You don't have to be college educated, a rocket scientist or a financier to take one look around us and see that we are living in scary, scary times right now. Every time I turn on the television I am greeted by a maniacally grinning talking head espousing the latest DOW drop, the current Congressional feud or the next estimated tax hike and it is starting to have an effect on me.
The Media is swimming with unflattering pictures of glassy-eyed, crazed-looking Tea Party members, frumpy, grumpy Dems or exasperated Republicans. The President is no longer smiling with condescension, informing us lowly peons that panic is unwarranted, he's frowning and sounding defensive. Long gone are the days that entertainment news ruled and we could all bury our collective heads in the sand and pray our ship would come in... We are in the thick of it now, pard'ner! And it only gets uglier from here.
If you believe the doom and gloom, our only hope is to buy gold and other precious metals because the end is near. We need a minimum of two months food and water stocked in our basements or garages and have you bought your generator yet? The Government will be confiscating our bank accounts, taking our earthly possessions as its own and only the armed and the well prepared will survive.
When I look at it like that, I am a deer in the headlights and I am scared! Too scared to even move, if I am downright honest about it. Things like this, times like these, they tend to paralyze me in fear. I get depressed, really depressed, and I stop doing things. I stop cooking, cleaning, and running my life. I start missing deadlines, I start reading a lot. I listen to every report and follow every newscast as though my life depended on it. I stop living for Christ and start living for my next check. It sucks.
My husband hit the nail on the head the other day in the middle of my melt down. He said, "More than having chickens, more than a vegetable garden, or buying up all the gold we can afford, more than anything we feel powerful enough to do, we must learn to pray without ceasing." Becoming more the Master's child, and less the master of our domain will calm us and prepare us for the days to come. To back all of that up, I began scouring my devotionals for any more comfort and I was immediately met head on in Sarah Young's "Jesus Calling." August 5, 6, 7, and 8 speak directly to the futility of thinking we have control over much in our lives, if anything. That our striving for "mastery" is as empty as our hearts without Christ. We have to trust that God will help us deal with the pressures we are given, that He truly doesn't hand us anything He isn't willing to walk with us through. Our job is to listen...
It isn't very glamorous or adventurous to sit and listen, but God wants us to wait on Him. He wants us to be like "still pools" awaiting His stirring of those waters into productive action. We don't get to understand it, to master it. We get to rest in Him. Sarah Young says that peace isn't something we strive to attain, we have it already. We have the ultimate peace when we accept Christ. It is our fallible nature that thinks that if we work at it, we can have more peace. Again, this is one of those "simple not easy" concepts. The hearing and the doing seem miles apart. Being calm when everything around us is falling apart is so very hard! We want to DO something, be active somehow, keep disaster at bay. The truth is we are simply expending useless energy when we do that. God wants our hearts and our trust.
God has been saying it from the beginning. Sad how it takes a crisis on the level of catastrophe to get my attention back to this very simple truth. God wants all of me... again. He isn't asking for a donation or a volunteer on weekends. He wants me all the way. All consumed and thinking about Him every moment of every day. His purpose in loving me is to show me trust. He wants me to trust Him with all of me and He will have his way, whether I come voluntarily and peaceably or whether He drags me there by the hair. His way, or no way at all. It has been eye opening, to say the least.
While it has been eye opening, I also have to say it has been ear closing. (Oh, yes... I hear the collective, "Huh?") At the risk of being very red-neck and labeled as uneducated and rube-ish I have decided to quit watching those talking heads for a while. Fact is, I haven't got any money in the markets, don't have a dime to spare to buy gold (or anything else, for that matter), and me getting over informed is simply giving myself over to the depression that looms in my genetic background. It isn't productive and I can do nothing to stop it from happening. So, to save my sanity, to keep the dinners coming to my family and the laundry from avalanching and killing the dog I am turning off the television and reading some good books, the best of which will be THE Good Book.
Just another day in paradise, living the dream. Over and out...
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