Understanding worry

Having spent most of my life suffering from severe depression and anxiety, I am well accustomed to the concept of worry. Significant portions of my life have been spent worrying about things - mostly needlessly. Throughout my 12 years of walking as a Christian I have learned a great deal not only about worry but about the psychology and wrong thinking behind it. Some of this learning has only come to me very recently - as in over the last few days. I would like to share some of these revelations in the hope that they will speak to someone.

1. Worry can easily be seen as a form of preparation.
Don't get me wrong - there are some things that we quite rightly need to be concerned about regarding the future which we need to take active steps in order to prevent them happening. This is normal, and healthy. But when this becomes extreme, it isn't healthy at all. I have just recently discovered about myself that I see all worry about everything as a form of preparation and prevention of bad things happening to the point that I have been afraid to relax and let go. This has been rooted in wrong thinking that I have carried around in my heart and operated out of subconsciously, without actually realizing what I was doing. The wrong thinking I have been subconsciously believing has been the lie that being constantly worried about bad things happening means that I am constantly prepared for them, which in turn means that they won't happen or that I will be better equipped to face them once they do happen. The worst part of the lie I've been believing has been that if I relax and let go nothing but bad things will come upon me and that it will be my fault that they did happen because I relaxed and let go and thus wasn't working hard to prevent them. It's like when bad things have happened in the past I've blamed myself because I wasn't alert and prepared enough to be able to prevent them.

It's almost like I've felt that if I just totally relaxed and let go of everything and stopped trying to control things by worrying about them, that the world was going to end and that it was going to be my fault that it ended because I wasn't worrying about everything and therefore preventing it from happening. I now realize just how faithless this mode of thinking is and how it completely removes the power of God. It is God's job to be in control of the world and how it operates - not mine. Living in a constant state of turmoil and worry is not good for anyone. I always remember a word of prophecy I was given many years ago where God said to me "Graham - where you end, I begin." I realize that I have struggled hugely to let myself end because I don't trust God taking over and beginning to operate in my circumstances. I don't trust enough in His goodness and His faithfulness to be in charge of my world even regarding the things I have no power over. I still have learning to do.

2. Worry is a sign of a lack of faith.
Relaxation and trusting the world into God's hand - including His ability to communicate to us and let us know when He wants us to do something - is living by faith. Trying to be God and trying to be in charge of everything that it is actually His job to be in charge of is living by fear and placing unrealistic expectations upon ourselves that we are simply not capable of fulfilling, yet we feel as if we have to anyway. I can understand how some would find it hard to have faith in God's goodness and God's control of their world. I certainly have - seeing as God has lead me into some terrible trials, especially over the past 5 years where I have faced more hardship than I have in my entire life up to that point. There's still a part of me that is afraid to trust God because I feel that He's going to lead me into something bad again and that it's something that I need to go through. I remember reading a note in my old Teen Bible that said God is saying to us that He loves us, and just wants to help us because He wants what's best for us.

I struggle to trust in God's omnipotence and omnipresence. Due to the spiritual ties I have carried around with me I have lived in terrible fear of being under the power of another person or object because my immediate expectation has been that they would use that power for harm and that I wouldn't be able to stop them or rescue myself once I gave that power over to them. Identifying this wrong thinking and bringing it to the light has been helping to break its power over me and helped me to realize that I can trust God in these areas and that the safest place to be is right in the centre of the will of God - even if that can be a hard place to live sometimes. God is faithful and His heart is for us - not against us. Sometimes we just need to remind ourselves of that.

3. Learning to stop worrying is a process - not a quick fix.
One of the most powerful testimonies I ever heard was from someone who had lived in a very dark place before they came to Christ. I cannot remember their name, their story or even when or where I read the testimony but I always remember one specific part where he said that little by little he was slowly giving the steering wheel of his life over to Jesus. This communicated to me that control over his life which obviously helped sooth his anxiety was not something he could completely give over instantaneously, but rather something that needed to happen slowly and over a period of time. It's not as if Jesus was not faithful to completely take the wheel and take complete control over this man's life at once - because He was. But where this man was at meant that to give everything over at once would have been completely overwhelming for him emotionally as it would have thrown all of the darkness in his heart to the surface at once which probably would have destroyed him.

