Built on the Rock: Don’t Anticipate the Storms, Just Be Ready for Them

My husband and I frequently have conflict over car repairs and broken appliances. Earlier in our marriage money was extremely tight and any needed repair or replacement felt like a crisis. While our financial situation has improved significantly in the last twenty years, I learned two things from that time in our lives.
1: Things break, it’s part of life. It’s not worth getting angry about it.
2: We have always gotten by and God has always provided, even when it wasn’t the ways I wanted or expected.

I spent a portion of my life being afraid to hope and plan for the best. I thought it was better to just assume the worst, that somehow that would emotionally and mentally prepare me for all possible negative outcomes.

Except it didn’t. The constant feeling of impending doom and cynical outlook actually make me more unhappy and unsettled. I remember in my first pregnancy trying very hard to just walk through the process one day at a time. I took a childbirth class but I didn’t spend every day dreading labor or worrying about potential negative outcomes.

When my daughter was born (normal and healthy despite the ways in which most medical personnel had tried to scare me towards the end), I made a conscious choice. I had years of crippling anxiety in my young adulthood and I knew that I was either going to be a deliberately relaxed mom or I would be a mentally unwell mom. So I chose the former.

It wasn’t an easy choice, it was a daily battle that slowly built into a habitual thinking pattern that still need shoring up occasionally. I’ve encountered and survived enough difficulty that now I mostly find these kind of things disruptive and annoying rather than earth shattering.

But sometimes I still feel the thoughts creep in.

“What if this time is the time that breaks me?”

“What if this challenge is the one that can’t be overcome?”

A wise mentor in my life once told me that she spent most of her life worrying about what might happen, and while she had her share of tragic and difficult events, they mostly weren’t the ones she was worried about. Most of the things she anticipated never happened!

I’m not advocating a blissfully unaware existence without things like life insurance, smoke alarms or seat belts. But I have found my own equilibrium. I do what I can, but I have to draw the line at some point and accept there are things I can’t control.

I’m getting better at recognizing how much of life is truly out of my control (i.e. most of it). I remind myself that none of us know the number of our days. So I try to live my life engaged but not anxious, caring but not overwhelmed. My phrase for this year seems to have become ” live confidently expectant.” Not that I assume everything will go perfectly but that I am confident in God’s power and goodness within the difficult and I live my life with an assurance of his sovereign power.

Those are big words and it’s easier to say than to live, but it’s what I’ve built my life on. Because, if you’ll forgive the paraphrase, I know no other rock as steady to set my hope on.