Last year at the local Church Nativity Play on Christmas Eve, all the children were asked to dress as shepherds or angels. My niece is very much into dressing up, particularly as an angel, princess or a fairy and so my sister just assumed that she would be very excited at the prospect of playing an angel. When my niece expressed that she wasn’t excited, my sister was quite taken aback. After probing her for more information as to why she wasn't excited, my niece said “I don’t want to be an angel Mummy, I want to be God.”
Starts young doesn’t it?!
I usually don’t write a lot about God when I am writing outside my own journal. Mainly because I realize that so often, I lose the reader when they see His name. For the purposes of this blog, I encourage you to interchange ‘God’ with ‘Universe’ or ‘Life’ or ‘Allah’ or ‘Buddha’ or whomever or whatever it is that you believe in. For me it is God and so that’s why I write His name but the message is really relatable no matter what it/he/she is that you believe controls our destiny.
I am someone who used to love certainty. I needed it in an almost addicted-like way. I didn’t always have control over certain situations and I somehow, subconsciously, thought that stressing would make things more in my control. I suppose that’s why we all stress. Stressing or worrying over something, somehow gives us the illusion that we might have more control than we actually do.
Over the last few years, I have realized that not only does stressing actually have no positive impact on the result I am trying to achieve, it actually stops me from being open to all the possibilities that life has in store for me.
We are all on a journey that we like to think we have control over. ‘We are in charge of our own destiny’, I hear over and over. While I am absolutely someone who thinks that we make our own luck, and that hard work, commitment, and a propensity to honor our values and do the right thing will lead to a fulfilling and meaningful life, it would be God-like to think that we have full control over where life takes us. I believe that there is a path laid out for us and all that stress and worry do is prevent us from being present and enjoying what is before us.
From the time I was about 10, I knew I wanted to live in New York. Having been there only once for a few days when I was 6, it would be naïve to think that I had any idea what living in New York actually meant. I suspect it was a combination of television shows like ‘Friends’, ‘Sex and the City’ and subsequent vacations over the years to New York that continued to fuel the desire; none of which actually prepared me for the reality of living there. Nonetheless, I was determined. When I was 28, I moved to Manhattan. While it was a wonderful experience, 18 months later, I left for Los Angeles, a city that had never even been a place I intended to visit, much less live. A one month stay turned out to be the beginning of the most extraordinary, healing and life changing four years of my life.
To me, Los Angeles is truly a city of Angels. It is where I healed from my eating disorder, found people who once strangers, have now become another family to me. I began the career of my dreams, recovered my faith and developed my true spirituality, and where I finally recovered the real me. In short, Los Angeles turned out to be the New York of my childhood dreams.
Imagine for a second if I had decided, before I even arrived in LA, that I would only be here for a month. Imagine the uphill battle I would have had against the life that was waiting for me. I am not for a second saying that I haven’t worked hard for everything that I have here. I have. And while Los Angeles has been the platform that I sprung from to build a healthy and meaningful life, it would be remiss of me to say that moving to a city where you know only a couple of people isn’t one of the more lonely experiences of one’s life. Add on to that working on recovery from an eating disorder and there have been some painful and difficult days.
However, the one constant presence in my life has been faith; even if I did not know it at the time. A few years ago, I did not have an identifiable faith. I was raised with one but I was certainly not connected to it. If you had asked me what I believed in, I would have had a hard time being able to articulate it. But deep down, on a subconscious level, I had a deep and profound faith and it was that faith that kept me persevering for years when I had no idea if I would actually recover. That faith in turn allowed me to be flexible and open to what came into my life.
I am so grateful for the part of me that was able to be flexible throughout this process. It has been the biggest teaching tool of my life. I have learned that I vacillate between periods of comfort in certainty and periods of absolute fear; this is particularly true now that I have started my own business and work for myself. Whenever I start to stress about something outside my control, or predict how the future is going to pan out, I turn to my God and I either ask Him to take it from me if I can’t deal with talking about it, or, I ask Him to walk with me during that fearful time. I am someone who believes He is always with me but when I talk to Him and verbalize my fear, I am choosing to lean on Him for support during that time. Let me tell you that it feels infinitely better than searching for guarantees and certainty, neither of which is ever available.
Of course it is important to think about important issues and how they may affect you in the future. We should think about what is relevant now and how it will affect us down the road. But if you wait for everything to be perfect or for the guarantees to come, you are going to have a suppressed life and likely not live the one that was laid out for you because you were too busy focusing on the one that you thought was best.
Sometimes I will find myself talking about my faith and feeling strong in it. Then the next day I will find myself stressing about the future. The thing is though; the two don’t go hand in hand. Each time I find myself doing that now, I know it is time for me to work harder at leaning into my faith.
All we can do is make the best decisions with the information we have at the time. Anything more than that is playing God. Next time you start stressing or searching for the answers to the future, stop and take a minute to look around. Feel where you are and what you are stressing about and take a moment to contemplate whether you are really allowing the faith that you proclaim to guide you or, whether you are trying to guide your faith in your direction. I promise the outcome of these two is very different.