“… the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by his letting us have our way in the end, but by making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly pray what he taught his disciples to pray: Thy will be done”
-Elizabeth Elliot-
It’s been nine months.
Nine months of diagnosed anxiety but years of anxiety without a name. anxiety is not something I prayed for and nobody wants it but it has taken me a while, but I think I am grateful for my anxiety. Now don’t just stop reading here and think that I wanted anxiety and want to continue being anxious because that is not the case. I have nights of crying because it feels like something is sitting on my chest and the walls are closing in. I have days where the world seems a little bit loud and I am in a bit of a daze. I have moments where I whisper why me. I have thoughts where I feel a spiral begin. Why I say I am grateful is because anxiety has taught me how to wait. If an anxiety attack occurs, I know it will pass so I have learned how to sit and wait for it to pass. I have learned how to exercise to help my mind cope while we wait for it to pass. I do not have a ten-point post about my cures for anxiety, but I have a truth. The truth is that in the wait your character gets formed. It’s scary. Anxiety is honestly terrifying.
I remember in October last year crying so much in fear of falling asleep that I would call my boyfriend at odd hours just to wait for it to pass. I would sit on a bathroom floor late at night crying and praying in hopes that I would not wake up my mother because I knew this would pass but that hour of crying felt like months. Sometimes the anxiety only lingers for like ten minutes – now I say linger because anxiety is not always debilitating, it is consuming but one can still be functional. In those times a close friend would encourage me to do it afraid. It took me months to get to the point that I would do it afraid.
If you are still reading this well done because that was an incredibly despairing introduction, but I could not figure out how else to start thing post but with the raw truth. If you are someone who has battled like I have or know someone who is battling or maybe anxiety is a foreign concept for you, I want you to know that this post is not about anxiety but about the waiting. Learning how to wait and why we wait is the aim in this post. The beginning of my journey of being diagnosed was quite a scary one because I felt like I failed myself and everyone around me because what triggered it for it to get this out of hand. I met my need with guilt and shame instead of meeting it with the truth and love of Jesus.
I threw away everything I knew in the moment I needed help because I saw myself as weak and ridiculous because why could I not just pull myself towards myself and carry on. Why could I not meet my feelings with logic. There were many days where I could not look at myself in the mirror because I was angry. When we are in a position of need, we tend to respond to ourselves in anger but when others are in need, we respond in love which makes your brain wonder what on earth is going on. Waiting makes us feel silly and not of worth because the people around us are achieving things we feel like we should be achieving. People are reaching milestones in their lives that we begin to ask when it is my turn.
Friend you cannot meet anxiety with anger and expect it to help. I am not saying when anxious thoughts come focus on joy because when the anxious feelings and thoughts come it can take everything within you to focus on joy. Just because your prayer has not been answered yet does not mean you need to be filled with guilt and shame. Corona or as I often say Rona has put a spanner in the works – things I have been hoping for or dreaming about seems a lot further now. 2020 planners have taken a back burner and holidays have been cancelled. Lives have been lost. Plans have been changed. God is working behind the scenes and sure you may have heard this before and just tend to brush it off because when is the whole production actually going to happen ? How many things need to happen behind the scenes for this production to finally happen. Gosh.
The amount of times I have asked myself these questions cannot be numbered. There is nothing we can do in the wait or in the panic but wait and this is where how we wait becomes important. We cannot throw away the truth because what we see does not link to what we know. You know you exercised but where are the abs? You know you ate healthy but why do you now have a cold? You don’t just throw your entire exercise regime away because your abs have not come in. You look at what you can do and what you can adapt. You work on you. You don’t throw your entire eating plan away because you got a cold. You work on healing yourself through the cold and taking various precautions. So why are we not working on us in the wait instead of throwing all our hopes and dreams away.
Put it in writing, because it is not yet time for it to come true. But the time is coming quickly, and what I show you will come true. It may seem slow in coming, but wait for it; it will certainly take place, and it will not be delayed.
-Habakkuk 2:3-
When I feel the anxiety coming, I now sit and occupy myself with other things in that moment. In my wait for it to pass I pray, watch a series that calms me, I have coffee and focus on everything else around me. My anxiety attacks used to last a lot longer simply because I would be focusing on them. In our wait for our dreams and hopes to come true let us focus on truths and action instead of the “not yet”. The waiting game that anxiety brought along has transformed me and taught me various things like chamomile tea is not for everyone and that drinking ice cold water helps. Haha but seriously run towards God in the moments of waiting or when you feel like turning against yourself. I am not saying it is easy to trust but I am saying it is worth it. I am not saying that I sit happily in the middle of a panic attack sipping away at my coffee but I acknowledge truths and that is that I have gotten through a panic attack before, God is good, the couch I am sitting on is comfy and that my cats are sassy.
Now some of these may seem silly, but they take my focus away from the attack to the reactions around me. I have survived 100% of the panic attacks I have been through and this is just another we can add to the success rate. I have not had a panic attack in two months. This may seem like a short time to some but in the middle of a world pandemic my panic subsided. I know what to read, when to read it and how to read it. if I read every single news story of course I would be panicked – anybody would be but I read what I deem important for what my mind wants to deal with at that time and then I move on.
I read a question not so long ago that simply said – have you ever considered the reason behind your waiting is for your transformation?
Waiting looks different for everybody. Anxiety looks different for everybody. But the truth remains the truth – so focus on that.
We know the truths and in the middle of the panic fill yourself with the truths that will help you when the panic comes. Stressful times results in you being squeezed so ensure that what comes out of you is hope and not destruction. Hope is not positivity. It is acknowledging what is happening right now and know it is not forever. Sometimes you need to worship God in the pain because miracles take time. Change the narrative from knowing that God makes promises to knowing God keeps His promises.
Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God’s story never ends with “ashes”.
-Elizabeth Elliot-
fierce musings 