The other night my mom fell down and couldn’t get up. I felt bad for her, but the only way to get her up was to pick her up and it was going to hurt. She wouldn’t let my husband and I do it. We had to call the fire department and they had to pick her up. It was just as painful for the three strangers to pick her up as it was for us to do it, but for some reason she didn’t want to argue with them.
I talk about having patience, love, and kindness for others. I try my best to do the same with my mother. Yet when it comes to these situations, I fall back to loving others as I would love myself. If I was lying on the floor in pain, I would want the people around me to pick me up even if it was painful. Life is painful. Sometimes living through pain is part of the experience and I found you can’t avoid it.
In fact, I have found the times when I tried to avoid pain it just made things worse. For example, when I try to avoid panic attacks because of the pain, the anxiety is just worse. I would feel so defeated knowing that everything I tried to calm myself down wasn’t working. I would get so much more anxious thinking that I was going to keep feeling panicked indefinitely. The attack seemed to go on forever and I would just keep thinking that I couldn’t live like that.
These days when I experience anxiety, I accept it. I think to myself that I am having a panic attack and that it is okay. I know the symptoms and I know that they are going to be slightly uncomfortable and painful, but they won’t be too painful, and they won’t last more than a couple of hours. I give my anxiety up to God. Then, I move on because if I focus on the anxiety and the pain, I will just make it worse. God won’t ever let me experience anything too difficult that I won’t be able to handle it. I have total faith in that.
With my mom, I believe that too. I know that it hurts to get up and I’m sorry she is in pain, but lying on the floor in pain is just going to make her condition worse. Sometimes, in life, I know it is painful. That’s part of it. God knows that, too. The trick is knowing that God is there to make sure the pain and difficulty are never too much. I know it. I’ll be okay. My faith tells me so.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
