Fight or Flight

This is your basic fight or flight battle. It is the product of living a life where I’ve always had to fight, where fight is my natural setting. Where I wake up in the mornings ready to rumble…

But there’s nothing to rumble against any more. God has taken away the darkness in my life that made me fight. He’s replaced it with a peace that is indescribable; it surpasses even my understanding, a tough pill to swallow for someone who has always known everything…or labored to figure it out. I still sit up at night wracking my heart and my mind, analyzing the day and trying to find something, anything to say.

Often, there is nothing. It almost feels like a waste. Nothing happened today? Nothing significant? Nothing to beat myself up over or to work harder at or to run through my mind until I’ve run it through the ground and still don’t have a good answer for it? The times I find something to remember, something to ruminate over, it is only praiseworthy. Only beyond my wildest imagination. Only the goodness of God in the most unexpected places.

You would think this wouldn’t be a problem. To be filled to overflowing with the graces of God, to have not a care or worry in the world. To finally be freed from the fight, the constant fight that has defined literally every day of your existence. To know peace, to know freedom, to know that deep breath of simply being.

To be ok. After all these years, to have no other words for what you are than simply…ok.

The problem is that I’m still primed to fight. I wake up every morning looking for a battle, and when I don’t find one (IF I can convince myself not to create one), I am left with all of this excess energy, mostly emotional energy. I don’t know what to do with that.

It deepens my worship, and my solemnity. It makes me quiet because I’m afraid of ruining the moment. I know myself, and I know that if I think about it too much, it will vanish. Do you know how hard it is for an analyzer not to sit up all night wondering what this change is taking place inside of her? To not overthink and overcontemplate what this means? It’s…the change that seems so thoughtworthy now, that makes me want to never stop thinking about it.

Yet I realize that all of this thinking…is detrimental in its own way. It is one thing to be in awe of this incredible gift of a God who loves me so much, but thinking about the freedom and its contrast to the fight dampens the spirit of the freedom itself. It is hard to embrace and to be as God has made me if I can’t stop thinking about what He transformed to create this, what He healed, what He redeemed, how He restored. Drawing that contrast over and over and over again, while it leaves me in awe and with the tears of repentance, does draw me back. It keeps me focused on the fight, though the fight is long past. Maybe that’s why I’m always still primed; because I never stop thinking about it. Because it seems to make the current situation all the more beautiful.

But really, it doesn’t. It breaks the current situation. It shackles the freedom and takes away the peace.

So I surrender. I give up trying to figure it out, trying to analyze it, and I give up even being in awe. For I know, and I have always known, that my God is good so why shouldn’t He give me this gift? And why would I work so hard to take it away from myself in favor of what? The fight? Because I’m ready to fight?

He’s caught me. He’s put me somewhere I don’t understand, in a situation I don’t know. He’s made me perfectly ok. Just ok. I’m determined to let Him do that. I’m determined to stop fighting it.

I am ready to be ok, and I’m ready for being ok to be ok. I’m ready to be perfectly fine…and to be perfectly fine with that.

And as for all of this excess emotional energy that leaves me primed for the fight that isn’t coming? That, I turn to praise. In deepest worship and in earnest heart, I praise Him for the beauty of this place, the gift of this moment, and the peace of His presence.

I will simply be.