When I get stressed, I get anxious and depressed.
When I get too much relief, I get anxious and depressed.
Any kind of heat creates weather. It all starts with heat, like a butterfly effect. Heat affects everything. Heat affects change.
Depression is more looking backwards and focusing on things that have happened that we can’t change.
Anxiety is stewing about now and what’s coming that may come and may not come.
But when anxiety and depression meet, that’s when you get a storm.
It’s like when cold air and warm air meet. In weather cycles coming out of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, the cold air coming down and the heat from the Gulf coming up, meet in the Texas Panhandle. When they meet, the two extremes or polars start wrestling and storms are created. It’s almost like good and evil meeting…that’s when you get a tornado.
When anxiety and depression get together and dance they tear up the dance floor, and not in a good way.
I think I listen to the devil too much.
I am an extremist. You either can’t tell me “nothing,” or I am a worm.
Either extreme is not from God; pride nor wormdom.
I have got to be aware, when I hear things that don’t line up with God’s word, it isn’t from Him. Make sense?
The devil knows my weaknesses as well as anybody. Whether it’s the devil, whether it’s my own fallibility and insecurity, or whether it’s the disease talking; when I hear something that doesn’t say, “You have a reason to live and you need to bless others,” then it is not of God.
I am not too damaged!
I am not too anything!
He wants me, as long as I live, to have faith in Him and not give up the ghost!
I wrote this Malachi yesterday.
When I get stressed, I get anxious and depressed.
When I get too much relief, I get anxious and depressed.
Malachi Moment Number 863
The duality of being at either extreme…
If I have too much stress on me, I get anxious and depressed.
If I get too much relief and do not have anything to deal with,
then, because I don’t have a sense of purpose–like God’s word says, without a vision, the people will perish–on that extreme, I get anxious and depressed.
Either extreme is bad.
Stress can negatively affect us. Mentally. Physically. Spiritually. Emotionally.
Stress…
Instead of using the word stress, let’s substitute the word activity. Activity or….obstacles on a path.
Obstacles on a path can be a good thing, because they keep us aware and focus our eyes on the path ahead, so that we don’t stumble over them.
Jesus said His yoke is easy and His burden is light and in rest and quietness there is peace.
So, instead of stewing about whatever it is I am stewing about, it just gets back to, I think, the centrality of Christ…that we just focus back on Him and then, all these other things melt away. And if the obstacles don’t melt away, because we are His, He will help us to figure out how to get around them, over them, under them, through them or demolish them.
The Amplified Bible explains misunderstood words and concepts, like “believe.” For instance, it clarifies “believe” to include “trusts in, relies on, clings to.”
Either we look toward Him…or we don’t.
Our human nature is to focus on self, and anxiety and depression is a focus on how things affect us.
It is not wrong to be aware of how things affect us; it is a good thing if it leads us to the One who understands how those things affect us, and what we can do about it.
Remember. When anxiety and depression get together and dance, they tear up the dance floor.
But, they are both rectified to the degree that we focus back on the One who “brung” us, the One who created us, the One who keeps this whole world spinning, the One who knows the number of hairs on our head. I cannot look around at everything I see: trees, birds, flowers, water, weather, crops, the mathematical logicalness behind so many things in Creation and not see that there’s Something that created it.
And if Something created it, which I believe, then I need to recognize He is bigger than I am. He is a higher power and I need to figure out what it is He wants.
When I find out that not only is He omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent (all-powerful, all-knowing and everywhere) …I learn that He is also Love!
That is existential.
The fact that God is Love.
How many leaders do we know who are love? That is not usually in a Machiavellian schematic of how power operates. He is totally different. That ought to intrigue us.
CS Lewis discussing Christianity stated, “It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.”
Queer meaning that it is so peculiar–the mysteries inherent in it–that it draws us in to where we find out things known and unknown. The unknowns are worth discovering, and the knowns lead us to the unknowns and to the One who is known and unknown, which is God.
Pretty cool stuff.
Malachi Moment Number 863
Malachi Montroy
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