Doing It Scared

I threw up before every recital.

I was a talented musician, promising enough in high school that my teachers encouraged me to pursue a fine arts degree.  And while I enjoyed performing, I dreaded the juried recitals: an optional pursuit for students like me, where we could be graded by judges for our playing and selected to national orchestras.

I wasn’t the only one.  My friend Stephen, himself a talented musician, heard that the potassium in bananas could calm nerves and made a habit of scarfing several before every performance. Some of my other friends tried breathing exercises.  None of it seemed to keep the nerves at bay for long; we were all nervous wrecks.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, I came to believe this was unacceptable.

I say “somehow” but I know that I actually learned this in church.  Pastors and teachers leaned on Scriptural exhortations not to worry or be anxious to such an extent that I came to believe perfect calm was the manifestation of a good relationship with God, the evidence of proper faith.  Peace was, after all, a fruit of the Spirit.

So I did what a lot of good Christians do when we can’t reconcile what we think we should be in Christ with what’s actually going on: I started lying.

No, I’m not scared.  Nah, I’m good.  Fearful?  No, I don’t get like that.  I feel peaceful.  Why wouldn’t I feel peaceful?  What do you mean, anxiety?  I don’t have that.

Outwardly, I projected perfect calm.  Inwardly, I was a wreck.  And not just about music.  Anxiety leaked out into every corner of my life, and I mercilessly squashed it down in public.  Never mind that I spent nights wide-eyed, staring at the ceiling with circling thoughts, or bit my cuticles until they bled, or cried hysterically in the shower. 

I kept waiting for peace.  I kept waiting for calm.

In my efforts to get a handle on my flight/travel anxiety, I took a maiden voyage to Boston back in January after three years of going nowhere.  I was terrified.  I did it anyway.  And when I came back, I wrote a note to myself in my journal:

Do it scared.

Last week, I pushed through the fear again, taking my first international trip.  We had a wonderful time.  But it was while I was on a plane out over the ocean that I realized I’ve been coming at all of this the wrong way.

A lot of the time, my anxiety stems from a profound recognition of my own powerlessness.  What isn’t powerless, after all, about being suspended in a metal tube above the Atlantic Ocean?  I can’t find a plane.  I shouldn’t be up here.  I don’t know the pilot.  Getting onto a plane is the horrifying practice of my own vulnerability in the face of—well, almost everything.  I am giving up control; I acknowledge that I am a small non-factor in a world almost entirely outside of my control.

There is something holy, in that knowledge.  And it is made holier when I can take that anxiety and walk with God through it, rather than shrink back to a world that is entirely under my supervision and knowledge. 

In Holy Unhappiness, Amanda Held Opelt writes that we’ve misinterpreted Scripture in many ways.  We perceive God’s comfort as being an absence of something—pain, anxiety fear, sadness.  We believe the comfort of God, as expressed in Scripture, is meant to take bad things away and help us feel good things.  But a closer study of the word “comfort” in Scripture reveals that God’s intention through it is to strengthen us up for whatever we must face: to give us the manna to move forward in the circumstances of each day.

I spent so much of my life trying to squash my fears and worries, sit on them, hide them, make them go away.  I believed that the way to “not worry” and cast my cares on God was to make everything happen myself—and, failing that, to feel inadequate.  In reality, I’ve come to see that the practice of trust and peace sometimes simply means moving forward in my fear and trusting God to work with me through it.

That makes me, admittedly, a lot less serene than I wish I could be.  I would like to be like the believers I know who float, ethereal, through life’s circumstances, somehow untouched and unbothered by all of them.

But that’s not me.  I’m flustered.  My heart races.  My thoughts circle.  I still bite my cuticles on the really bad days, though that’s gotten much better.  But I am at finally at a point in my life where that me is still walking forward with God—is not missing things, is not shying away, is not pulling back.

And that’s where the peace is. 

May you experience that peace, too.