Anxiety and God

High Anxiety (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thinking about Keith's sermon on the silence we need to hear God's voice, and reading Kate's blog post about courage, have helped me to think about this.

I have an anxiety disorder. This makes it hard for me to talk to God. If I try to talk to God about one thing, everything else I'm worried about will all show up and flood the prayer at the same time, and instead of feeling relieved, I wind up feeling more worried than when I began.

Anxiety makes it hard to meditate as well. The last thing I want is to empty my mind, because any empty space in my mind gets filled with anxiety.  Everything I'm worried about floods in. The longer I meditate, the more I find to worry about. By the end of a session I'm a nervous wreck. This is not the kind of positive feedback that encourages me to keep trying.

I am only now beginning to realize how much of an effect anxiety has on everything I do; that it's not just something that flares up from time to time, it's the water I swim in. For example; I can't plan, because knowing that I need to do something at all means to my anxiety that I need to do it right now, and since I can't do everything this instant, choosing any one task out of the stack of tasks in front of me simply makes me feel guilty and anxious that I am not doing all of the other ones. At once. It's easier to just stay in bed.

It is above all very hard to hear God through all this fretting. I only hear my own fears, echoing back and forth inside the curvature of my own skull, drowning out any other voice.

I'm sure God has something to say about all this. In fact, I even know what it is. It's "Be still, and know that I am God."

That God said this tells me that I am not the first person God has met with an anxiety disorder. Still, being still is precisely what anxiety makes it very difficult to do.

However, I think it's something I have to learn to do, because what I'm doing now doesn't work. So I am going to try meditating for five minutes a day. I know everybody says that's not enough, but I have to start somewhere, and more than five minutes at a time fills me with dread. I hope that with practice I can learn to be still, and know that God is God. And someday, I hope, my own mind will even quiet enough, sometimes, to let me hear God's voice.