Anxiety feels so much like cramping muscles. It lives in my gut and squeezes my heart and my stomach in nagging intervals. I have so much of it these days and for the most part it’s unclaimed. I usually quickly understand its source and do my best to make peace with it or at least understand it. These days though it’s no particular issue other than maybe life-altering grief. It’s my biology saying, it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
In this case there is no making quick peace. I know I’ll eventually get there and I do have a sense of eternal peace but today it feels wrong still. It will always feel wrong in this life I think. God has done so much work in me so that I might see hope clearly even in the depths of pain. I believe God makes good things of us when we suffer, I believe God grants us peace in our pain and I believe He’ll redeem it all in a way that will be worth it. But today it feels wrong.
And so I’m losing weight, I have no appetite and I always really need a nap.
Until I run. When I run it forces out the anxiety cramps like yoga for my soul. Because of the pain of running I am forced to feel my body and thus forced to bring my mind back into it. It’s mindfulness for those who can’t meditate. I learn so much about life when I run. I learn how to do hard things. I remember that when our minds are panicking and telling us we can’t keep going that we can in fact take one more step, and another, and another, until we have kept going. My mind goes quiet and I believe in God when I run. In nature God makes sense to me and so I exist in faith with each mindless or mindful step. My anxiety eases as my mind simplifies to breath and movement and it is that simplicity in which I find freedom. I see wildflowers and believe in goodness. I breathe salty air and believe in restoration. I see purple mountains and see God. And I run until I can’t and then I stop and I sob.
My chest splits open in the heavy breath and all the pain explodes in heaving intervals. I feel the ache of my human body which somehow releases my soul and reminds me I’m more than human. God always finds me there, or the other way around. I’m living in my breath and suddenly reminded that man at his best is just that, a mere breath. What an upside down thought to know relief in knowing that even in heart stopping death there is life, as we will finally know wholeness after all of this brokenness.
This isn’t it- this breath, these tears, this loss, these broken hearts. There is more.