I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on the nature of stress and the effects of anxiety in our lives. Psychologists tell us there are two kinds of stress, eustress and distress. Eustress is good stress. It’s the stress that comes from reading a syllabus in class, knowing you have a certain amount of time to produce a project, like the first two chapters of your dissertation in your D.Min. program while you’re also serving an active, growing church. Oh, did I say, “good” stress? Yes, there really is good stress. It is stress that motivates you to be productive, to feed your family, to work hard and overcome obstacles. Everyone needs a certain amount of eustress in their lives.
Distress, on the other hand, is anxiety-producing, health-destroying, negative stress. Distress carries with it a certain amount of seeming helplessness. This is probably what makes it so distressful. Distress is often perceived as originating from outside of ourselves and carries with it the sense that we are unable to do much about it. Oh, we might try, and in our fight or flight response, adrenaline is released, our heart rate increases, and we feel a sense of urgency, but in the back of our minds we continue to experience an overwhelming helplessness. Wow! I feel stressed out just writing about it!
What many of us are lacking are positive coping mechanisms to enable us to process the stimuli in our lives that lead to distress. A boss that’s never satisfied, a child who seems uncontrollable, a project that never ends, a financial situation that feels hopeless. What do we do with this?
Some of us stuff it and go. Stuff it deep down inside ourselves and hope it doesn’t destroy us from the inside out, but it always comes back to haunt us, usually in physical illness.
Some of us dwell on it as if worrying will make it go away. We worry and worry and worry, believing in our worrying that we are somehow being responsible, but never making healthy choices that will alleviate and transform distress.
Some of us turn to substances to help dull the pain of distress. This, of course, creates other negative stressors in our lives.
Over the next several weeks in the messages at church, we’ll be talking about some of the positive actions we can take. You can check out the first message here.
One action I talked about this past week was turning off the noise. We need regular times of quiet in our lives so we can re-center our beings on God and God’s love for us. If God is for us, who can be against us? But we neglect times of stillness and prayer, and even our prayers get “noisy,” noisy with anxiety and not at all prepared to receive from the Lord. We use anxiety as an excuse. “I have too much going on. I don’t have time for prayer.”
“Be still and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10m (ESV)
God’s love for you is so immense, so complete, so amazing! I’m wondering when is the last time you just soaked in the presence of the Lord? For many of us, our view of God is warped by poor Biblical training, poor examples of “godly” people in our lives, and just plain neglect on our part to find out more about God. We fear God. We project onto God our own low-self image. “If I don’t like myself, why would God like me?”
God loves you. Jesus Christ died on the cross, was raised on the third day because he knows life can have meaning and purpose and God can give us a deep, abiding sense of peace.
Carve out five minutes. Turn off the noise, outside and in, and hear the words of God: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” Jeremiah 31:3 (ESV)
Flourishing Life 
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