Why Does It Feel Like Everything Is An Emergency?
Anxiety makes everything feel like an emergency. To my anxious body, everything is urgent, as if it’s a matter of life or death. Which either feeds or is fed by my functional God complex: a condition in which my nervous system seems to believe that all outcomes, situations, and experiences depend solely upon me.
One attribute of said God complex is my recently uncovered but deep-seated need to be infinite. Intellectually, I know that God is the only infinite being, and that nothing about me compares or keeps up with that attribute, but my nervous system finds it too limiting operating within a finite nature, and therefore I walk through life within a dominant, yet unconscious, infinite narrative which defines my responsibility as boundless, and my energy as the same.
Being human, I am by definition limited; I know this. I cannot do everything, attend to everything, respond to everything, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna try.
Infinity, as I live it, is not a grand delusion of power. It’s a perpetual assumption of availability and need wherein I live as if I should be able to hold everything open at once, every task, every possibility, every responsibility, because there is too much to be done not to attend to the next thing I become aware of needing my attention every moment of every day.
Like my internet browser, I have 15-20 tabs in my mind open at any given time, with the full intention of getting back to all of them. I guess you could say that I’m a glutton for responsibility.
The result is a life that never resolves anything. I’m always in motion, but rarely at rest. Always doing, but not really finishing anything. My attention cannot land long enough on one thing to allow my body or mind any peace because somewhere in me is the persistent belief that I should be able to keep up with everything all at once. I must continue onward, filling the expanse of unfinished tasks, until there is no void to fill, which you are probably realizing is never. Hence, my need to be infinite; there is too much to do not to be.
And ironically, my system treats “too much to do” as an error condition that I’ve got to fix by doing more. That’s like asking the fire to put itself out; it can’t, all it can do is grow bigger and more destructive. My capacity to act was never meant to be infinite. It was designed to be limited, requiring me to live more by faith than by sight.
For decades, I have lived by the code that awareness creates obligation. If you send me a text, I have to answer it immediately. Your emergency is my emergency. If I see a wounded bird on the side of the freeway, I have to stop and rescue it at my own peril. It’s an emergency. If there are dishes in the sink, I must clean them, though I was just about to rest. (Emergency!)
As I sit here writing, the birds outside are chirping at me to refill their feeder. It’s another bird emergency. My first instinct was to drop everything and do that next thing. And once I got out there, I would find five other things that needed to be done, and suddenly I, like Buzz Lightyear, would be moving to infinity and beyond without looking back.
But knowing that infinity is not a human attribute and that sovereignty is not my job, I’m reminding myself that not everything I notice is mine to manage.
BTW five more things just popped into my head as I looked around the room. This is why people say it’s hard to work from home; there is just too much to do. Is that true, or is it just our way of avoiding the spiritual truth that we feel more pulled to responsibility than worship?
How many of us have chuckled at Martha, who, being in the very presence of Jesus, couldn’t stop working and just worship like her sister? Yet how much easier is it to do that very thing when His presence is no longer sitting in the room, but dwelling within us? We shake our heads at her distraction, all while living with the same Lord inside us and refusing to sit still.
Fortunately, what we are doing wrong is very close to what we were made for. We were made to be attentive, just not to everything. We were made to respond, just not to every job that passes in front of our eyes. There is a difference between what we notice and what has actually been placed in our hands, and much of our unrest comes from treating those two as the same.
Martha did not fail because she worked. She failed because she assumed everything in front of her required her, so much so that in the presence of Christ, she expanded her responsibility instead of letting it narrow.
Many of us who struggle to live within our limits do the same; we treat the awareness of something that needs to be done as a direct assignment, and in doing so, we take on more than we were ever meant to carry.
To live as a finite person is to let our attention settle on Him and then to allow some things to just go undone without chasing them. To trust that we don’t have to carry what God hasn’t given us to carry.
Maybe the question is, what are we still trying to hold together?