The crazy in my head

Some days I am convinced that I just might be crazy. Just for fun, let me prove it to you. Here are some actual thoughts that often go through my mind:

Every single time I drive on an overpass, I brace myself for fear of falling over it's edge.

I have an irrational fear of being t-boned. Since having two kids, I can no longer drive through an intersection without braking a little too much. When it was just me and Moses, I could at least have the hope of only getting hit on the side of the car where he was not. But now that I have two little ones, both sides of my car feel fully exposed and vulnerable at any given moment. I cannot be t-boned without one of them getting crashed into; it is certain that one of them would get hurt. Obviously, intersections now terrify me. Have grace for the crazies who slow down to 8 mph as they drive through them; it's probably just a mom. It's probably just me. 

Whenever my kids get sick, not once do I assume it is just a cold or fever or virus, but every single time without fail I am convinced that they have meningitis, that their brain or limbs or nervous system are being attacked, that they are dying. Because this is the most logical train of thought, I'm sure.

Once, as I was driving down my alley, I saw a tennis ball in the road. I can't see something like this and just think that it is a tennis ball because that would be much too rational. Instead, I was fully convinced that some rogue teenager had made a makeshift bomb that would explode as I drove over it. I ever so bravely forced myself drive over it just to prove that I was in fact crazy. Astonishingly, I survived. (And just for the record,  the other day DJ sent me this. Turns out I'm not so crazy afterall, eh?)

I cannot get onto a plane without being fully convinced that it will crash. I make DJ pray before every flight and I clutch his hand at the slightest onset of turbulence. Heaven forbid I ever experience legit turbulence; I'd probably die of a heart attack. But if we are comparing heart attacks to plane wrecks then I guess that's the better way to go anyway, right?

Praise God for Find Friends because if DJ is just a minute late from work, I just know he must be dead on the side of the road somewhere. Of course it would never be that he just left work a minute late. Of course it would be a car accident. Of course he would be dead. What did I do before Find Friends? I called him in a sheer panic. Not only am I praising God for Find Friends, but DJ is too because this lovely advance in technology has eliminated all the crazy calls from his hyper-paranoid wife.

I was recently told that I had a bladder infection but I just knew the doctor was wrong. Obviously what she meant to tell me was that I have cancer. To be sure, I scheduled too many follow up doctor appointments because I was certain that I must be secretly dying inside from some undiscovered disease. News flash: I'm not.

For months after Jones was born, my hip hurt. Nevermind that I had just pushed a whole human out of my body; I must have searched the internet a hundred times to see what it was I might be dying from. According to Google, it's not hip cancer but I don't think I'm out of the woods yet. I'll keep ya'll posted.

If it sounds crazy, it's because it is. Basically, if I have seen it on the news or have heard of it happening to anyone (no matter how far removed) it becomes the reality in my head. Not only that, but it takes zero effort whatsoever to conjure these stories up in my mind; they are readily available and threaten to be all consuming at any given moment of the day. Last week I was reading a book called The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and I actually laughed out loud when she wrote, "Yet, once on a rough flight between Honolulu and Los Angeles, I had imagined such a mutual disaster and rejected it. The plane would go down. Miraculously, [my daughter] and I would survive the crash, adrift in the Pacific, clinging to the debris. The dilemma was this: I would need, because I was menstruating and the blood would attract sharks, to abandon her, swim away, leave her alone. Could I do this?" To some this might sound crazy. To me, this just sounds like my life. Didion went on to talk about how fear once nearly paralyzed her, how vulnerable she felt to tragedy. She told of the time she started to wear tennis shoes instead of sandals for fear of tripping and getting hurt; of how she slept with all the lights on for fear of bookshelves toppling over her as she walked through the halls in the dark. She admitted to preparing herself for the worst scenarios, only to come to conclusion that tragedy often comes in the most ordinary of moments, like the time her husband died at the dinner table while in mid conversation with her. She had been so busy preparing for the freak accident that when tragedy struck in the mundane she felt tricked. What a companion I found in Joan Didion. Her crazy made me feel not so crazy. She made me feel not so alone.