I certainly relate to this. It has been a process in my life too. Every time a bit of wrong thinking is revealed - and healed - Jesus "takes the wheel" a little bit more in my life. If every bit of wrong thinking in my heart was thrown into my face at once it certainly would have overwhelmed me and I would not have been able to cope. Jesus knows this and therefore has taken to revealing truth and healing to me slowly and over a period of time at a rate that I could handle it. I've likened it to a tree growing - sometimes it doesn't look like it's growing at all, especially when you see it every day. However if you don't see it for 6 months you will be amazed at how much bigger it's become over that time. There is no harm or shame in slow growth as God knows our individual hearts and circumstances and if we let Him, will grow us at a pace that's perfect for us.

I hope that this has spoken to someone. Learn to face the worry and wrong thinking that drives it in your life. Have faith in a God that is infinitely bigger than you are and wants the best for you, and don't be frustrated if you are on this path but it's taking longer than you would have liked.

Take care and be blessed.

Listen for God's voice

If there is one thing that has got me through the last 10 years in my Christian walk, it's been about learning to identify and obey the voice of God. I want to share a bit about different ways that He speaks to us as His children and why His word is most important above all else.

The main way that He speaks to me is usually just through a still, small voice in my soul that I just know hasn't come from me, and it's like it brings all of my other thoughts to a complete standstill. For example - once I was praying about a job that I was failing in miserably due to a poor work environment and the job being completely unsuited for me. I was frustrated and angry and asking God why I wasn't succeeding in this role and He simply said "Maybe you aren't supposed to succeed in this role." Sure enough, He was right and success was not His plan for me in that awful job but rather learning about perseverance through difficulty.

God also speaks to His people through dreams. Just recently I was sound asleep and in my dream it's like I was talking with God about my struggles and He kept encouraging me to open up to Him about what I was feeling. I managed to address some strongly rooted issues in my own inner struggles while in the middle of a God inspired dream. This insight that I gained while I was asleep helped me to process and continue to heal some of the tension that has kept me so highly strung for so long and is now finally unraveling.

Someone once told me many years ago that I will face many critics over the years and people trying to sway me from the path that I was on but when that happens I need to hear the voice of God. The path I have been on has been a path to finding inner healing and it's come through digging into the heart of my deepest and most painful struggles to unpack and unravel what is there. Many have told me that I am focusing on the negative and that I need to stop being so morbid and turn my focus to positive things and that I'm making things worse by what I am doing, but I have continued to hear God's voice encouraging me to continue to go down the path I was walking down and that it was what I was meant to be doing.

I've learned that nothing is more important than hearing the voice of God and obeying what He says when it comes to different situations. If others disagree with you then so be it - it's not between you and them but between you and God and if doing what He wants you to do pisses other people off, then they can go and take it up with Him. God doesn't always speak the way that we expect Him to and He doesn't always say what we think He should say - but He says everything for a reason.

His reasons for saying things can be different to how we interpret them. Shortly before I went through complete burnout last year, God put someone on my heart very strongly and no matter how much I protested, God would not let me let this person go so I began to place my hopes and dreams upon this person as I believed that they were going to be an important part of my future. God never actually said that they were going to be an important part of my future but based on His refusal to allow me to let them go I began to believe that they were. Shortly before I collapsed through burnout it became strikingly apparent that the future I had been believing for due to hearing from God was not going to happen and due to my already fragile mental state I crashed completely.

I had not heard wrong as God had encouraged me to hold onto the hope that I once had but His reasons were different from mine. I know I heard His voice and I was obedient right till the end. I thought I was going to be blessed but God used my obedience to His voice to break my hopes and dreams for this future I believed in so that I would break completely. It sounds horrible and it was traumatizing at the time to say the least but I have come to realize that it needed to happen for my sake because I needed the time off to get my first ever proper rest and I couldn't heal completely without breaking completely first.

What I learned from all of this was to listen for what God has to say and don't immediately assume you know why He is going to say it as His purposes are greater than ours and He might set us up for a totally different outcome than we expected. But if we listen for Him and obey Him, He will protect us (even if it means we have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death as I did) and He will see us through.

Take care.

We must lose ourselves to find out who we really are.

The human heart is a deep well. Behind a person's smile, many unknown things can dwell, often without us even realizing that they are there. It is so easy to think who we are on the surface is who we really are. However this is all too often not the case at all.

The human heart goes much deeper than we realize. There are things dwelling deep inside us we don't even really know are there, and when push comes to shove in daily life, those things begin to get exposed, the masks come down and we are shown up for who we truly are and what we truly carry inside ourselves.

