Some years ago I passed through a very stressful period of my life. There was work to do, but our finances had taken a nose dive as the novelty of our product came to its end. Yet we were still living according to our previously higher income, while our present income had dropped and bottomed out. Our savings were suddenly taking a beating and we had little work for the amount of personnel we had employed. We needed to make some changes. At home our teenagers were being teenagers and I was learning quite slowly how to adjust to their new behavior. It was just getting to be too much all at once.
It was then that I developed a strong pain in my heart. It felt like someone taking a knife and stabbing me. When I felt the pain, I would massage my heart. I also asked my wife and some close workmates to pray for me. Someone suggested I use canine pepper, which is supposed to be a good heart attack preventative. I started using canine pepper in all my foods and drinks. But after a three day period, and I was still suffering with the knife-like heart pain, my wife convinced me to go for a check-up at the local hospital.
I arrived at the emergency ward and explained my problem. I was around 58 years old at the time. The doctor took down my details and because of my profession as a Missionary worker for a Christian NGO decided to do every test available to find out what the problem was. My pulse and my blood-pressure were normal. We spent the next hour and a half doing a blood test, an x-ray, and a urine test to see if any irregularities showed up. But the conclusion was nothing.
I seemed to be perfectly fine. “But Doctor,” I asked, “why am I having these pains in my heart.” The doctor asked me again. “How many children did you say you had?” I responded, “Seven.” She said, “I have two and those two give me a lot of stress. I can’t imagine how much stress you have. That’s why you are feeling that pain in your heart. The stress is causing erratic and dangerous electrical charges. If you don’t eliminate the stress, it can kill you. Stress kills.”
She then prescribed a pain-killer and a relaxant for me to take. I asked her, “What if I don’t take these?” She said, “What do you mean you won’t take them. You better take them. Your life is on the line.” I didn’t want to argue, so I thanked her for her careful analysis of my problem and left.
However, I was under the impression that just taking a pain-killer and a relaxant was not really getting to the root of the problem. It was acting against the symptoms, but I needed to find a way to reduce stress, to eliminate stress which was the cause of the pain. After praying and asking the Lord what to do and researching on the internet, I initialed a three-fold plan of attack.
First, I was going to strengthen my relationship with the Lord by spending more time in praise and prayer. Jesus said, “Come unto me all ye that are burdened and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me for I am meek and lowly of heart. And ye shall find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”[1] So my first priority was to come unto the Lord, to praise Him more and bring my burdens to Him in prayer.
By bringing more praise and prayer into my life, it helped me to be more relaxed and trusting in the Lord. Instead of carrying the burdens on my own shoulders, I was transferring them to the Lord’s shoulders. Suddenly stress began to subside.
The second part of the plan was I was also going to be on the look-out for those moments when I got stressful. The Bible says, “I will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed upon me, because he trusted in me.”[2] I was going to try to keep the Lord’s peaceful spirit with me. I was going to try to identify those moments when I was tempted to get stressful and avoid them. You see, you don’t need to go around full of stress. You can decide to not get stressful. You can make a conscious effort to change your behavior, with the Lord’s help. You do not have to let stress dominate you.
The third part of the plan was I was going to have regular exercise for one hour a day. I started to jog and to walk for one hour. At first all I could jog was ten minutes and then I would walk for fifty. Over a period of time, I worked up to one hour of jogging. If you go on the internet you can find hundreds of articles on the importance of exercise to help eliminate stress. I started walking up the stairways instead of taking the elevator. I started walking to the office, which was about two kilometers away, rather than take the car. And it worked.
In the end, I hadn’t taken the pain-killer or the relaxant, but God had given me a plan to reduce stress. He can do the same for you.
Having a stress-free life is your choice. He says, “Seek and ye shall find.”[3] So if you’re suffering with stress, try this three-fold plan, or ask God for your own personalized one. He loves you and wants you to have a stress-free life.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment