Stress

 

If we were to ask any of our friends or family members who have had strokes, overly high blood pressure, eating or sleeping disorders, or heart attacks what might be a single contributing factor, almost universally we would hear, stress. Doctors have singled that cause out for a number of health issues we face.

I’m no doctor, and thus I can’t get into a medical discussion about stress, but from my own experience this is what I know about it;

·         Stress is what I feel as a result of worrying or fretting about things I have no control over, to the point that it affects my attitude, behavior, and my well-being. In doing so, it also affects my relationships with others around me. It drives a wedge into my spiritual foundation. It is self inflicted, and it is not communicable.

There are medications that are prescribed to control stress. A change in dietary habits also goes a long way in controlling it. A change in lifestyle can not only relieve stress, but prevent it. No, we’re not talking the “be happy—don’t worry” thing here.

The most solid thing I know of to prevent a reoccurrence of stress once we have it under control is faith. Stress affects our heads and hearts. Faith lives in our heads and hearts if we choose it. If we have truly strong faith, we may minimize our  stress because we fully trust the Lord with our lives, not ourselves. Think of it this way—we get stress from things that we do to ourselves—nowhere else. By the way, we can’t buy faith at Walgreens. We have to find it on our own.

My way=Stress

His way=Faith=No stress

Faith, in combination with a change in our lifestyle, will give us our best shot at controlling our stress. It’s something many of us want to ignore, simply because we have a human tendency to want it now and not fully trusting God with our lives.

Bottom Line Thought: Only a simple choice remains. Which will it be, stress or faith?