False Walls

I have been characterized on numerous occasions as a quiet, thoughtful person who doesn't speak much. I've been told I'm a deep thinker, and a problem solver. These things are true. I like that they are true. They help me to visualize myself as wise, caring, confident, and insightful. I feel pretty good about that. Most of the time.

I wish that was the whole picture.

The truth is that often that quiet, thoughtful part of my personality is often a mask for fear. The truth is that often when I'm feeling particularly insecure about my faith and my worth in Christ I simply smile, shrug, and explain that "I really just don't have much to say on the subject." The truth is that I struggle deeply with sin that I simply don't want other people to know about. It's embarrassing, shameful actually, to try to explain that honestly, the reason I'm not talking much is because I'm afraid of what I might say and who might find out. I might open myself up so wide that people might find out that I'm not quite as admirable and stoic of a figure as they thought.

It's silly really. Or, rather, it's pride.

I'm discovering that God is a God of great mercy. I'm discovering that he loves us all, including myself, unconditionally. I'm finding that even when I've put up every kind of defensive wall I can think of to hide what I can't bear to be seen, He can obliterate those walls in a unrelenting yet completely gentle way. As painful as that really is, the freedom it brings is incomparably and brilliantly life giving. It's new life, and it is so very good.

Groaning

Over the last couple of weeks, the moniker "thehappyhandyman" has not been entirely accurate. I've found myself allowing my job to stress me out in ever increasing doses, and not always dealing with it in entirely healthy ways. I've found myself angry to the point of yelling with coworkers and friends, losing sleep because of anxiety, and even being impatient and insensitive to my wife, my best friend and love of my life. It's not the first time this kind of thing has happened; I understand it really is quite common among the working class. Knowing that, and after spending some time in scripture, prayer, and repentance, I find myself mulling over the difficulties and traps of stress, perhaps better described as anxiety.

After jokingly telling my wife one night that she needed an off switch for her brain so that she would stop losing sleep from over-thinking and processing that day and the next, I saw her face fall and realized that, yet again, I had jumped to a conclusion and tried to solve the problem quickly without really hearing her out. This happens, quite often actually. I'm working on it, so cut me some slack. For me, sometimes all I need to relieve stress is to sit down, relax, read a book, watch a movie, or play a video game. I shut my brain off to the worries and stress from the day, and after an hour or so, feel refreshed enough to face the next task. Now, that type of stress handling can quickly turn into a form of escapism, and that is a slippery slope once started down, a fact for which I am intimately aware. For major stress and anxiety, there simply is no substitute for taking time to talk with the one who once said, "Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?" All that being said, it turns out that the way I handle stress just doesn't quite cut it for my wife. We're actually quite different on multiple levels; go figure.

So everyone handles stress in different ways, apparently. Ok, I understand that. I think what's bugging me is why? Why to we all consistently allow the pressures and trouble of this world get to us? As Paul said, "For in this tent we groan..."(2 Cor. 5:2). After recently discussing that passage with a friend, it has occurred to me that Paul was illustrating two different contrasting points in a seemingly simple statement. We groan, because life is difficult and filled with pain and confusion. The slightly more subtle, but more important point is this though: we groan in a tent. A tent is a temporary house. It's not meant to last, it's not meant to be the end of the line. We're moving, camping out in this wilderness in hopes of someday making it to our real home. It's hard to grasp because we were born in this tent, and we have no concept of what home will really be like.

Ok, so this life is temporary. So when I find myself stressed out and anxious, I just need to remember that life is temporary, and that someday I'll get to go home, really home. Good. Now if that freaking idiot in front of me won't learn how to drive he's going to end up sending me home a lot sooner that I expected. Wait, now I'm stressed out and angry again. See, for me, the biggest things that stress me out and get me riled up are people, people who are rude or unfair or just plain jerks. Now it has occurred to me that I can't just go through life floating on a cloud because everything's temporary and I don't really need to care about you or your crappy attitude. Wait, I have a crappy attitude? Who are you to judge me? None of this really matters and gosh I can't wait to get to heaven so I don't have to deal with this anymore.

"For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God," (2 Cor. 5:21). In the ultimate act of selfless love, Christ gave himself up and took on the weight of sin of the entire world. Totally without sin, yet totally selfless in his love for his soiled and stained bride-to-be, he took what he did not deserve, but did what absolutely no one else could have done in order to reconcile his bride. So often I get so angry and stressed out because someone is not being "fair" and "just." I take offense time and time again because I have this pompous idea that somehow I deserve better. I have failed to love, because I forgot how deeply and unrelentingly I am loved. And I wonder where stress comes from.