 1 Peter 5:7 NIV. And, probably like many of us, I thought that I was casting my cares on Jesus. I mean, I prayed here and there, I tried to focus on good thoughts instead of bad ones, and I knew that I had the victory through Jesus. But then anxiety and its controlling friends, worry and despair, showed up and it felt as though my life was over. I was already facing challenge after challenge and then they arrived. What was I supposed to do?
That’s when God began to show me how unfamiliar I was with Him. You see, I knew Him the way that you know a familiar associate – well enough to have an idea of what they are like and to be able to introduce them to someone else, but not enough to have an intimate connection, let alone a thriving relationship. So, He began to teach me in more radical ways than ever before what it means to trust Him and cast my cares onto Him. He revealed to me that I needed to stop looking at the circumstances and people around me, and instead focus on Him alone. He also showed me that I needed to spend more time in His Word, studying the scriptures, and experiencing Him. And instead of rehearsing the challenges over and over again in my mind, I needed to praise Him in every situation and at all times, with a grateful heart.
I would like to tell you that it has been easy to do the things that God told me to do, but it was not easy. Let me clarify that. It was easy to have the desire to please and obey God; He gave me a new spirit and made me a new creation when I received Christ’s gift of salvation, so the desire to please and obey God was already there. My unruly flesh with its evil desires has fought me the whole time. That is where the challenge came in; that’s what turned this into a battle.
Just like David, a man the Word of God describes as “a man after God’s own heart,” faced battle after battle, we, too, will encounter opposition. And like David we have a choice. Will we try to tackle everything in our own strength and under the limitations of our own humanly-acquired resources, or will we trust God, heed His Word, and cast our cares onto Him knowing that He cares for us? The choice is ours. Be blessed. #sanguinemango
Sanguine Mango 