The Three Stresses: Relation, Location & Vocation

This Polar Bear certainly looks like he's chillin'...and not just because he resides in the Arctic. I used to envy my cat Barnabas. I would come home from work and I'd see him sleeping in the windowsill taking in the late afternoon sun. He would have to nap, it seems, to recover from a nap.

Generally, when we are under stress, it can be from three sources: Relation (with God and Man), Location (where one lives), and Vocation (what one does for meaning and money). When all three mount an attack simultaneously, people's stress levels go into the danger zone. Kind of being assaulted from the air, land, and sea. Nowhere to run and hide. So an individual has negative relationships--or no relationships, lives in bad environment--dangerous, abusive, or just plain boring, and has a crappy job--or no job. We can envision a person experiencing all three at once. What's the remedy? A pill? The bottle? Suicide?

No, God is our source of help in times of trouble. If a person is a Christian, saved from eternal hellfire, that should remind us that 99.999 % of what we really need to worry about has been resolved by Jesus on the Cross. The remaining .0001% still weighs on us heavily in this world because we are temporal creatures who don't bear burdens well. God also comes into our situations of stress and gives us the ability to persevere. Makes our backs stronger vs. taking the burdens away.

Think about Paul and Silas....unjustly and severely beaten, thrown in jail, and put into stocks, which were instruments of both confinement and torture. They sure had relational (the mob and the jailer were quite unwelcoming), locational (in a dungeon, late at night), and vocational stress (just preaching the Good News and look what happens). Yet, they sang at midnight to the amazement of the other prisoners and jailer. Either these two are sick in the head, or they are far healthier than we might imagine. When the earthquake strikes, the jailer is ready to impale himself and Paul implores him to not hurt himself because all of the prisoners are in their places with bright shining faces, probably because they are mesmerized by Paul and Silas's joy....like "What is up with these cats. Why are they so happy? I want what they got, whatever it is."

The jailer and his family then are saved. Now, it is clear that Paul is not exactly pleased about getting beat and jailed illegally (Acts 16:37). I love the combination of pure joy and serious indignation Paul exhibits. He is able to have joy in his trial while not particularly enjoying how the trial happened and went down. There is a beautiful realism to this story that should help us see stress as an opportunity to be a victim or a victor. Are we going to chill in godly confidence and be able to express our concerns constructively OR are we going to get all worked up and hot and bothered, adding fuel to the fire? The choice is ours....



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