All At Once

Every so often, it all comes at you at once. Your pre­cisely timed day or week sud­denly has sev­eral com­pli­cat­ing fac­tors thrown in.  You are tempted to have a first class panic attack, but that would only add one more fac­tor of dif­fi­culty, so that is not a work­able option. Still, the panic sits there wait­ing to spring its dis­abling trap. You focus on the sud­denly dou­bled list. So, what do you do first?

Sim­ple: you call reality’s bluff and take the dog for a walk, or go to the weight room, or to the cof­fee shop. Along the way to any of your choices, you pray. It is not a prayer of panic, it is the prayer of trust, dis­cern­ment, and res­o­lu­tion. Toss in some humor while you are at it. Write some poetry. Call a friend. Play on the Inter­net. Then, you do one thing at a time in some sort of order.

We are not tempted beyond what we can stand, but we some­times feel like we are look­ing up the moun­tain at an avalanche head­ing our way. It is the Mon­day morn­ing syn­drome of see­ing all of the week like a one hour task. Yes, it is your imag­i­na­tion work­ing on you. Also, your imag­i­na­tion missed the adven­ture part. It just looked at the var­i­ous “bot­tom lines” and inter­rup­tions. It also has a short mem­ory. You have faced worse things than this and sur­vived per­fectly well. So, what is the worry?

The worry is miss­ing the real pace of real­ity. The mind can multi-task. Sit­u­a­tions change. Inevitable events march­ing your way are really not all that inevitable. Even inter­rup­tions have inter­rup­tions. There are “wild cards” in real­ity. A tor­nado, an ice storm, an inter­na­tional event can totally rearrange the day or week. Never for­get how Jesus turned a really hor­ri­ble week into the resurrection.