Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, but I don’t feel a sense of gratitude in my heart like a want to because all I seem to be focused on is how life is going wrong. One thing after another seems to be going wrong. If I try to do something, it goes wrong. My boss leaves for vacation, everything at work blows up. I try to do something at work, the state comptroller website has a massive failure. My husband and I come up to Oklahoma for his doctor’s appointment and his doctor has car problems and shows up two hours late. I am having a massive anxiety reaction to it all. I just want to scream and yell and hit something really really hard.
When I tried to do that with a rake in our backyard, the damn rake broke. And so right now, I am sitting in a car outside a medical building while my husband and I have been waiting for over 2 and a half hours to see a doctor that we drove six hours to see and I am wondering what the hell I am doing wrong. When I asked my husband about it, he just said, “Shit happens.”
If it’s true that “shit happens”, then why do I feel like I am falling apart? I feel like I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to sleep, I don’t want to do anything. My stomach hurts, my head hurts, and everything feels irritating. All the noises feel too loud. All the lights seem too bright. And all the touches feel like electric shocks. During a time that I usually enjoy coming to see my family, instead I am feeling like a bundle of nerves and I just want to run and hide away from everyone and everything until whatever is happening will go away. I don’t want to do anything or see anyone.
And I keep asking myself, what does God command me to do? He wants me to let go of my expectations of how I think life should be going and just let His plan happen. He wants me to hold Him above all others and be thankful. He wants me to love others as I would love myself. I know all those things, but when I find myself in the middle of a dark place in so much pain, it’s very difficult to do as God commands.
That’s the part that no one ever gets real about when they talk about God. Even when you have a strong faith, even when you believe, there are times when it is just plain difficult to follow God. And I think of Jesus in the garden. He experienced as He prayed all the sin of the world and He cried because He really didn’t want to follow God’s commands. He wanted to live a normal life or at the very least, He didn’t want to take on the pain of the entire world. At yet, in the end of His prayer, He prayed for God’s will to be done. He surrendered Himself to God.
I don’t know why I feel so bad right now. And I wish I could change everything and make it better, but the problem is that there’s so much right now that is out of my control and the best that I can do is put it all in God’s hands and do as He commands. Let His will be done.
As I wrote this post, I heard a strange honking sound. I looked up into the sky and I saw two geese fly overhead. I live in a place where I see lots of wildlife like deer and forest birds, but I rarely ever see a goose. I even see ducks sometimes in the Texas Hill Country. The strangest part is that they were flying low enough that I could tell that they were geese. It’s crazy that when I am crying in a car feeling like everything is falling apart and I just don’t want to be thankful, two geese would fly low right over the car. God either has a sense of humor or a great sense of timing. I don’t know which one. Does it really matter?
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