In the past year, I have read a few other books like this one. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi and Being Mortal by Atul Gawande have both been excellent reads that have made me all too aware of my own mortality. I loved them and greatly appreciated the raw vulnerability, transparency in suffering, and acute awareness of our fragility that is expressed in each of their books. And yet, their words have stayed with me long after I have finished reading them and they have filled me with a certain fear that I just cannot shake. The fear and the certainty that death and tragedy and loss are inevitably coming for each of us. For me. For my husband. For my kids. For you. There is a soberness that comes with living in light of our own morality and a freedom that comes with not being undone by it. I am not sure that I have figured it out, but I do know that God both cautions us to understand our finiteness all the while commanding that we do not fear. These things seem to contradict one another, but they are meant to go hand in hand and it is a balance I am trying to find.

It's strange how easy it is to imagine my house catching on fire or my husband dying of a disease or my car plummeting over side of a cliff. Those fears do not even have to formulate; they are just there threatening to consume my sanity at any point. Why does it take so much more effort to put these paralyzing thoughts to death? Why is it so much harder for the truth to cast out lies? Fear and anxiety are a hard thing to overcome and it only seems to be increasingly difficult; the more children I have and the more I fall in love with staying at home and raising them, the more threatened I feel by loss. I just have so much to lose these days. I think women by nature are more prone to this kind of fear and anxiety, but bringing children into the picture only worsens it as we realize our own vulnerability and inability to fully protect them from harm. Regardless, there is just always something to worry about, isn't there? There is always something to fear. But this is no way to live. I don't have it figured out by any means, but here are a few little things that I have found encouraging and helpful as I try to combat the crazy in my head. I hope they help you combat yours as well.

I recently watched a video about the power and freedom that comes with changing the phrase "What if" with "Even with". Instead of asking, "What if DJ dies?", I can say with confidence that even if he does, God will still be good. God will still provide. God will never leave me or forsake me. I love the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3. They were well acquainted with the Even If's. They knew that God was able to deliver them from the fiery furnace but instead of asking themselves what would happen if He didn't rescue them, they proclaimed that He is still good and worthy to be praised, trusted, obeyed, and followed even if He didn't. What an example. What hope that provides!

I am truly trying to live in light of eternity. When I am only focused on the here and now, fear grows and overtakes my heart. Kind of like the time that Peter walked on water; when his eyes were on Jesus, he stayed afloat; he did not sink when the storm came. But the second he took his eyes off God and focused on the circumstances around him, the second his faith started to falter and he began to sink. When my eyes are on Jesus and when my thoughts are on the eternal instead of the temporal, I am so much less afraid. One of the best books I have read that has helped me keep a kingdom perspective is Heaven by Randy Alcorn. It is fantastic. He thinks about eternity and the new heavens and the new earth from a ton of angles I had never once considered before. And what I appreciated about his perspective is how rooted in scripture it is. He may be off on some of his ideas or thoughts on heaven, but he has read God's word and has tried to understand heaven in light of it. His ideas have helped me turn my heart towards eternity and that is a good place for my mind to be. Nothing can cast out earthly fears like a kingdom perspective.

I recently heard a sermon on the bodily resurrection. It was fantastic. In it, the pastor referenced the historical text of 2 Maccabees 7. I am not well acquainted with Catholicism, so I was not familiar with this text but it was so encouraging and powerful and has encouraged my heart ever since. In it, a mother and her seven sons are being tortured for their refusal to abandon the tradition of their faith by eating pork. After the soldiers had killed the first two brothers, they approached the third and threatened to cut off his tongue and his hands if he would not eat their pork. The man courageously held out his hands and responded, "God gave me these hands, but his law means more to me than my hands do and I know that He will give them back to me again at the resurrection." While I don't believe this text to be canonical, I still find it to be so powerful and it has helped me change my thinking. Since hearing that text I have begun to say, "I can be content in sickness because one day there will be no more sickness. I can lose a limb, because one day my body will be made whole. I can face the most wretchedness of grief and sorrow now because a day is coming when all sadness and tears and pain will be wiped away. My house may burn to the ground, but a day is coming where nothing will ever again rot or destroy or grow old. I can die because I will rise and live again." Praise God for that. Basically what this means is that I just need to preach Revelation 21 to myself all day every day and I'll be good.

Above all, scripture has been a source of hope and life on the days when the crazy just won't relent. Time and time again, God tells me not to fear (Joshua 1:9). He reminds me that He is with me (Joshua 1:5). He says that I do not have to be afraid of bad news (Psalm 112:7) and that those who trust in Him will never be moved, uprooted, or shaken (Psalm 112:6; Psalm 55:2, Proverbs 10:30). These truths are setting me free.

This post is long and time is short. If you made it this far, here is a quick recap: I am crazy, but God is good. Yes and amen.

Much love,

courtney