Social Anxiety

Now that the semester is over, I feel finally able to sit back and process a little. These times are good.

I know that sometimes I will hide behind a very structured schedule, and life, to avoid down time. I guess I've come full-circle, since I used to be neurotically anti-social and heavily sought out alone time to avoid others...now I'm more likely to spend my time neurotically hopping from activity to event to class to avoid being alone.

Yea neurosis!!!

Some of those close to me know (some don't, or at least didn't...) that I have dealt with some form of anxiety disorder for all my adult life. I don't make a huge deal about it, since it's something like 40 million adults in the US that find themselves in a similar boat. In fact, I used to think that "anxiety disorder" was just a clinical term that we make up.

It's always so much comforting to know that your seemingly unexplainable, irrational physical symptoms and emotional crises has a name...plus it's a lot easier to say, and saves us all some time.

Which is why, when my god speaks of my becoming a new creation, when He says that "creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay, and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God...", that it means a great deal to folks like me.

Which is why following Christ, for me, is hardly a crutch to help me through life, as some have claimed. I've never understood that argument, and dispute it more now than ever. The Jewish concept of redemption, and I would argue, the Biblical concept, has as much to do with today as it does eternity.

On my best days - my most confident days, the days where I truly feel connected to something deeper than myself, the days where I know the lives around me are better because we share something - on those days, I can literally sense the new creation taking shape, and the old begins to fade.

Days like today...like Paul emotes so eloquently in Romans 7, the old creation is not completely gone. Some days, it is as if redemption takes a back seat. I want nothing but to be left alone, and the wall grows thick. I don't want this, I know it isn't rational or right or anything resembling who I have become...yet here it is.

"Why are you so downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, the help of my demeanour, my God."-Ps 42