STRESS

There’s a story, a parable really, about a woman giving a presentation on stress management. She raised a glass a glass of water, and instead of asking the “half full or half empty” question, she asked how heavy the glass of water was. Responses varied between 8 oz. to 20 oz.

“The absolute weight doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is how long I hold the glass. If I hold it for a minute, it is no problem. If I hold it for an hour, I will have an ache in my right arm. “If I hold it all day, you’ll probably have to call an ambulance. In each case the weight is the same, but the longer I hold it the heavier it becomes. That’s the way it is with stress.”

We are all stressed in one way or another from birth to death. Stress is part and parcel of life. The only time when we will no longer be stressed is when we are no longer alive. In the meantime each day we have to deal with our share of stress of some kind, sometimes many kinds. How we deal with those stresses in our lives determines how healthy or how ill we are.

The worst way to deal with stress is to go it alone. The stresses in our lives are burdens we must bear. And the best way to bear any burden is to find someone to help carry and share the load. Doing so will not remove the load. It will simply make the load, the stress, easier to bear. Often the best way to share the load is to find someone to talk to. Keeping the stress bottled up inside only makes it worse.

Over the years my wife and I have had to deal with the stresses that came with our work and even more deal with the stresses that came with raising five daughters especially when they were teenagers. Our solution was and is to walk and talk: one to three miles walks for normal stresses to five mile walks usually brought on by the teenagers. We could not and did not resolve work issues or even teenage issues, but talking about them helped each of us share our stressful burdens.

The same is true when we put some of those stresses in the hands of God. Believing, knowing that God cares and will give us whatever strength we need to deal with those life stressors is important. God will not remove them but will help us carry them. That is what prayer is all about. To deal with stress we need both the grace and strength of God and the help and support of another, of others, often many others.

While we need to share those stresses, those burdens, we also need to lay them aside for a while. That is what vacations are for. That is what hobbies and outdoor activities and other forms of recreation are for. Recreation: re-creation. They help us recreate our body, our mind, our spirit so that we can deal with the stresses a little bit better. The better we deal with them the healthier we are.

The opposite is just as true. If we do nothing about the stressors in our lives, we will lose our health. How we deal with stress is vital to our physical, spiritual and mental health.