Do you know that feeling – when your heart is racing, and it feels like it’s beating from both your chest cavity and your skull? When most people are only passively aware that their heart is pumping liters of blood through miles of veins, you are acutely aware of its rushing nature, which in this moment appear to only be tangled in knots somewhere between your chest and brain, and threatening to burst out of the membrane walls. If you look, maybe your fingers - that you aren't consciously moving - are swaying, keeping rhythm to the beat of your beating heart.
Perhaps your head hurts, perhaps you feel like you can’t catch your breath. Maybe, if you’re like me, focusing on anything more than a millisecond seems to be an impossible feat because for you that millisecond is a million thoughts. Evaluate your breathing – how are you breathing? Such a mundane question, everyone breathes. Is your chest rising and falling, or is it your gut? Or, are you breathing at all? Of course everyone breathes, but for some, it is possible to forget to breathe.
Stress – a simple word used so often. The employee who returns home from work and exhaustingly states he had a stressful day. Every person knows what it is like to have a stressful day, stressful week. Few know what it’s like when it triggers physiological changes that alter your body’s normal function.
Anxiety – what happens when there’s too much stress, and you think too much about that stress. Or, specific triggers that create an automatic response.
Uninvited words, digital black and white appear on my phone's screen. Sometimes they're words of love. Deceptive words. Today they're threats. A promise, a reminder that my fight is not over.
Perhaps your head hurts, perhaps you feel like you can’t catch your breath. Maybe, if you’re like me, focusing on anything more than a millisecond seems to be an impossible feat because for you that millisecond is a million thoughts. Evaluate your breathing – how are you breathing? Such a mundane question, everyone breathes. Is your chest rising and falling, or is it your gut? Or, are you breathing at all? Of course everyone breathes, but for some, it is possible to forget to breathe.
Stress – a simple word used so often. The employee who returns home from work and exhaustingly states he had a stressful day. Every person knows what it is like to have a stressful day, stressful week. Few know what it’s like when it triggers physiological changes that alter your body’s normal function.
Anxiety – what happens when there’s too much stress, and you think too much about that stress. Or, specific triggers that create an automatic response.
Uninvited words, digital black and white appear on my phone's screen. Sometimes they're words of love. Deceptive words. Today they're threats. A promise, a reminder that my fight is not over.
I breathe the truth in, and breathe the fear out. Inhale the promise in: God will fight for me. And exhale the lie: I have no peace.
Then I remember something else. I can’t place the verse, but a few keystrokes later, I find it – Isaiah 55:11. So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.
God will fight my battle; I can have peace. God spoke it.
God spoke, and the Earth was formed. If God can speak nothing into something, so can He speak peace into chaos.
This does not mean that I do nothing. When I get a phone call in the midst of my panic, the voice reminds me, telling me his words are empty and to remember only the steps that I can control. Holding my peace means that I do not let fears and worry make me forget. Stick to the steps, and breathe.
Then I remember something else. I can’t place the verse, but a few keystrokes later, I find it – Isaiah 55:11. So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.
God will fight my battle; I can have peace. God spoke it.
God spoke, and the Earth was formed. If God can speak nothing into something, so can He speak peace into chaos.
This does not mean that I do nothing. When I get a phone call in the midst of my panic, the voice reminds me, telling me his words are empty and to remember only the steps that I can control. Holding my peace means that I do not let fears and worry make me forget. Stick to the steps, and breathe.