In case it wasn’t readily obvious, I thought I should let you know that I tend to be on the more anxious side of things. I tend to be the kind of person who gets a little manic and panicked and nuts and — when I’m in that state — everything feels urgent and everything feels as though it must be solved. Immediately.
This may or may not sound (very) familiar to you.
All of sudden I feel a visceral need to know: Where we will live for the rest of our lives. What we will do with the carpet in the girls’ bedroom. What Middle School the twins will attend (they’re 5). And whether or not we will paint our kitchen cabinets. It all must be solved, answered, put to rest . . . Right. Now.
I’m grabby. I need a bumper sticker that says: “Put your life down and back away slowly.” I need to keep my grubby mitts off my own life, but it’s so freakin’ hard.
Every time I try to fix or solve out of that anxious place, it backfires. It’s like the hole you can never fill. No matter what you throw into it . . . it’s never enough.
When I’m around other people who are frantic and frenzied and anxious and think they have to solve everyone else’s problems, it makes me highly annoyed. Calm down, stop trying to fix everything, stop making everyone around you crazy, I want to say. My annoyance with others’ inability to relax, their out-of-control-ness, is such a clear indication of the rejection of those traits in myself.
The truth is, that frantic lunatic is me too.
Recently I felt very defensive about something. And I wanted to run to my own rescue. I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to launch into self-protection mode and, if I had, it would have been disastrous. Instead, my dear friend Tina saved my bacon in a big way. She knew I was getting crazier by the second about the whole episode, and she said to me, “Leeana, this is not an urgent matter.”
Put it down and walk away. Let. It. Go.
Sometimes I get very worked up over things that are not urgent. I get frantic. Frothy. And then I see that I have picked up something I was never meant to hold. And, what’s worse, I’ve believed that all the power is in my hands to change or fix or rescue. This is a bad recipe.
What have you picked up and made an urgent matter that you need to put back down? Or better yet, put into God’s hands.
Today’s urgent matters: For me, my urgent matters are being a good companion to myself, nurturing my kids, keeping a sense of humor with my husband, creative expression of some kind, ongoing prayer with God so I don’t unleash on those I love most. Oh, and breathing. Breathing is always an urgent matter.
Everything else, I could probably just hand over to God. Yep. Seems like a fairly good strategy.
What do you need to take your hands off of?
What are your urgent matters today?
(Always, we begin again.)
