“Fully Rely on God,” the radio broadcaster explained one morning this week, encouraging his audience to add the familiar F.R.O.G. acronym to their electronic signatures, just as we type LOL for “lots of laughs.”
Now, anxiety is my middle name, and yet as a believer in Christ, it should be farthest from my imaginings. Fully rely on God. If I could just really live what I believe, how would I ever feel anxiety at all?
From whence comes each anxiety or fear? Aren’t they connected to our ultimate fear of the unkown, death? Again this week, listening to a relaxation tape, I was reminded that death is not something to fear, but a thing to rejoice in that it is a necessary step to another, better stage in existence. Fully rely on God. Seeing this life and its troubles as a stepping stone to a better, at this stage unknowable, existence should be a source of solace instead of fear and anxiety in a Christ-centered world.
Twice this week, I have been encouraged to turn to God when I feel the pressures and anxieties of this world coming down on me. How will I turn to Him? In prayer? By reciting my favorite verses to myself? By stating to myself that there is a purpose to what I am feeling or experiencing that means something to God, even if I can’t see it in this moment?
Christ seemed to know that we would be challenged by anxieties in this life. We are encouraged to “cast our anxieties on Him because He cares” for us. His parables tell us about people who faced harsh masters, life-altering mistakes, and the early death of loved ones. Even Simon, called Peter, who certainly fully relied on God, fell victim to the devil and denied Christ three times before the cock crowed.
When I think of all the time I have wasted on feeling unnecessary anxieties, I wonder how I haven’t learned from them. What is it going to take for me to fully rely on God in even the smallest of things, not to mention the really big challenges of life?
For those who are predisposed to overmuch anxiety, relying on God is a daily struggle. But even the most steady of personalities faces challenges where relying on God’s will helps to make the challenges more emotionally manageable.
Maybe a little more F.R.O.G. in our correspondence is really a good idea, especially if we refuse to forget the fully part and practice a little more reliance.
Category: Self-Help
Not Just a Bumper Sticker
The world is full of one-liners. Some of them make us laugh. Some of them bore us. Others are supremely forgettable.
But others somehow find a way of sticking in our brains. In some way, they reflect a deeper truth than the ten seconds it took to read them as they zoomed past us on the back of a worn bumper sticker on the busy freeway.
My latest brain sticker came to me through one of those email blasts of “feel good” lines that I often usually skip over, as too many emails come through my box every day. This email, however, had been “screened” and forwarded to me by my dad, so I knew it would be worth a look.
As it turned out, I was really glad I did because the email led me to a new mantra that is helping me approach my life from a better perspective each day. I even put the statement on my day planner as a recurring task so I read it each day.
What’s this great perspective? “Don’t take yourself seriously. Nobody else does.”
This statement doesn’t work for everybody. If the problems you are dealing with are extreme low self-esteem or feeling alone in the world, then your statement would be something more along the lines of “God loves you,” or “learn to love yourself and love will find you.”
But for someone like me, who was driving herself crazy with a pile of things I “should” be doing, beating myself up about what I wasn’t accomplishing every day, and feeling like I was somehow wasting my life because I wasn’t doing an undefined “something” that was my great purpose in life, the idea of not taking myself seriously is helping me put things into a more realistic perspective. It’s making me not judge myself or others the way I was doing. And, when I catch myself getting revved up into anxiety about what I am or am not accomplishing, the statement helps me shift back down into a more reasonable gear.
The statement is also getting me to see life from other people’s perspectives much better. After all, the reason no one is taking me as seriously as I take myself is because we all of us face the world from the very limited perspective of the self. I’ve even caught myself doing a better job of thinking about what I am about to say and realizing that what I would think is obvious or practical might actually be insulting or wounding to somebody else. I am also learning not to take things personally that I might have otherwise done. People aren’t deliberately wounding me so much as rightfully being caught up in their own problems and wounds.
Finally, the statement reminds me that I am not supposed to be sticking my nose in other people’s problems. I like to be the fixer, you see, and so I find myself volunteering to do things or solve things that aren’t really in my purview. Sure, I’m supposed to be helping people as a Christian, but that does not require that I do everything for everybody, which is a trap I can easily fall into. When you find yourself sitting around thinking about how to solve somebody else’s problems, when that somebody hasn’t even asked for your input, your are taking yourself way too seriously. Do you really think you are that smart or important? All you are really doing is avoiding solving your own problems and making yourself feel more important than you really are in the grand scheme of things. Most importantly, always thinking just flat out makes your brain tired.
So, I hope if you are dealing with a particular, pervading issue that you can find your own “bumper sticker wisdom” to help serve as your own reminder of how best to beat the challenges in your own life.
Just remember, that while others aren’t taking you seriously, God most certainly does. All the time. Unwavering.
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