There is a huge unknown factor to this. Most of the time the things that we struggle with are not related to our circumstances at all - our circumstances are merely bringing to light who and what we truly are inside, below everything, in the darkest levels of our own minds. Everything in life is a test - a test to get to know ourselves and push us deeper into uncovering our own individual truths about who we really are.

We must learn not to resist hardship when it comes, for it is through hardship that we are pushed deeper into our own minds and hearts and what is there, instead of being hidden becomes exposed and in our faces - we have no choice but to either front up to it or continue to stew in our own agony. As we continue to do this, a light is shed into the darkest corner of our own hearts, and what was once unknown, unchartered and a breeding ground for fear and uncertainty becomes light, becomes known, becomes another brick in the strong foundation we must build in our lives if we ever hope to carry anything worthwhile in this world - anything related to eternity.

Our lives in the western world are made easier - and subsequently destroyed - through our wealth and culture of consumerism. We can go through our whole lives getting everything we ever wanted handed to us on a silver platter, never having to work for anything, never having to really put your heart and soul into anything, never putting anything at risk - including risking the masks we cover our lives with, and never once having to face the hardest thing to face - ourselves.

This culture creates a breeding ground for poor character and subsequently fruitless and unsatisfying lives. We spend most of our lives and most of our days building things around us - and inside of us - to save us from the cold, hard facts about ourselves. Though on the surface it all appears to be ok - all we are really doing is lying to ourselves and subconsciously protecting that which we desperately want to hide, as we think keeping everything in the dark will bring peace - where as the truth of the matter is we need to learn to face the truth about ourselves and keep nothing hidden, as that is the only place true peace, dependable peace, unshakable peace - is really found. Ignorance is bliss, however it only ever ends in destruction. Awareness can be very painful, however if we persevere and uncover the truth through our awareness, our awareness can subsequently bring us great peace.

I know what I'm talking about as well. I am facing a lot of hardship at the moment. My natural urge is to resist what I am going through, to run and hide, to deny the truth and hope for a change in circumstances to protect what I am already feeling. However, I know now that if I do this, this time will be wasted and I will probably end up facing the same thing later on in life. If I really want things to improve circumstantially, I must seek to thoroughly examine and change my own heart, and God will change my circumstances when He sees fit to do so.

This is a quote from Star Wars which, although perhaps a little extreme, hits on what I'm talking about -

"Tell me what you regard as your greatest strength, so I will know how best to undermine you; tell me of your greatest fear, so I will know which I must force you to face; tell me what you cherish most, so I will know what to take from you; and tell me what you crave, so that I might deny you…"

This is very true in many ways. We must seek to throw away the crutches we continue to stand on in our lives. The only thing we can depend on is God, and God wants to teach us to stand on our own two feet and not have the need for crutches. I'm not saying the church should not be united - it should. But each individual congregation member needs to only have one crutch in life - God. Everything else must come second, and we must only fully depend on God, for as much as we think otherwise - we will be let down by our other crutches, which we have put our full weight on, and we will subsequently crash very hard and very heavily.

Or perhaps even worse - live a life without learning what we need to about God and ourselves, and end up at the end of our lives with the realization that in denying the truth and refusing to ask yourself hard questions, we have actually robbed ourselves of a life that could have really meant something in eternity, rather than just a life that gathered a lot of possessions, all of which will just waste away and be forgotten at the end of it all. I can imagine nothing worse than getting to the end of my life, with nothing to look forward to besides the grave - and realizing I have done nothing but waste the chances given to me.

We must not run from our trials. We must embrace them. We must delve into the darkest parts of our own lives when God brings them to the surface, and surround ourselves with those who do the same. We must ask ourselves honestly - what do I really value in my world? Are there any crutches in my life I am depending on that I shouldn't be? Are there any false gods I am worshiping without realizing it that need to be torn down, or else I risk losing everything?

The Psalmist David hits on this in Psalm 139:23 -

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts."

David is asking God to bring what he carries within him to the surface and reveal it. Jesus also said something similar in Luke 17:33 -

"Whoever tries to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it."

If we try to save ourselves and try to resist everything that happens to us, block ourselves off from trials, and fight against our circumstances, we will ultimately end up losing ourselves. However, if we lose our masks and our coverings of fear and allow God to journey with us into those dark places, through those hard times we would rather resist, only then, will we truly save our own lives.