De-stressed

I had cookies for breakfast this morning—not even “good-for-you” cookies, just normal breakfast cookies. This is an Italian’s idea of a proper breakfast—coffee or tea and some cookies or fruit. They just about have a heart attack on my behalf when I tell them I eat eggs for breakfast.

These are some of the few cookies I will deign to dunk, since they have the right consistency for it and actually taste better with some other flavors in the undertone.

I’m not a cookie, but I’ve felt a little lately like I’m soaking in tension from all around me (maybe I need to work on my analogies). Not that I’m under particular stress, mind you, it’s just that I keep seeing stressful relationships: on other teams, in churches, between friends; and I feel like I’m soaking this all in and making it my own, and am ready to crumble. Not to mention the dread I feel when I think of the tension almost guaranteed my team in the future.

The library here has pithy sayings written up on the walls over the door. One of them is, “Vivere e’ combattere,” “To live is to fight.” I don’t know if that’s supposed to instill courage. But I’ve been feeling lately that that’s all life is: fight and fight and fight, and then we die (alone). I said this to a friend yesterday, feeling cynical and grown-up.

I should know to beware whenever I feel grown-up. There’s a reason Jesus said we have to be like little children. All of my cynicism is rooted in thinking that I’m in control; I have to carry the weights of the world alone. In acting like I think I’m God.

Most of my problems with stress, like suffering, happen when it’s not even really mine. God gives grace for the real, but not for the weights created by my imagination. He is still in control. He is enough for other people’s problems, and enough for the problems which will come in the future. He has already overcome the world. Each problem that arises is an opportunity to demonstrate His victory.

Yesterday one of the elders in my old church (yes, the one suffering many tensions) read part of Romans 8: “In all these things, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation [in Italian it says, “any other creature”—all of these things have been created], will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In all of my worry about fighting, I had forgotten what God told Moses: “The Lord will fight for you; you have only to be still.”