I know people might read the title of this post and think I’ve decided to take a break from my usual hope-centered posts, but I haven’t; this post is also about hope.
A few years ago I was watching a show about ancient Rome on the History Channel. One of the most fascinating segments was on the incredible highway system the Romans had built throughout their empire. These Roman Roads were built to exact specifications to handle cart and foot traffic. This intricate network of roads facilitated trade and commerce as well as making it much easier for people to travel.
We saw early Christians respond with courage to severe persecution.
We saw miracles were normal for the early church.
We might say such strong faith is something we long to see in our church.
But do we really?
We sing, “Revive us again,” and “Mercy drops round us are falling, but for the showers we plead.”
But do we really desire and plead for the presence and power of God to revive us?
I wonder if we are content with the “mercy drops”.
Maybe really we are satisfied to have the Lord simply break through, every now and then, to do a mighty thing or two among us, but we really aren’t serious when it comes to wanting to see the full power and presence of His Holy Spirit.
Now some say we are living in a different dispensation and that the age of miracles is over — that was for a specific time and place to authenticate the message of the apostles, but we no longer need that today.
English: Sunrise on Mt. Sinai in Egypt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Really!!
The church doesn’t need the power and presence of Holy Spirit today?
Miracles are happening in mission fields where people have never heard of Jesus, why not here?
Is not “Jesus Christ […] the same yesterday and today and forever” as it states in Hebrews 13:8?
I’m afraid we have become comfortable and accustomed to the absence of God’s Presence in our meetings.
In reality, maybe the Presence of God scares us, just as it scared the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, and as a result, we don’t experience the miracles of God.
And our faith is dying.
When God sends forth the Holy Spirit, amazing things happen:
No morn? Not if you’re up all night, nope. No such thing.
No proper time of day? That’s IT! EXACTLY! Oh, it’s day? Oh. Okay . . .
That’s what that distant blue is, isn’t it. Hmm.
Here in these four walls,
connected by two halls,
no matter nature calls,
or if the toddler falls,
or if the baby bawls,
or carburetor stalls,
or dog the mathbook mauls:
Mom to the table crawls
And has her lunchtime!
Spending my daytime often solo, I have devised the plan I love:
Cook a decent supper, and then reheat for lunch the next day.
Our supper last night was sublime. If I do say so, I cannot help it. I just had to try this combo. I could not stop myself.
The results?
A few swai filets, breaded in egg, almond meal, and course black pepper, sautéed in olive oil, served over a bed of hot morrow squash, al dente, in a sauce of winter onions braised in butter and sour cream, with swai pan glazings and a skif of cayenne stirred in.
We nearly foundered.
But “nearly” only counts in hand grenades and horse shoes.
I got my reward, very carefully warmed over, today, with a cuppajo, or should I say, a very aromatic mug of Arkansas’ own Biff’s coffee, from which I receive no remuneration save the golden drink, itself.
I suffered from going into the past to worry about a future that never came about.
However, I did stop worrying about the past-future-what-ifs and I’d like to share with you how to do it, in case you find yourself needing to know.
1. Stop imagining.
My kids tell a joke, disguised as a riddle, which begins: Imagine you are in a car rolling backward down a hill toward a lake. The troubles and frustrations described in the joke continue to the point of desperation. There is seemingly no way to survive being drowned in that lake when the question comes: What should you do? Once the victim of this joke tries every possible solution to this seeming riddle and then gives up, the joker gives the answer: STOP IMAGINING! At that point it is very funny.
If you tell it right, the relief in the air is almost palpable at that moment, because the listener latches on to the story because we all have imaginings like this from time to time.
You may have imagined worries, but you can have that palpable relief, too.
In real life.
Imagination is a wonderful tool, in its place—but stop imagining.
2. Take every thought captive and make it obey the truth.
Realize there is something or someone trying to take away your sanity and you need to fight to get it back. Tell yourself the truth, aloud, if needed.
Ah, but what is truth? How can anyone ever possibly know what might have happened?
Don’t go there!
Take that thought captive!
Here is the truth: You are not in control. You do your best with what you are in control of, and then other forces are in control of all the rest. You try hard to be in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, and then, you let go.
The truth is that God is in control and you are not God. He rules the world. He determines. Not you. Not me. Not any malfunctioning gearbox, not any tornado, not any burglar, not any hormone, not any doctor, not any police.
God.
We read the stories all the time of those who escaped harm while doing the wrong thing. People hide from tornados in flimsy shelters and the whole building blows away except for the flimsy shelter. We read, also, of a tornado that swoops out of nowhere to pick up only one person and passes on to do no more damage. Burglars flee when someone rolls over in bed; other burglars take everything. Careless women have healthy babies; careful women deliver stillborn babies. And on it goes.
The truth is partly in the timing. When God determines it is time, then it is time. We all want to escape all danger, harm, shame, etc., but after doing all we can do, then the ball is in God’s court, and when it comes to THAT ballgame, God wins.
Of course, the fatalist will say, “Then why try?”
We must try hard to stay alive and to keep others alive, if at all possible, because life is a precious gift from God and we are to use it to His glory. We are not to become fatalistic or desponding, but to trust Him to make the best possible outcome from our entire life. We are to cooperate with Him, but not to worry about if He knows what on earth He is doing.
