I Think I'm The Last of Us

How long do I have to wait?

I hate waiting. Just the anticipation of a long wait makes me sick to my stomach, my heartbeat races, and panic knocks at my door. I’ve always thought it was because I’m just impatient—which I am—but now I’m starting to think there is something more to the waiting pain.

But, in the past six months, I’ve discovered the way to hack my anxiety is to look underneath the stress into the machine that produces it—my mind. My brain seems to think its job is to protect me in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone and everything is out to get me. It’s like my brain is Ellie from The Last of Us, living with constant danger around every turn. Ellie lives in a harsh world where she is driven to hyper-vigilance by the constant threat of zombie attacks, like having a four-hour layover in Las Vegas.

Long waits are like zombies threatening to devour my brain, and I hate them, so to prepare for the wait my brain has it all under control. Let’s just call her Ellie. She’s constantly scanning for problems, my Ellie, even when there aren’t any for a lesser brain to find. But my Ellie is a fighter. She’s not a vigilante, but she is taking names and making a list of all the things that could go wrong on a long layover.

The endless nature of a layover, or any wait longer than 30 minutes, turns on my amygdala. (Yeah, my amygdala gets off of detecting threats.) If I’ve got a wait waiting for me, my amygdala doesn’t know what to expect, so she reacts by sending her famous stress signals, even if the situation is not promising any danger at all. You just never know. Ellie doesn’t see waiting as a neutral or even restful state. She translates it into her own flashing red light of ‘potential threat’ to my comfort or safety. What a pal!

In this heightened state of preparing to wait, my sympathetic nervous system jumps to the rescue and prepares my body for fight or flight. It turns up my heart rate, makes me nauseous, and generally worried about my impending battle with waiting.

Of course, the root of all this anxiety is not danger, after all, how dangerous is a layover? It’s really a question of uncertainty or unknowing. That’s the scariest thing of all—not knowing.

Between the state of not knowing and knowing is a wasteland I call the faith gap. In this gap is where I have the chance to panic, to complain, to stress about not knowing, and to worry about how long I’ll have to suffer. The faith gap might also be called by its fancier name—sanctification. But who wants to be fancy when they can just keep worrying about not knowing what’s going to happen next?

This process of progressive spiritual growth—see, fancy, isn’t it?—this process happens in the faith gap—the space between breaking and the breakthrough, devastation and spiritual resilience, the unknown and known. In this space between, our faith is proven or, in my case, often disproven. After all, what faith do I have in a Sovereign God who can’t help me in my time of waiting at an airport in a first-world country?

This gap is meant to build faith, to help us to rely on Him in the midst of suffering or waiting, but when I fill it with worry or fear, or taking control, or giving up, I never reach the other side—the breakthrough.

The truth is that this faith gap often feels like a bad dream. It’s the stuff of nightmares that keeps us up at night and the source of anxiety that threatens to make me stay home all day. In this gap, we either respond with one of three ‘belief styles,’ as I call them: pessimism, optimism, or realism.

The pessimist sees a future where God doesn’t show up, doesn’t care, and isn’t God. That’s the back story behind the worry of the pessimist, if only subconsciously. In this space, sanctification is responded to with anxiety rather than faith and hope in the process that could prove their spiritual resilience.

The optimist, on the other hand, doesn’t see the problem. They are sure that God will keep them comfortable, and spare them from hardship because, after all, they know that He favors them highly. In the faith gap, the optimist refuses to progress from breaking to breakthrough because they refuse to be broken.

The realist has a more practical and pragmatic view of God. They live with measured expectations and are prepared to deal with whatever difficulty might come their way. They are masters at being prepared for the worst-case scenario. In the space between the known and the unknown, the realist relies on themselves and their ability to plan, to prepare, and to handle whatever comes their way, and in so doing, they may get by better than the pessimist, but they reject the process of sanctification in favor of self-reliance.

I’m a pessimist by nature, having been born, like all of us, with one of these three prior beliefs, but over time, I’ve seen that pessimism does—if only subconsciously—expect God to fail, and so I’m walking myself back from that, and choosing to be a holy optimist instead.

I decided that since each prior belief, or explanatory style, as psychologists call it, is a part of our fallen nature, assigned to us at birth, there must be a better way to explain my world to myself and others.

Enter Holy Optimism. Holy optimism is the madness of believing that God can be trusted even when it looks like He can’t. I say madness because, to the pessimist inside of me, who worries about layovers, it is madness. I mean, after all, what can God do with a layover? Sanctify me? Wait. What?

Yeah, turns out that instead of getting into a fighting position like Ellie in an abandoned building, we were meant to surrender to the impending apocalypse of dying to self and pick up our cross, so to speak, in surrender, in peace, and in hope, rather than swinging at invisible monsters. The Lord will fight for you; you have only to be silent—12 of my most favorite words ever! (see Exodus 14:14)

So, this is my final message, and it is to my brain—to Ellie. You are not the last of us: you do not live alone in a post-apocalyptic world. You are a part of the human race, created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. With that as your purpose, how can you take the opportunity for sanctification and do anything with it other than thank God for it and dive in, hopefully expectent for Him to reveal Himself in every formerly scary moment?

You did a good job of alerting me to ‘danger’ all these years, but now I have a Protector, a Savior, a Friend who is with me in every dark and dank place of waiting for my next flight, or my test results, or my old age. I have heard your worries and your fears, and I no longer need them. They speak of a danger that only exists when God is not with me, but with me, He is, forever and for always. So goodbye, fear, and hello, peace.