So long, lonesome

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds in the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, yet you heavenly Father feeds them, Are you not more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?" Matthew 6:25-27

 Three out of my seven days a week I awake with somewhat of a routine. First my alarm clock sounds & I ever so reluctantly ease from my warm bed just as I would slowly slip into a icy swimming pool on some idle, summer afternoon. My cereal of choice is then poured & consumed leaving enough time to throw on my scrubs, put some water in my hair to tame my bed-head, then grab my badge & snacks on the way out the door for work. Mornings at in this little studio are usually fast paced & short lived because I feel the snooze button is the next best invention to footy pajamas.

A few minutes of quiet exist on my drive into work. My little white truck (aka White Lightning) so reliably starts for me as it has done the past several years & the heater kicks in just before I pull into the parking lot at work. Some days by this point in the morning I have let fear begin to whisper to me. Will I have what it takes to to care for my patients today? Do I have what it takes to serve outside myself? Will I get a lunch break? How can I feel so alone when I am surrounded by such great people? And so on. My fear & worry exists before & after I work as I examine all the things that have been or may be. So this same fearful trend occurs in my relationships, in my school-work or almost any other realm of life. This fear is like when we were afraid of the dark as a child or just before you see that scary person in that scary movie you shouldn't even be watching. Our imagination can easily trend towards fear & while we recognize we shouldn't believe everything we think or feel, it can be hard not to. But just we turn on the lights or see that scary person in the movie, our fear often subsides because our imagination cannot run freely.


For me, worry, just like fear, is a lonely place to be, not because we are alone but because we feel alone.

More often than not I find myself in a state or place that doesn't easily permit reliance on prayer & God, because of that I can worry a great deal. What a blessing it is to think but what what a burden it can be to over do it or let your thoughts carousel wildly back around & around until you are left in a daze. Believe it or not, this kind of  'carousel worry' used to define much of my thinking. My thoughts had & still often have little discipline & guidance so I frequently let them take me where it may all while gritting my teeth & bearing it.

Fear, like everything, has an origin & lately I have begun to recognize this. In my relationships, my faith & my thinking I have begun to expose the fear in my life. Just like in a scary movie, once fear is exposed it regains it's normalcy or at least becomes less than what your imagination said it to be.  Just like a doctor must trace a disease back to it's cause in order to cure it, so must we trace our fear back to it's start. Treating the symptoms of a disease does nothing to eradicate it; for that we must know it's cause. In this we must be brave & seek help. Through this unraveling we must not choose to be alone. Bring fear into the light & the darkness will soon leave; choose to include others in this journey & loneliness will be replaced with love.

A much wiser man than myself once wrote this-

 "I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists of being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' -or else not. It is still 'either-or'. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain the smallest most intimate souvenirs of Hell." - C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce