Anxious Moments

Often we hear that it is change that makes us anxious. Last Friday I was at a conference where one of the presenters conjectured that it’s not so much change that makes us anxious, but pain that brings us anxiety-- either experiencing it or fearing it.

Last year, during Jeff’s last several weeks, he kept asking for more and more pain medicine. His doctor and nurses didn’t deny his experience of pain, but they were baffled at the rapid increase. When his doctor finally prescribed an anti-anxiety medication without further increasing the pain meds, Jeff reported that his pain was better. His pain was real, but it was also being intensified by his anxiety at the fear of having pain or of not being able to control it.

I have never had to experience the level of physical pain he had, but I know that I find myself anxious when I face other kinds of pain. And so in my seeking to control my anxiety, I am most likely to either avoid –flee from the possible source—or comfort myself by feeding, consuming my way through it. I have been doing a lot of the latter in the last several months, eroding much of the good I had done for my body and health. As I realize this, I know that I am going to have move back out of a reactionary mode into a more thinking, reflective mode. This is going to be hard, and even the thought of that raises my anxiety. So what I need most is to be able to rest against God’s breast like a child that is already weaned.

Psalm 131:2

But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.