I had a migraine yesterday and took a few hours off work. I wanted to go back to work because July is a busy month, but the medication just made it impossible, and I had to rest most of the afternoon. I found myself worrying about catching up with my work today. Yet when I actually started to do the work, it really wasn’t difficult to catch up at all.
The entire situation made me start to think about anxiety and fear. I think that there’s an aspect of anticipation that can make the situation worse. My husband once told me about how Alfred Hitchcock built tension in his movies. He would show a bomb underneath a table to the audience, but none of the characters would know the bomb was there and the audience wouldn’t know when the bomb was going to go off. The audience would be filled with tension and anticipation because they knew the bomb was going to explode, but they didn’t know when.
Life is sort of like that. We know that there are events, challenges, and struggles that are coming up. We don’t know exactly when they will occur or what will happen when they do. The anticipation of waiting for them brings tension, excitement, and sometimes anxiety.
One way of dealing with it is living in the moment, but as much as I want to live in the moment, it is very difficult to do all the time. With my OCD, that anticipation translates to having every worse case scenario I can imagine play out in my mind for every upcoming event.
I wish there was an easy answer to this one, but I really don’t have it. I just know to take that anticipation, anxiety, etc. and if it gets to be too much give it up to God. I try to believe that no matter how scared I feel about what’s to come, since God is with me, I will see my way through it. It’s like taking leaps of faith all the time for me; I am worried all the time about what is coming next. Somehow, I just have faith and I keep moving forward.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
