Anxiety

 Anxiety is a hard thing to admit to having.  I used to pretend like I was immune to it out of shame and pride. It clouds your thoughts entirely; it's like trying to drive while looking out of a windshield in a rainstorm with broken windshield wipers. But God is Truth, and I have found that when I intake Truth all day (mainly through listening to the Psalms through music), the voice of anxiety quiets.  It gets softer and softer until I forget it was ever there. 

I remember one night when I was cooking at the homeless shelter, and they had just let people off the street in. We had already served 100 meals, and it looked like 100 more were needed. I was racing back and forth to each serving window, counting lunch trays, checking steam pans, telling people to give smaller scoops. Then I found myself racing to the walk-in fridge frantically grabbing donated foods, heating them in the microwave, creating more plates that way...moving to throw away plates because the dish room couldn't clean the lunch trays fast enough. At that time I had a friend who used to come into the kitchen to help me regularly.  He had a rough past, and I knew he had been in and out of jail multiple times. He was about 6'5" and was treated by the other men at the homeless shelter as the alpha. I wasn't afraid of him even though others were. He would come into the kitchen and snatch the mop from me after dinner shifts, asking why I didn't have anyone doing the mopping for me and telling me to go home.  

He and I knew how to work together, and I found that to be a common thing in the kitchen that I either had with people or didn't.  A kitchen flow.  Some people had it and others didn't.  This friend did, and it seemed he was always looking out for me when I needed help. I will always be thankful for him.

The night I was scrounging to feed the excess of guests from the street, my friend looked down at me and said "We got this." 

It was as if he knew how we were going to create dozens of meals out of thin air. I knew we didn't have enough food. I knew people were hungry and expecting to be fed a hot meal and I could never bare to turn anyone away. But I remember that night just looking at him and believing him. Trusting him. Letting go. It felt kind of like giving up. And somehow we ended up producing enough food for everyone. Everyone was fed.

I often think of this night when I am anxious and remember that God's got this.  It's hard for me to believe that but I know that's how we are supposed to live. Trusting him is hard. But it's easier if I sit down with a pen and paper and look back on all the ways that he has taken care of me. It's in small and big ways, consistently through my entire life. And I'd be an arrogant fool to give myself credit for my fate, because half of the time I had no idea what was going on and His plan always turned out better than the one I imagined.

So I have to remind myself of this all the time. He's got this. He's like my 6 foot 5 friend towering over me kindly, letting me know as I'm sweating, exhausted, and unsure of how to finish- that he's going to take care of it.