How To Deal With Anxiety
Anxiety is a source of worry that creeps into our lives during small moments, but it can overwhelm us. Soon, a little chard of worry turns into millions of pieces of worry that cut and bruise everything we do. Anxiety, if left to grow, turns into a thorn that entangles us and refuses to let us out of its grip.
It happens innocently enough. I was watering all of our plants this morning in our flower boxes, our front near the stairs, on the side where the tomato plants are, and in the backyard where the rest of the vegetables reside. I noticed one of our tomato plants was lying limp. It wasn’t eaten or trampled. It had just died. Plants die. Every gardener knows this. We’ve had plants die before. But something hit me this morning…
I froze. I started to become anxious. What if our beautiful flowers in the boxes died. What if we have no vegetables this year. What if every plant died no matter how much water or topsoil or manure I placed on it? I had become anxious.
I dealt with it the best I could. I breathed deeply and meditated on the chaos of life. Yes, that’s how I deal with anxiety, to think about chaos.
I do this because for me anxiety equals control, pride, and hubris. I become anxious when I want to wrap my greedy and selfish hands around something and make it conform to my precise demands. I become anxious when I want my life and everything around me to happen exactly as I want it to happen. If it doesn’t, I become anxious.
So I deal with anxiety by reminding myself I am not in control. The world is chaotic. Not in a there is no God everything is meaningless kind of way, but in an unordered kind of way. Life does not happen in my order. Life, from my perspective, is irreducibly chaotic.
And I am okay with that. I really am. I have to be, because that’s the way the world is, and I can’t change what I can’t control. When I get home from work tonight, I am going to plant a new tomato plant. I hope it doesn’t die—after all, after the watering and the green thumb, everything else is out of my control.
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And His ways are not our ways, so what seems unordered to us… may be very ordered to Him.
I too am learning to trust….
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All’s grace,
Ann
“I do this because for me anxiety equals control, pride, and hubris.”
Sometimes I forget God is sovereign, and not only that, that he acts in and interacts with his creation.
Thanks for this thoughtful post. It’s a good reminder to me that I’m not in control, especially as life continues to get crazier and crazier.
I completely understand your meditating “on the chaos of life,” as you say. It seems backwards, but during the early stages of a take-your-breath-away, pressure-in-the-chest panic attack, when I pause to imagine the absolute worst case scenario, it somehow forces me to acknowledge that God could handle even that scenario. And only then am I able to find peace.
Elizabeth,
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. The worst case scenario presents us with the inability for us to control a situation. It reminds us we are not God.
Thanks for this thoughtful post. It’s a good reminder to me that I’m not in control, especially as life continues to get crazier and crazier.
I completely understand your meditating “on the chaos of life,” as you say. It seems backwards, but during the early stages of a take-your-breath-away, pressure-in-the-chest panic attack, when I pause to imagine the absolute worst case scenario, it somehow forces me to acknowledge that God could handle even that scenario. And only then am I able to find peace.