Stressed Out

Last week was a pretty stressful one for me.  Holy Week is always a pretty busy week, of course.  But this year, I had a funeral during Holy Week.  And I also had a funeral on the day after Easter Sunday.  That means, starting from Palm Sunday, that I had a worship service of some sort on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday, and Monday.  And the thing is, it’s not just the time in the service itself.  It’s all the time getting ready for the service.  Plus, there’s doing all the other things I do every week.  It got to be a lot of stuff to do in a pretty short time.

Now, my point in telling you that is not to get you to feel sorry for me.  Especially, if anyone who is part of the one of the families involved in the funerals is reading this, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.  What someone goes through at the loss of a loved one is on a totally different scale from anything I went through last week.  If you're part of one of those families, please know that you remain in our prayers.

Every job, and in fact every life, has its stressful weeks.  Last week just happened to be my turn.  I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining, because I’m not.  I’ve said before that I love my job and I love being where I am, and I do.  Nothing about that has changed.  Again, everybody has stressful weeks, and this just happened to be one for me.

The point, though, is that when you feel stress, it can get to you.  It got to me this past week.  Not as badly as it has in the past, I don’t think, but it did get to me.  And the thing is, I did not even realize how stressed out I felt until we got to Saturday, when a lot of the services were over and the stress level went down.  I suddenly realized how much better I felt now that I could see that I really was going to get through this.

But at the same time, I was disappointed in myself.  Because I should’ve known all along that I was going to get through this.  I’d prayed for God to help me.  I was confident—or at least, I thought I was confident—that God would help me.  So if I truly trust God, if I truly have faith, what was I feeling so stressed about?

There’s an old saying that hard times don’t build character, they reveal it.  I think that could apply to our faith, too.  Stressful situations don’t necessary build faith, but they reveal it.  Or, sometimes, they reveal the lack of it.

I’m not going to beat myself up for that.  I don’t think God’s going to beat me up for it, either.  But it does show me—not that I shouldn’t have known it before—that I still have things to work on in regard to my faith.  And with God’s help, I’m going to work on them.

The reason I’m telling you this is that maybe you’ve had those times, too.  Maybe you’ve had times when you were under stress, and it started to get to you.  Maybe you’ve had times when you’ve prayed, and you believed God would help you, but you still felt that stress.  In fact, maybe you’re going through one of those times now.

If you are, know that you’re not the only one.  And know that God understands.  God is not going to beat you up for letting the stress get to you.  But God doesn’t want you to let the stress get to you.  Instead, God wants you to rely on God, to trust God, to have faith that God will take care of things for you and that you will get through whatever the stressful situation is.  You will be okay.

God wants to help us with our stress.  If we open our hearts and souls to God, God’s Holy Spirit will come in.  And then, we’ll be able to handle whatever stress life may throw at us.