Dear Anxiety,
Sadness, confusion, doubt, and fear. You respond to all those names, as I now know well. You a shape-shifter. You take on different forms in attempts to grasp whatever shadow of light I might find shining through the dark silhouette of the forest. That is your favorite time to taunt me, after all. We are best acquainted when I am in the thick of night, unsure of what is up and what is down. You offer me the most fleeting form of solace, twinged with hysteria. You surround me with promises, gifts that supposedly ensure meaning and purpose. Yet when I stretch my shaking fingers to grasp what you entice, they instantly turn to vapor. I know this now. I think a part of me has always known this. That’s one of your best ploys, anxiety. To dwell in my human condition of forgetfulness and actually convince me that your suggestions are what I want, what I need.
The thing is, you make me your puppet. You posses my perceptions of reality seemingly out of nowhere. Before I know it, I’m left empty and perplexed, wondering what is wrong with me? This is not a time to be less than excited about life, so why do I feel so
empty?
I’ll stop my flattery, my old detractor. The truth is that you really aren’t that good. You, like all of us worldly inhabitants, contain a defining fatal flaw. Although I tip my hat to your cunningness and malicious brilliancy, this is where I stop.
When you are matched up with the purest light of the Creator of the Universe, you lose every time. You are obliterated into nothingness, and replaced with an all-encompassing peace and clarity.
You are confined to one realm. A realm that has been conquered and redeemed far, far before I ever took my first breath. While you pick off piece by piece of me, I have a God who unites my entire being into a heavenly body at the sound of a word. Where my rhetoric fails, He provides Divine mantras.
“I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” Philippians 4:12-13
As I meditate on this, my God reveals to me that you have no power to waste time, Anxiety. He has taken your most heinous despair and transformed it into revelation. He uses these times of uncertainty that you produce to demonstrate the jubilation of one simple truth: there is nothing that can separate me from my Light. In fact, I can sit deeper in this certainty after being rescued from the darkness. I can better communicate to my Lord after the numbing of this lifetime has been ripped from me. Until I am left raw, brimming with emotion.
So.
So long, sucker.
