I woke up wide eyed and irrationally panicked, on the first day of this new year, my mind crowded with several thousand things I needed to do right then. I lay in the dark and tried to climb down from the edges of insanity, reminding myself carefully that it was only 3:30 in the morning, that there was no reasonable way to do any of the things swirling together in the forefront of my anxiety. Getting up to clean the school room and rearrange all the cupboards was a bad idea, right then, I should try, perhaps, a little more sleep rather than doing all the things.
This happens to me every so often. I carry along in my ordinary way, doing the work that’s pretty well right in front of me, and then suddenly, usually in the middle of the night, all the things that I have done yet, and all the things that I can’t possibly have any control over, marry themselves to the kingdom of anxiety which is my night time mind. I like to blame this experience on Satan, because it seems the clearest and easiest way, but I would be deceiving myself if I didn’t admit to it being in some measure my own fault.
Not that I’m thinking I should add to the wretchedness of the midnight panic this extra measure of guilt. No, not guilt, but rather facing the insanity of such a panic in the first place. What I never am able to ask myself in such a moment is, ‘what are the lines of my own responsibility?’ What am I supposed to be doing? At 3am I am supposed to be asleep. On Sunday morning I am supposed to be in church. During the week I am supposed to be in the school room with the children. What I am not supposed to be doing is taking responsibility for stuff completely outside of my control, like, say, how the will do when they get to college, and whether so and so will come to church, and how to stop war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
I have spent two days trying to keep awake through James and two verses leapt out at me, in light of my auspicious entry into this new year. The first is this,
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’- yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'” – James 4:13-15
And the second was this,
“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” – James 4:7-8
I’m not a merchant, making plans to go off and trade in one place or another, and make a profit, but I am a person who makes plans, who things that on such and such a day I will do x, y or z. When my plans are spoilt I generally react with a total lack of grace. I am shocked and appalled. In fact, I often conflate my ability to carry out my own plans with God’s measure of me. If I decide to do something, and then don’t do it, I haven’t just failed myself, I have failed God, and the children. I am therefore useless. I therefore wake up in the middle of the night sweaty with anxiety about all the loose threads that I haven’t perfectly tied, or properly ordered. I heap up guilt upon guilt.
The remedy to this stupid thing that I do is not to just beat back the anxiety by a careful examination of Twitter (actually, this is a pretty good way to go back to sleep) but rather to more fully understand that my life is but a mist, that I am not that important in the scheme of things, that I am allowed to screw up because God’s not pinning all his hopes for the world on me, that the little that I do is not that consequential, and that, therefore, I can submit myself comfortably to God.
Submission is not a groveling, sniffly nosed obsequies ‘please don’t kill me or hurt me’ posture. Notice that it is paired with resistance. You submit to God, but you also resist the devil. You say no to Satan and come close to Jesus. The best way to resist Satan is not to think of yourself too high and to keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, single-mindedly. The best way to submit to Jesus is to trade your measure and plans for his.
And on that note, I will toddle over to church. Have a lovely Sunday.
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