True freedom from worry over past-future-what-ifs came for me — and I hope, for you — with these thoughts:
My baby did not die that day. (It took me a while to get that part.)
Therefore, it was not God’s will for my baby to die that day.
Therefore, it was impossible that he could have died that day.
There could have been NO what-ifs that could have changed that. Since then I have even met a family whose son was run over, with no lasting harm coming to him. It’s all about Who is in control.
And it’s not about you or me.
The glorious liberty that comes from the truth, can set us free from all fear of death and all guilt.
We should do our best and trust God. He can and will take care of the what-ifs.
The traumatic what-ifs happen. They happen to very nice people. They can ruin sleep and even ruin life for people who basically did nothing wrong.
Sometimes we think what if about the future.
What if a tornado were to strike? What if a burglar came to the door? What if I miscarry? What if the thought police read my post? And on and on and on.
We call those what-ifs “worry”. We can make great use of them if we take notes, plan for the future, and then forget it. We stock the basement with candles, drinking water, maybe helmets, and then we relax. We lock the door or place a chair under the knob and then go on to sleep. We take our maternity vitamins and trust our medical pro. Etc. We do, in other words, whatever we can to avert disaster, normally, and then we go on to the next topic.
We call that wisdom.
We are bringing the scary future worries into the present, actual, factual preparations. Dealing with them in the present is what we should do. When we acknowledge actual, possible disaster, it does not seem so scary. When we use known fact to make ourselves safer, we actually benefit. We plan to succeed, maybe update now and then, and let the plan be enough.
Or we fixate on it and go through life abnormally worried about everything. What if the tornado sucks me out of the basement, what if the burglar comes down the chimney . . . We can drive ourselves crazy. We can have nightmares (if we’re not losing sleep.)
We suffer trauma when nothing has actually happened!
PTSD changes from POST– to PRE-traumatic stress disorder.
What a shame. How avoidable.
We call that waste.
However, sometimes we look back.
We look back on our past traumatic experiences and think too much.
We actually worry about things in the past.
Things that only might have happened.
But did not happen.
They are “what-ifs” from the past. There is no way we could ever go back to the past and be in danger from these what-ifs, but we go back there, mentally, and worry about what-if they had happened.
Now, I will grant that once we have experienced actual trauma, our brains are shuffled a bit. That is true. We do not walk through true danger without knowing it, without adrenalin, without fight-or-flight, without some sort of harm or terror.
But we sometimes do not stop there. Sometimes we worry most irrationally: We worry about the future, but we go back to the past to do it.
Sorry, but what we call that is just a bit wacko.
How do I know? I know, because I’ve done it, and I’ve seen others do it.
When my son fell out of the rolling car, I was sleepless many nights. He was fine. He was not crushed. The car did not roll into the street causing an accident. Someone was there to help. We all lived happily ever after.
But I worried.
For days.
What if my baby had been crushed. I’d have probably had to go to court. I could have had my children taken from me. I could be in prison. My poor baby would probably have died. Or worse. My poor teenager would have felt guilty. What if the car had continued rolling into the street, and had struck another car. Or another child. Two children could be dead right now. What if my teenager had to go to court. He was old enough to drive. He could have lost his privileges to drive. What if he had become suicidal….
This is only a fraction of what I suffered, and if you’ve ever gone down this path, you know it’s really a maze that keeps taking you back to the beginning. You never get out. The end of all this is either such weariness that insomnia is impossible, or else the end is insanity.
Oh. An added bonus is that some get to enjoy substance abuse. Why we don’t worry about that is a puzzle to me.
Okay. I did stop worrying about the past-future-what-ifs and I’d like to share with you how to do it, in case you find yourself needing to know.
. . . I left my children, one of whom was a teen (in the back seat) another, a baby (strapped into an infant car seat in the front) in the car while I stepped into a store to confirm an order.
Just for a moment.
The engine was off and in the parking gear. The town was population 100 or so, all friends and neighbors. The street was seldom trafficked.
This was a safe practice 30 years ago.
The baby was in that “twos” stage, when (we all know) it takes expert managing to control their little adventures. He was ready for adventure that morning.
We did not know he’d been studying how to extricate himself from his car seat.
He did.
The teenage child was in the midst of inexpertly admonishing him (from the back seat, remember) to get back into his seat, when the baby grabbed the gear stick and—in direct defiance of the manufacturer’s promises about parking safety specs—pulled it out of gear.
The car began to roll backward.
A grocery sacking attendant happened by at that moment.
And panicked.
And yanked open the door on which the baby was leaning for support.
The baby fell out.
The car continued rolling.
The sacker guy grabbed him, about one second before the wheel could crush him, tossed him back into the car, jumped in, stomped on the brakes, and put the car back in gear, averting further disaster.
He then proceeded into the store where he chewed me out, half explaining and half blaming me, in his total anxiety/trauma/relief-reaction to his recent activities with my children.
I, wondering what he was talking about, left my business in the store to check on my children. All was seemingly fine. They were somewhat upset, but the baby had learned the lesson and was totally compliant about being in the seat, into which his older sib had succeeded in returning him.
Outside of anger that the car could be taken out of gear, when the engine was off and the keys in my purse, contrary to new safety regulations, with which the manufacturer made loud claims to have been in compliance, I really felt only relief and thankfulness for how things turned out.
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