Bringing It All Together 10: Stuff Below the Line (still more)

Here's one of my favorites...

Black Box Special #2: ANXIETY

This is a fun one, isn't it? Anxiety is a special kind of fear that doesn't know what it's afraid of. Fear is specific. You are afraid of something particular--spiders, or closed spaces, or heights. But anxiety? You are blind while it eats you up!

Acute anxiety can be adaptive. You are being chased, so you run. God made your body with lungs and running muscles that can kick into overdrive when you are threatened. But chronic anxiety... it can be a killer. Continual high levels of stress hormones can eat away at your stomach (ulcers), cause tense muscles that can never relax, cause headaches, heart palpatations, and a garden variety of other health problems! These symptoms are often God-given signals from you body-- PAY ATTENTION, PAY ATTENTION, PAY ATTENTION.

Like pain, the first step of growth for an anxious person starts with awareness. When you feel anxiety, can you say so? Or do you rush to fill all the available space with internet, computer games, numbing entertainment?

Anxiety works like a thermostat. Consider this scenario. The whole family knows the unwritten rule: Bob (dad) can't handle a messy house. When Bob walks through the door and sees the kids toys all over the floor, he breathes a heavy sigh and slams down the newspaper. No words were spoken. But everyone got the message. The thermostat has just kicked in. Bob's anxiety rises, and the family kicks into action. Mom apologizes for their mess and talks about how busy the day has been. The kids wisk the toys away. Notice the reason for the activity. Not in order to clean the mess. But so that Bob will calm down. Bob's anxiety, unnamed, is unequivocally driving all the members of this family.

All of us experience anxiety. But one way to see how you may or may not be growing in this area is to ask what you do with it. When you feel anxious does it incapacitate you? Do you run (literally or figuratively?) eat? check your email? attack? Or can you stop and say, "I feel anxious. Let me stop and think. What's going on in me? My reaction is not really equal to what happened. Why is that? Yes, I'm anxious, but I can still make a wise choice here... The anxiety may still be present, but it doesn't win.

Bring the Lord into your anxiety struggle, and he WILL answer those prayers to show you what's really going on down there in your black box.