A Different Path

“Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.” Psalms 34:19

A few days ago I was video chatting with my sister while she was driving home from work. (Before you freak out she was completely hands free and didn’t look at me not once, eyes on the road the entire time I promise) And the conversation was going well but at a certain point she said “I think I missed my exit.” She got her barings straight and she had, in fact, missed her exit. Now, I know my sister to be a creature of habit and to like going certain routes. I began to get a little worried as I thought about her losing her direction and not being able to easily get back to where she was headed when she, to my surprise, stated “It’s a good thing I know other ways to get home.” In hearing that I instantly relaxed and let the Stress I hadn’t even realized was building ease from my shoulders and I knew she would be able to navigate herself safely home.

How many times do we have an obstacle as simple as missing an exit, getting caught by a red light, your computer freezing 5 minutes before a presentation, or being a few minutes behind on a deadline cause us to tense up and stress ourselves out? You let that delay become so big it becomes difficult to see anything else and you tunnel vision on the trouble it’s causing you instead of on ways around it. It’s something I know I’ve done many times and it’s really not a good practice. When you allow the road block in your path become the only thing you can see, you miss out on the rest of the map. There’s a beautiful thing about maps: most of the time, there are multiple paths to completing the same journey.

That’s what my sister discovered about her drive home. Instead of fixating on the missed exit, she paid attention to her surroundings and realized she knew where she was. If she hadn’t taken that moment to use her other resources, she could have possibly ended up much further down the highway, away from recognizable landmarks and extended her journey home by hours instead of minutes. We have to learn to apply this practice to any Stressful area of our lives. What are the other paths to our destination? Will I lose more time by Stressing about what went wrong or by using my resources to discover another way to get it right? It’s human nature to catastrophize a situation, making mountains out of molehills, because the brain is more attracted to Stress inducing red light than the all clear green. We have to train ourselves to be problem solvers instead of problem reactors.

So how do we do this? Well first, remind yourself that you know more than the problem knows. A problem is a temporary response to a situation. Temporary. It doesn’t act on its own, it’s an effect to a cause. If you change the cause, the effect has no choice but to change as well. And you know all about the cause. When working on balancing those books, if the batteries die in your calculator, that doesn’t keep you from knowing how to add and subtract. It might not be convenient, but it still works. There’s another way to solve the problem, and you know that. Just take a minute to focus on your desired solution.

Second, as I’ve stated in previous posts, you have to decide if being this Stressed is worth the problem you’re stressing over. Can you work around the delay at the light? Can you shift that to-do-list item from the morning to the afternoon? Can you make chicken parmesan instead of spaghetti when you realize you took out chicken breasts instead of ground turkey to thaw this morning? If the answer to any of these is yes, then don’t Stress it. And be honest with yourself. Don’t convince yourself that because you really really wanted to get it done in the morning and couldn’t that the world is coming to an end. Our wants are just that, wants. They are hopes not needs. We categorize a lot of wants as needs and we should be careful with categorizing things with higher importance than they deserve. Don’t give something more power than it can handle or needs.

Finally, find comfort in the knowledge that you don’t have to do it alone. There’s a support system out there that you can rely on, be it family, friends, coworkers, colleagues, even strangers with good intentions. And at the end of the day, if you turn any which way and cannot find a soul, reach out to a higher power and ask him to just help you endure. The Bible tells us that “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.” (Psalms 34:19) It’s God’s way of reminding us that he knows we face a lot of tough battles, but He’s going to deliver us from them all. And tough is relative. What’s tough for me may not be tough for you, but it doesn’t even matter because God didn’t give a universal definition of what those afflictions we’d face would be, He just promised to bring us out. I’m taking Him up on that deal.

So remember, you’re smarter and bigger than your Stressors, it’s probably not worth the amount of energy we’re giving it, and when all else fails, put your trust in God to deliver. Trust that a different path can get you to the same destination. If you can do these things, Stress won’t keep you from getting there at all.