Over the weekend I had a small string of epiphanies which popped up during church on Sunday, family home evening on Monday, and some conversations I’ve had over the past few days.
The first came from the theme for the ward conference I attended: “Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed” (D&C 123:17).
Starting then, and building up like a snowball through the rest of the conference, it hit me that I’ve let fear chew its way too much into certain parts of my life. I haven’t trusted the Lord, but instead I’ve festered on my worries and my doubts until they paralyzed me. Or shoved me into a trough of depression. Or darkened my perspective in some areas so that I couldn’t see clearly.
This is bad.
I mean, the Lord says himself, “Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not” (D&C 6:36). All throughout the scriptures he keeps telling us not to fear. And here I am, not recognizing it for what it is. Being a hopeless romantic, I’d somehow gotten it into my head that I ought to ride the wave of my emotions wherever they take me — that any feeling I have is valid just by nature of being a feeling. Boy, was I wrong. I thought those feelings of fear and doubt and worry were helping me make the right decision. They weren’t — they were flaying and dismembering me so that I couldn’t make a right decision because I was too focused on them.
Once I’d realized that fear was bad and it was in my system more often than I’d like, I got to thinking about what I do that might invite it in. After all, when the devil comes knocking, you don’t want to throw open the door and fling down the red carpet so he can plop down in front of the fire. You want to put up the deadbolts and pull out your shotgun. So what was I doing that was inviting fear in for the duration?
It didn’t take long before the light bulb went on. I have this habit of thinking about things. I’d taken pride in it, being a writer and all, but I hadn’t realized that it had a nasty side to it. I mean, there are things that I obviously shouldn’t think about — dirty thoughts, the like — and I’d already put those on my blacklist. But I what I didn’t see was that not all the rest of my thoughts were necessarily productive. In fact, some were wolves in sheep’s clothing, minions of hell quietly sowing seeds of darkness and despair. And I didn’t even know they were there.
Now, overanalysis isn’t a problem with some things. But with others — we’ll take dating and marriage as the prime example — it’s Satan himself. At least for me. :P Give me just a few words, an expression, a look, and my thought processes would manufacture reams of motive, spinning out a web of tales possible, both past and future. She did this? Oh, then that must mean this, and this, and this. And the interesting thing is that it usually ended up looking futile, and thus depressing.
So I’m banning myself from overanalyzing things. I’ve been doing it for the last day and a half, and it seems to be working very well. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been tempted to overthink something in one direction or another, and I’ve felt the fear start to creep back up like bile in my throat, but I’ve cast it out and flung my thoughts in a different direction. And the fear has left. I can’t say for sure, seeing as this is still a fairly new venture, but it feels like I’ve hit the jackpot. I was in darkness, but now I’ve stepped into the light.
(Hmm, should I really post this? I feel like I’m publicly opening up a can of worms that might be better to leave in private, but maybe this’ll help someone. I don’t think everyone struggles with this, true, but I don’t think I’m alone, either.)
