Anxieties

"Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you."
-1 Peter 5:7

One of the things that has not changed in my twenty-one years of life is that I am a fearful person.
As a kid, fear manifested itself in quite a puerile way, as it does any child.  My parents take great delight in reminding me that at around the age of eight, I thought we would get in trouble for blowing bubbles in a park because there was no sign that permitted us to do so.  Worry was a constant for me - if I wasn't worried for myself, I was worried for those I loved most - and conclusion jumping was my greatest talent.
As I grew older, the fear transfigured, but still remained a constant.  At age sixteen, I began to have panic attacks, which often barred me from getting any sleep and, in turn, sometimes kept me from going to school.  When I wasn't having a panic attack, I was dreading the next one, waiting with anticipation for the next time my fear would twist and choke every organ of my body and make it feel as though it were dying.  I actually feared fear itself, and my odd sense of humor makes me wonder what Eleanor Roosevelt would have made of that.
Four and a half years later, at the age of twenty-one, the fear has transfigured yet again to something truly grotesque, something that is much easier to loathe.  Thanks to therapy, chiropractic care, and lifestyle changes, my anxiety became something much more manageable, a mental battle where I had the upper hand.  Still, it wasn't completely gone, and it was at its worst in the times where I didn't fully trust in God.  This past year, what is perhaps my greatest source of anxiety - my fear of failure - often put me in a state of terror in my schoolwork, so much so that it pushed me to be a straight A student.  When I read the letter that I was on the president's list for having a 4.0 GPA, I was initially ecstatic.  I certainly put in a lot of work for that number.  But now that number only creates a sense of shame because of what I did to achieve it.  Because I was always afraid I was going to fail, those closest to me - mostly my family - were negatively impacted by how I chose to behave.  I fostered such a negative environment that one day, in her final week of school, my younger sister Grace was in such a panic about what she was going to wear for her presentation that it drove her to tears.  I am entirely to blame, and I feel no small amount of shame when I think on that.
Shameful still is that I allowed my anxieties to affect my thoughts regarding my upcoming trip to Germany.
My feelings toward the trip are overwhelmingly joy and excitement.  I've wanted so badly to go for months now, and that God would allow me the privilege of going on this trip amazes me.  Still, despite these feelings, the notion that I would fail resurfaced and grew uglier and uglier.  The denouement was a few days ago when I was in the bathroom, trying to do my make-up, when the anxiety that had been built brick by brick reached its peak.  I broke down crying, and tried to regain control of myself, but to very little avail.  It took a while before I was able to continue doing my make-up, and even so, the misery continued to rot in my brain like poisoned food.
As I came to later understand, the problem wasn't that I feared.  The problem was that I allowed it to stay like a guest in my house, and I might as well have given it the deed.
Reflecting on this later, I realized all I had done.  The greatest was that I refused to trust in God.  By allowing my anxiety to grow more and more, I was essentially refusing the comfort that God provides and I did not permit Him to assuage my fears that I would screw up something in Germany.  I chose feelings while rejecting truth; had I accepted truth, I would have understood that the mission certainly isn't reliant on me.  Even if it were, I should have known that God will not use me to prevent His kingdom from growing!  Anxiety turned humility into self-reliance, comfort into paranoia, productive time with God to wasted time spent worrying.
When I finally realized this, I felt horrified, but turned to prayer.  I asked God to forgive me for my choices and for Him to provide the comfort He promised, and because He is always merciful, He did.  Now is the time for me to repent, and to rest in God.
This isn't to say that anxiety in itself is a sin.  To say that would not only be incorrect, but a terribly harmful idea, so I want to ensure that I am not sending that message.  Where I went wrong was not my fear, but what I chose to do with it, and allowing it to breed and fester.  When I have trust in God, I have a spirit of power, love, and self-control (2 Timothy 1:7).  Fear has absolutely no power in comparison to His, and that which He in turn has bestowed to me and those He calls His.

