Thursday, August 29, 2013

Happy, happy, happy

Our society is consumed with being happy, happy, happy. I am probably the biggest proponent of laughter that you will find, but as it says in Ecclesiastes 3:4, there is a time to laugh and a time to cry. Despite the fact that we all have bad times in life, we do our best to cover it up and make sure nobody knows that we are sad, hurting, or broken. We all have to face sickness, death, financial disasters, stress on the job, chaotic schedules, and on top of all that, many of us have children who are involved in too many activities. The stress of our lives is way over the limit of what we should be handling on a daily basis. The past few months have been difficult for me. It seems that the stressors of my life, which are probably about par for the course, have started bothering me more than normal. I heard my husband tell someone the other day that I had been the most mature twenty-one year old in the world. My daddy says that I have "always been a grown-up". I guess all that maturity has finally gotten to me. The past few months, I have had a hard time dragging myself out of this pit that I’ve fallen into and getting myself focused to do the things I need to do. I, like many other moms, have a very active schedule, and the holidays and summer vacation just escalate the madness causing us to endure new heights of stress and chaos in our lives. The past three years, I’ve had several extra stressors come into my life which intensified the normal stress.

 
I guess it’s no wonder that sometime at the end of last year, I realized that I was at my limit. I decided I needed to laugh more to get rid of some stress. The more the year has progressed, I started noticing things that I hadn’t noticed before. I began to have more anxiety, wanting to cry all the time, being unable to focus on movies or books like before. I go through spells when I can’t decide what I want to eat or what I want to listen to; I have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep–it is just a general malaise. I have covered well, and when I have tried to talk to people about it, they either don’t understand or don’t think anything is wrong with me. Apparently, I don’t act depressed, but it seems that I have to make myself do everything that is required of me, and I tend to do everything much slower than before. I would just prefer to sit on the couch or lie in bed all day. I can’t actually let myself cry and release any negative emotions because then people will ask what is wrong with me and I really haven’t been too sure about that myself. I apparently am very good at bottling things up and putting on my happy face. I laugh and I smile, and I show frustration over minor things, but I’ve developed quite a skill at tapping down my emotions over the rest of life’s problems. I don’t have time to deal with emotions, if I cry, people will want to discuss it. We really do discourage tears in our society, and we shouldn't. Jesus wept, and he did it in front of his friends.

I’ve been craving time alone. I don’t ever seem to be alone, and if I’m away from my family, it’s to go to a meeting with another group of people. I think that everyone needs time to sit and think and spend time with God. A time to get away from the pressure of a schedule. Even though I’ve had vacations and church camp, they all require something of me while I am there. I am not sure I’ve ever had three days in a row without anywhere to be or anything to do or anyone to be around in my life. Jesus went away for 40 days to be alone and pray, and when we fail to have sufficient alone time with God, the stress of our lives will become too heavy for us.

On September 18, I will turn 40. Most people want to do something radical to mark this event like tattoos, body piercings, skydiving, bungee jumping, or a big trip. I started early this year thinking about what I wanted to do for my birthday. Like everything else, I had no focus and just couldn’t decide. Then last week a friend called and said she wanted to take me away for my birthday. I seriously thought about it and realized that I didn’t want spa treatments, or anything enjoyable per se, or even to be around people. I just wanted to be alone to pray, cry, scream, sleep, sit, read, walk–just be. So on September 15, I will be going to the Hesychia House of Prayer, and yes, it’s a monastery. I know that normal people don’t want to wake up in a Monastery on their birthday, but I am far from normal at this point. I’m tired of being and feeling the way I have this year. So I am going away and me and God are going to wrestle it out. I am not sure how I will react to being alone, but one thing is for certain, Tammie will never be the same again.

Verse of the Day