anxiety, endurance, and healing

I've been looking at 2 Timothy 3:11.  It's about endurance.  It's speaks of persecution and enduring with that. Paul says the Lord rescued him from his persecutions.  I suppose He did a lot of times, but I think in the end, Paul died a martyr's death.

 

When I think about how to endure, sometimes there's no other thing which keeps you going, except God. You can use strategies, diverting occupation, counselling, friends' support.  These things are invaluable.

 

But at the bottom of all these, it's just you and the problem and the pain.  And endurance will stand you in good stead.  The way to endure is one day at a time.  If you have anxiety, problems, endure them one day at a time.

 

There will come a time when you will be sick and tired of living a day at a time.  You'll long for a day when the pain/problem is less severe or finished. That day WILL come.  It absolutely will come.  And, the fact that you are longing for that healed day to come, is actually a sign you are getting better;  someone who is immobilised by fear or suffering or pain, lives in that moment because they are trapped in it.  It's only as you begin to come out of the terrible suffering or conflict, that you even have the capacity to contemplate the future.

Live a day at a time for as long as it takes to "feel normal" again.  There will come mornings of sunshine and evenings of peace.  You just have need to endure.  There will come a time when you are happier, calmer, healed. And along the way you will have learned strategies and strengths so that you will never be brought quite so low again.

 

Having said that, someone who has had terrible hurts at the hands of someone else, is never quite the same.  Certainly someone who has lost a child will never be completely healed until the Day of Resurrection dawns. Someone who has been abused as a child will always carry those wounds.

 

But there will come a sort of "healed, mended frailty"; not unlike a leg that once broken is always a little tender on the break site. 

 

For me, the anxiety and panic attacks can never have the power to completely control me, as they did in the past, because I learned how to "bluff them back".