When My Mind Drowns Out Peace

Anxiety has been a heavy itchy blanket I have been trying to put down over the last few weeks.  I feel like I have been rushing here and there – from helping to lead a team, to trying to be a loving, listening wife, to homeschooling and parenting the children, to taking the odd moments to write down the many ideas I have in my head and think about how to turn them into writing. 

I keep trying to shake this blanket off.  And trying to be still.  To spend time in worship in the mornings and quiet myself before Him.  But this noisy parrot of a brain keeps on at me, reminding me of this or that. 

I had enough.  Didn’t Jesus promise peace? In the storms He slept and He told the disciples: In this world you will have many troubles, but…I leave you my Peace.

Peace.  That is what I am struggling to feel right now.  How is it that I can lose a baby and feel His overshadowing peace through it all and now I can’t even feed Kaleb porridge without losing the peace I have gained in my quiet time?

So I spent a week, waiting for peace to come.  My mind all over the place, urging me to keep on, keep busy, keeping going, all the time knowing this needs to stop.  The tensions of ministry, motherhood and creativity surely don’t have to look like this?

So I asked God to show me the roots of this anxiety. 

I surprised myself when the first word I wrote down was ‘perfectionism’.  Now perhaps this won’t surprise those who know me, but it actually surprised me.  Not because I am not aware of a past of perfectionism, but because I was surprised it had become a present.  Yes, I like to do things well, but I am actually generally very flexible with things not being done and I generally don’t have a problem extending grace to others.

But then again – how good am I at accepting grace for myself?

Where had doing things in His strength and His freedom and His Spirit suddenly become about doing it in mine? These standards, this legalism that I was holding over myself – why had they just intruded my being?

And once again, I realize that I had made it about me, instead of about Him, and so it was no wonder that I couldn’t hold on to the ever-accelerating roundabout. 

And I realized how much of my life is supernatural – that I can’t do anything without Him and it is truly Him who holds it all together. 

And so I have decided to hand it all back over to Him again.  Because He can do it peacefully. And I can’t.

God, the one and only—

    I’ll wait as long as he says.

Everything I need comes from him,

    so why not?

He’s solid rock under my feet,

    breathing room for my soul,

An impregnable castle:

    I’m set for life.

God said this once and for all;

    how many times

Have I heard it repeated?

    “Strength comes

Straight from God.

Psalm 62:1 & 11.