I have a habit of biting off more than I can chew.
I’m not great at time management.
And I can’t seem to say no.
It’s one of my lesser qualities. I can be a pushover, and I’m easily swayed on the small things. For example, bowling on a Saturday night or taking a friend’s shift at work. All good things.
I’ve been feeling convicted (especially after spiritual emphasis week at Berean–what a week, am I right?!) of taking on too much. I didn’t realize it was a poor decision at first.
But then I started letting people down.
I spiraled into this dark place of worry, anxiety, fear of failure, and stress. Oh, the stress.
I ran on a short fuse and snapped at the people I cared about. I looked for value and worth in people I had to work hard to be noticed by. I lost sight of the big picture and could only see what was directly before me and how things could not possibly get worse than they already were. I felt lost, and there were days when I looked in the mirror and didn’t identify with myself at all.
A mere two days before spiritual emphasis week began at my high school, I made the decision to get rid of certain things that offered no joy or benefit to my life. I wasn’t necessarily thinking in those exact limits at the time, but I knew I needed to change something because I simply wasn’t happy.
So I deleted Snapchat and Twitter from my phone.
It was mainly Snapchat that sucked time and energy from my days, and all it was doing was causing me anxiety. And for someone who’s battled anxiety for several years, I’m not exactly eager to indulge something that imposes those same ugly feelings on me.
The timing kinda worked out perfectly, considering the theme of spiritual emphasis week happened to be refocus.
Like wow.
God, You’ve got my attention now.
The past couple of months have been nothing but ugly for me. I’ve been stressed, sleep-deprived, and lonely, and God hasn’t been my still point. I’ve been looking to fill the dark void with approval from others, good grades, relationships, work–anything that wasn’t God.
But it just doesn’t work.
It’s not about me. It never has been. When I gave my life over to Christ, I gave Him all of me–the good, the bad, the ugly. The stress. The worry. The anxiety. The control I so desperately cling to, the structure I rely so heavily on. The darkest parts of me and the brightest. He knows me. To think anything less is ignorance.
On Friday, during chapel, we had the opportunity to take a stone and write a word that would remind us to refocus. I debated what to write, because I love words and choosing just one or two is a struggle for me.
But the one word that kept coming to mind was trust.
It’s something I’m not excellent at, mostly because it means letting go of my perfectly-planned-out fairytale life and blindly following while God leads. It’s uncomfortable, and not my first choice.
But it is necessary.
The phrase attached to ‘trust’ is saying yes to every good thing. That’s what I’ve been doing–saying yes to everything wonderful and charming–and it’s actually pulling me farther away from God and the things I’m passionate about (i.e.–writing). I’ve been so caught up in doing as much as I can just to prove to myself that I can handle it, and it’s ruining me.
But trust.
Trust is the bridge between self-reliance and freedom.
I don’t have to rely solely on myself when I put my trust in God, and therefore, I am free.
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