CAN ANXIETY BE BANISHED OR AT LEAST MADE WANE AND WEAKER

(These thoughts are added to each Sun, Mon and Tues)

Can anxiety be banished, never to return again? ’Fraid not. Can it be managed so that it becomes a weight you can live with? Sure can.

We all will agree that anxiety does exactly what the Greek translation in the New Testament says it does – it strangles the living daylights out of us.

Indeed, when too much fear-factor takes over, it runs around in circles wearing holes in our brains. It creates ulcers in our stomachs and makes our emotions go to pieces. When we are overly anxious, we think crooked rather than straight and promptly make more problems than we had in the first place.

Fear, of course, can be healthy. It can lead you to drink milk rather than poison, stop at stoplights and go see a doctor when you don’t feel well. But anxiety, and there is a difference, is a spiritual polio that paralyzes mind, body and spirit.

Its essential ingredient is numbness. It makes people afraid of high places, close quarters and unknown tomorrows. It curdles. It crumples. It cripples mind, body and spirit. We only have so much time and energy and it wastes both.

So then, is there a cure? Where can a pound of fortitude be found to control a pound of fear before it becomes a ton of anxiety?

I like the way one little old lady, almost ninety, put it. She lived all by herself far out in the country. When asked if she was ever afraid she simply replied, “Why should I be? Faith closes the door at night and Mercy opens it in the morning.”

It was said of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, who arose each morning at four A.M., preached over 40,000 times and traveled over 250,000 miles on horseback; that he never hurried, he never worried and he never let foolish anxieties wear him down.

Or, as one of the field hands in my first rural pastorate often mused, “When I work, I work hard. When I sit, I sit loose. And when I start to worry, I just go to sleep.”
If there is an answer on how to handle the art of living rather than letting it handle us, it would seem to me that we must first and foremost learn how to cooperate with the inevitable.

We make an appointment and our watch stops. We go fishing and the only things we catch is a bad cold in a rainstorm. The inevitable is always with us, even though it is not always kind.

It is why I pray often, “Lord, if I cannot like it, let me learn from it. At least then, it will not be a total waste of time.”

Once there was an oyster
whose story now I tell,
And about a grain of sand
that worked beneath his shell.
Just one little grain, but oh such pain
For yes, oysters do have feelings,
even though they’re definitely so plain.

This oyster, however, didn’t curse the heavens
for such a deplorable state.
Nor berate the government
Or call for an election,
Or demand the sea
give him immediate protection.

No, he just lay down on a rocky shelf
And talked again and again
to his irritated self.
Saying, “If I cannot remove it,
I’ll try to improve it.”

Then the years rolled by,
as years always do,
And he came to his ultimate destiny,
in a hot restaurant stew;
And in place of the sand
That had bothered him so
Was a beautiful shining pearl all richly aglow.

The tale you have heard has a moral, now isn’t that grand.
What wonderful things oysters can do with only a morsel of sand.
What couldn’t we do, if we’d only begin
With all the things that get under our skin.

Have a friend visit my ONE A DAY YOUR SPIRITUAL VITAMINS site. Have them go to Google and where it says “Google Search” type in “Neil Spiritual Vitamins”

And, yes, if this site has met any of your needs share it with a friend. Just have them go to “Google Search” and type in “Wyrick’s Writings”

And, yes, maybe they will back track a few weeks to read other of my musings.