What role does anxiety play in your life?
Anxiety is a hot topic these days. There are many tips, tricks, remedies, medications, meditations, advice, and other therapies to help alleviate anxiety, which is great because anxiety really sucks!
I truly hate feeling anxious and if I had my way, I would remove it from my life altogether. However…
My job is to help you take the adventure God has for you, so we need to talk about the connection between anxiety and adventure.
Over the past several weeks, I have been telling you what you will need to do in order to experience a great adventure with God. You can read the first two things you need here: step 1 and step 2
The third thing you will need to do if you want to experience adventure with God is to be willing to go to unfamiliar places.
If you want to take the Adventure God made you for you will have to be willing to do things that make you feel uncomfortable and dare, I even say, anxious.
Unfortunately, for us, anxiety has gotten a bad rap. For many of us, we name it like a bad personality trait that we can’t control, and even worse, we name it as a perfectly good reason that we can’t do something.
“I was going to, but I just felt too anxious about it.”
“I could never do that, I have too much anxiety.”
“I would but my anxiety is too bad.”
For many of us, we have come to the wrong conclusion that feeling anxious is a reason not to do things. When in fact, anxiety is often a sign that we are doing something new, something challenging, or something bold.
I want to help you take this adventure you were made for, and I need to help prepare you for what it will entail. One of the things God will definitely do is ask you to do things you don’t want to do. It’s not if, it’s when. And these things He asks you to do will sometimes scare you. In fact, there will be times that you would rather do ANYTHING but the thing He wants you to do.
And it will be in these moments of spiraling that we determine if we will or will not find the Adventure we were made for.
In many ways, I wish this wasn’t the case. I wish I could tell you that taking this journey will be a fun, exhilarating experience with only butterflies and rainbows but I can’t tell you that because it isn’t true.
You see, when God put you on this Earth, He knew exactly what you were capable of accomplishing. He knows you better than you know yourself. Yet, you and I have quickly found our ability to keep ourselves from harm. We love comfort and want to stay where we feel safe. The idea of putting ourselves out there and being rejected, failing, or embarrassing ourselves is not something any of us want to do.
Of course, when we feel anxious, it doesn’t guarantee that we are on the right track, but it certainly doesn’t mean that we are on the wrong one.
Our anxiety should not be able to keep us from doing what God wants us to do. And we must learn that if we say “yes” to God we will have times of feeling extremely anxious. All of this is part of our Adventure but more than that, it is part of learning who God created us to be, discovering our potential, and learning we can trust our God to guide us in this life.
Your anxiety sucks. I get it. But your Adventure is worth pushing through and finding out what is on the other side of it. You can do this. Please, try. We need you!
Don’t forget, the Earth is waiting for you to show up. 🌎 -Haley
Want to go deeper? Listen to this week's podcast:
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