Anxiety has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.
As much as I dislike anxiety and wish it would never be a part of my life again, I love anxiety for ONE reason.
Recently, a friend of mine told me of a really, really hard trial that she had just gone through. The trial was SO heavy, and me being the empath that I am, it didn’t just feel like a story. It felt like I too was walking this trial with her. I started to feel extremely anxious about the situation.
All of these questions started to go through my mind like:
- Would I ever have to go through something like that?
- Would I be able to handle it?
- How on earth is my friend putting on a brave face and keeping her head above water?
- Why do such dark and heavy things happen in this place we call earth?
I felt this intense emotion for my friend. I felt this deep fear for myself, just the story alone was feeling too heavy for me to bear. I couldn’t shake how dark life can get at times. I started to question my ability to go through the challenges we are placed here on earth to bear.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes life can make me feel like I’m going to break. As if I’m not strong enough to bear it. I’ve heard over and over again that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle…but have you ever wondered what that might mean?
I personally feel like I’ve been through some REALLY HARD trials before…so what does that even mean…something that you can’t handle? Is it something that fully crushes you so much that you die from heartache because the trial was such a heavy burden?
While the thought of this sounds nice, I’ve come to the belief that this isn’t exactly how this works. If everything we went through in life we were capable of on our own, there would be no need for Christ, no need for His atonement. As life does get so hard, it’s in those moments we end up leaning on Him and His grace and strength comes in. And these are the moments that we collect as our precious treasures.
For those of you that are weightlifters, you know that your goal is to constantly increase the amount of weight that you can lift. You don’t increase it all in just one day… it’s over a period of time. You lift one weight until you become so good at it that you need to move up a level of weight in order to then gain more muscle.
BUT…here’s the thing, you have no idea if you can handle the amount of weight you’re about to increase to until you do it. Say for a week you’ve been bench pressing 25 pounds and you become really good at that. So after that week, you feel as if you’ve stopped progressing and you’re ready to up the weight. You then choose to up it 10 pounds, making it a 35 pound weight. Well, you’ve NEVER lifted a 35 pound weight over your head before, so what makes you think you can do it this time? Well, you DON’T know! You don’t know if you can do it until you try.
AND THAT RIGHT THERE, THAT is what is so amazing about Heavenly Father. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows what we can handle. He’s the one that knows if we’ll be able to get that 35-pound weight over our head or not. And to me, that is what I want my relationship with Heavenly Father to be—always trusting Him. Using my worries and my anxieties to fully rely on Him.
I don’t know what’s going to make me stronger and help me get back to Heaven with so much joy, but He does! He knows if that 35 pounds will squash me… but He also knows the strength that could come from it.
His ultimate goal for us is to become stronger and become whole. We signed up for this—to be able to OVERCOME and get stronger. He’s not going to put something in our path that will make us weaker, that’s just not the Father He is.
So, I’m going to embrace my anxiety. I will take power over it through healthy lifestyle choices, and I will continue practicing faith. But when I feel weak and the anxiety seems to take a pull on me, I will embrace it because that’s one way I’ve learned my Heavenly Father/daughter connection grows. And THAT is the most important thing to me.