Do you ever feel like you’re spiralling downwards and can’t reach the brakes?
This has happened to me a few times during these weeks of Covid-19 isolation. Most of the time things are fine – after all I’m one of the privileged ones. I have good health and a safe comfortable home to isolate myself in. I have running water to wash my hands. I have a full cupboard due to an inherited gene from my mother that sees my cupboards routinely stocked for Armageddon. We were eight of a family and my mother’s cupboards reflected that. I am a household of one, yet somehow…
I also have many friends and a caring family who WhatsApp, Facebook message, email and phone me. I have no elderly relatives or children or students home from university to be anxious about. I’m not a grandparent distancing from precious grandchildren. I am part of a supportive church with online sermons, blogs, zoom meetings, and I can go out for essential shopping or daily exercise. Believe me, I am intensely, intensely thankful for all of the above.
But sometimes, it really hits home – I just want another human to come and sit down beside me on the sofa and talk to me face to face. I want to hug somebody, and be hugged. It’s been too long since that happened, and I have no idea when it will happen again and sometimes that becomes overwhelming. So what do you do when the downward spiral starts?
Let go and plunge into the dark depths of self-pity and attendant guilt? For me that is too awful an option – but I can’t reach the brakes. So I shout into the silence for help. Does God hear? I believe He does. I’m not the first, nor the only one to feel like this. The Bible gives plenty of examples of stumbling sinking souls crying out for help. Just read some of the Psalms, they deal frankly with every strain of complex human emotion.
Similarly, I too need to acknowledge the plummeting; to face honestly the fact that at this particular moment in time I couldn’t care less about the challenges facing my many acquaintances who suddenly find themselves confined all day in a house full of people large and small. The last thing I want to do is read another encouraging blog, listen to a sermon, clean a cupboard, watch yet another video, or read a book, and I certainly don’t want to watch the latest coronavirus update. Hard to admit – but I only care about ‘me’ and how rubbish ‘I’ feel. The gloom and the guilt pile on.
I also need to recognise this as normal. Everyone has these kinds of days. We are all going through incredibly abnormal times such as none of us would previously have imagined. It would be odd if we did not find it hard. The change came so quickly. Feelings of anger, self-pity, frustration, guilt and their physical responses of crying, binge eating, kicking the door suddenly surge up. But they will pass. We will come through this. These negative feelings and spiralling emotions will pass.
Again, the Bible is no stranger to strong feelings. It’s all there. King David (who had more than most people’s share of privilege) cries out to God in confusion, fear, anger and guilt. He describes it as it is. Hard. The Lord himself cried out during that agony of unique isolation from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Whatever our cry, it comes nowhere near to His. Yet because of His cry, we know that when we cry out, He will understand. We are not alone, and when we can’t reach the brakes to stop our downward spiral, the only thing to do is to cry out to the Lord for help, knowing that He will hear, and He will understand.
When we do, and when we reach out of ourselves, and cry to God, slowly the brakes come on. It may not be a juddering halt and a quick reversal, but slowly, quietly we begin to sense that the turmoil is lessening. Somehow the storm has calmed. Rational thinking is being restored. Psalm 46:10 is a reminder to, “Be still and know that I am God.” Sometimes all we can do is to stop our striving and trust in the God who created the world, created the galaxies; the God who created me and knows exactly how everything including the fall-out from Corona virus is affecting me, is affecting us all. An old song helpfully says:
‘Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.’
So, next time you can’t reach the brakes – give a shout. He will hear you. Then as in Psalm 34, remember to give thanks.
