Trusting God When You Can't Trust Your Own Mind

By Mary Skoglie

As I sit here tonight, I could be mulling over the pain.  The pain that has been so faithfully "stabbing" me in the back and chest!  I could take another tylenol.  I could sit here and think, is it my gallbladder?  Is it a heart problem?!  Or perhaps just a stomach ulcer?!  I COULD sit and diagnose myself of almost anything!  But I choose NOT to tonight.  For tonight, I choose to put my medical diagnoses in the back of my over-crowded mental closet!  It's funny but not funny.  I have a degree from Hypochondria University.  I also got my Masters of Paranoia at the prestigious Every Disaster Imagineable University (yep, the one and only E.D.I.U.).  And I'm still an ideal student, currently enrolled in Cyber-chondria College, a fine online university, ideally located on the Internet Super Highway!

At least that's on one road I can travel!  One safe trip to Google.com provides me with every conceivable reason for my every ache and pain!  No fear of wrecks on that road, anyway, and I don't even have to buckle up!

Did I mention my fear of wrecks?  Not a once or twice a lifetime wreck, and certainly not a minor fender-bender.  No, this is more like every car on the road is huge potential threat to my very life!  Surely they ALL drive at speeds of at least 90 miles an hour, all around me!  You know just KNOW one of those insane drivers is going to cross 2 lanes of traffic without warning, crumbling the front end of the car you're in like mere tin foil!  Tin foil and broken glass.

Or one of those speeding cars is most surely NOT going to stop at a light or stopsign, thereby making you pray for side airbags!  Oh, but wait--the fun doesn't end there!  I fear wrecks and medical catastrophes at every turn, yet it gets even better!  Friends, let me take you into the wonderful world of Germophobia!  Oh yes, endless supplies of anti-bacterial wipes and gels!  Just turned on a lamp: run for the wipe before the deadly diseases lying in wait on the lamp switch get a chance to just leap into a crack on my dry skin!  Or what if I leaned onto the couch, which a dirty dog had jumped on--last year?!  And what could have been on the dog's paws?!  Oh, horrors!  And don't even get me started on the human offenders: those murderous people who wear shoes on your furniture!  And where have those shoes been?!  Whew!  You take your life in your hands before you ever touch that lamp switch!  Heck, if I don't turn on the lamp, it will help lower my electric bill anyway, right?

After surviving all of this, you run for the wipes, and on your way, a sock falls onto your shamefully unvacuumed floor!  Oh, it has to go in the laundry RIGHT NOW!

On the way back from scrubbing like a surgeon in the bathroom, a fork drops onto my kitchen floor!  Or worse: food.  Or perhaps one of the 5, 899 pills I need to keep my sanity and physical health intact!  A fork I can wash, but a pill!  Garbage can, here I come!  And where is the nearest hand wipe or gel?  After all, I had to TOUCH the floor to pick up the pill - oh horrors!

They say that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  I guess that's true because at least now I can laugh at myself and my irrational fears.  Laughing at them doesn't necessarily take them away, but it does take them out of the dark, foreboding corners of "what if" and into the glorious light of reality!

As a Christian, I am so deeply ashamed of all these fears.  Yet, I know God loves me anyway, and desires to grant me healing in His time.  I have, sadly, let dust collect on my Bible all too often.  But once I take an anti-bacterial wipe to the entire cover of the Bible (yes, I have actually done this!), I discover wonderful things in it, that, if I would just focus on them, and not on the scary possibilities of everyday life on this earth, would HEAL my mind.  If I would just allow God's Word to straighten out my confused and paranoid mind.  How frustrating that I so often run for the wipes, yet shamefully neglect to wash myself in God's healing Word.

This year, Lord, I want to do better.  Not just for me, but for others who are painfully like me, and many that are far worse.  Those of us who cling to the worries of life so tightly that there's no room for the water of His Word to wash us clean.  Clean and whole.  If You will help me, Lord, I will make this a better year, even now.  A year in which I finally put into practice the words of Phillipians 4:6,7: "Do not worry about anything, but pray and ask God for everything you need, always giving thanks.  And God's peace, which is so great we cannot understand it, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." (New Century Version)

Sure, I'm currently still a student at Every Disaster Imagineable University.  I still get excellent grades there!  But with God's help, maybe I can soon "flunk"!  When I do, it'll be time for me to seriously enroll as a student of God's Word.  Because He loves me--inspite of me--and can use me to help others who are "frighteningly" like me!  Oh Lord, heal and use me.  AMEN.

Mary Skoglie writes from Medford, Oregon.