After work
yesterday I treated myself to “San Andreas” the movie. I have always been fascinated with earthquakes-
though they mostly scare me. I remember
when we studied earthquakes and volcanoes in elementary I would get pulled out
of class because I would get so scared learning about natural disasters. I’d spend hours feeding my anxiety thinking
that at any moment I could die if the earth decided to erupt or shake. As I grew up other things gave me anxiety,
but they were more personal struggles, stresses about university, work, death
of loved ones, relationships, etc. To
this day I still worry about things that are out of my control, even though I
have God and my faith I still waste time worrying about a lot of things. Sometimes I give my worry to God and place my
trust in Him, but when I see that He’s taking too long to resolve it- I take it
back thinking I am better fixing it on my own (and of course that never
works). What I have found is that worry
is usually a type of insecurity. We feel
uncertain about a problem and this causes us to worry. This tends to happen a lot at the beginning
of relationships between two people.
When you
like someone there’s always the fear of rejection. This worry often comes when you are trying to
give a little more of yourself to your beloved. I
experience this all the time. First,
comes the worry that you are not enough: not good looking enough, not smart
enough, not fun enough, not experienced enough, not accomplished enough… Then
comes the fear that maybe the object of your affections is leading you on
simply for his/her amusement and distrust begins to set-in. After comes the uncertainty that during the
process of discerning a friendship with the one your heart adores he/she will
find someone else and you will be stuck loving them. Putting up our defenses follows because suddenly
the person we like has turned into our enemy or at least someone we must
protect ourselves from. All of this is
usually a product of our critical self, the insecure part of us that is afraid
of intimacy because it requires a ton of vulnerability. C.S. Lewis stated it perfectly “to love is to
be vulnerable.”
Falling in
love challenges us in ways that we don’t expect. The more we value someone the more we have to
lose and the more we become afraid of getting hurt. And our mind constantly terrorizes us that love
is not worth the hurt. At times the
anxiety causes us to withhold our affections, retreat back into our comfort
zone or reject the object of our affections before he/she rejects us. Personally, relationships with the opposite
sex intimidate me because I don’t have a lot of experience. I get scared that I will be humiliated
because of my inexperience, that my weaknesses will go out on blast or that
others won’t accept my high moral standards (among other things). Sometimes I get scared due to all mentioned
above, but God gives me strength and hope.
I also think of the object of my affections and I place my trust that as
a man of God he will act like a godly man and that too comforts me. To love also requires a lot of humility, to
know and accept our smallness just like Jesus became small for us- for love
hurts, but it also heals and transforms. So, don't give in to worry trust in God and slowly in me too.
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