Introduction

"Be still, and know that I am God.  I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!"
-Psalm 46:10

Welcome.  If you are here, I thank you for reading.  I'm not sure how often I will have the opportunity to update this blog or if I'll be diligent about it, but I intend to use this as a medium to keep everyone in the loop about my upcoming trip to Leipzig, Germany, and perhaps future trips or even other endeavors.  Either way, the greatest purpose of this blog is to show how God is working in my life and to be held accountable.  After all, to publicly proclaim my everyday testimonies as to how God is displaying His love serves as a way to examine that constantly.

For starters, if you don't already know, I've had an interest in languages for as long as I can remember.  With a passion for languages came a passion for other cultures, and that in turn begot a love for other people.  Somehow, though I once was incredibly cynical and wanted nothing more than to be a reclusive hermit in the Finnish Lapland as soon as I could find a way, God changed me so that I could love His people.

Honestly, I'm still an introvert.  I still think people take a lot of energy.  And sometimes I still sit and cry when I see yet another heinous crime against humanity committed.  And I often feel like I suck at this "love" thing.

But I do have a desire to know and love people.

This is manifesting itself in a desire to go on mission trips.  I always thought those sounded pretty cool, but for some reason it wasn't until last year that I decided I needed to actually do something to get myself there.  So first, the plan was Poland.  While in California last year, my family and I visited my great-aunt Georgia, who goes on mission trips to Poland regularly to help teach children English.  I decided that I, too, wanted to go - until I learned that she wasn't actually going this year.  I was a bit hesitant to go on a trip with people I wasn't already familiar with, so I decided to wait and see what opportunities would open up.

Perhaps the next step, I thought, was to go on a trip to the Czech Republic.  The church I attend, The Crossing, sends people there, and a couple that used to attend our church is now there.  Soon after this decision, I found out that there would be a small team going to the Czech Republic - but they would be going in September, which I could not do because of school.  I resolved once again to wait and see what happened.

Not much longer after that, my dad texted me a picture of a flyer he had found while attending Bible Study Fellowship.  Another church in Fort Collins, LifePointe, was also sending people out on mission trips to Utah, India, Japan, and Germany.  Having already had a vested interest in Germany and the German language, I was quite excited by the thought of doing mission work there.  So despite being nervous at the idea of going on a trip with people I didn't already know - the very reason I decided not to go to Poland - I went to the informational meeting.

The people of the church were so welcoming.  In all my nervousness, I had prepared to be grilled on my beliefs and values, and I thought about how I was going to respond.  Admittedly, I even prepared responses on my beliefs on things like baptism.  After that first informational meeting, I was asked things such as why I wanted to go on the trip, but not the tiny questions I had conjured up in my head.  I then began to attend weekly meetings for those going on the mission trips, which served to help us understand why we were going on these trips and to prepare our hearts for them, and started to pray.  I had a tugging feeling in the back of my mind that this trip wouldn't work out too, and I was still anxious at the idea of the trip, but that didn't mean I wasn't going to make an effort.
By the grace of God, the trip is still working out.
That doesn't mean that things won't still fall through.  God gives... and takes away.  I've prayed that if God wanted me to go on this trip that I would, and though there is still a lot of work to do to prepare for it, I am now 29 days away from boarding the plane.  I've had to come to terms with the fact that my prayer does not change the course that God already has set out for me.  My petitions to Him to please let me go so I can build and cultivate relationships in a beautiful country did not make Him take a pencil, erase what was already destined to happen, and rewrite it.  So, then, unless I happen to break my neck or all airplanes suddenly cease to exist in the next month or something else barring me from leaving happens, I will be going.
If you are reading, please pray for us.  We need prayer that all the team members are able to raise the money to go on this trip; that we will be used as vessels, to be guided in whatever way God sees fit; that we will be building strong relationships with the people we will be meeting; and that we will be safe.  As anxieties surrounding this trip and our outside lives start to build, we need to focus on the greater goal that lies ahead.  But we cannot do this without prayer.  Beyond anything else - such as  resources and money, though those both are still needed - we need to be in communion with God.  All of this team, and all of you who also want to see the advancement of God's kingdom.  Above all else, with each other and with God, we are in need of koinonia.