What's In Your Anxiety Toolbox?

A couple of weeks ago, Kristi Noem, the Secretary for Homeland Security, had her purse stolen while she was out eating with friends and family.

Like many people, when I first heard the news, I immediately had questions.

My first question was where was Kristi Noem’s Secret Service detail?  Letting someone close enough to steal a purse seems like a major failure.

My second question was the same as many people’s.  Why was she carrying $3000 in cash?  Who carries cash these days anyway?  The other day when the little girls rang the doorbell trying to sell me a flower they had plucked from the neighbor’s yard for a dollar, I had to search for four quarters to give them.

But perhaps even more bizarre than the $3000 in cash was that she was carrying around blank checks.  Kristi Noem is a few years older than me, but she and I are both considered Generation X and she is giving our generation a horrible name by not only carrying around cash, but also checks.

All of this, though, got me thinking about what I carry in my bag.  For the record, I don’t carry a purse or own a purse.  My grandmother used to have a purse to match every pair of shoes she had.  I consider myself low maintenance.  So I have an LL Bean backpack that I generally only carry to Morning Prayer.  It holds my Book of Common Prayer, printed copies of my reflection and the Bible readings for today and also my prayer journal.

But in the pockets, I also carry some “in case of emergency items” including hand sanitizer, cough drops, Advil, a Super Mario handheld game, and of course, a book.

And I swear to you that I didn’t plant this book in my bag just for this reflection.  I try and always have a book with me just in case I get stuck somewhere for a while and I make the book pocket size so I can carry it in my pocket if need be.

So what’s the book in my bag?

“The WORST-CASE SCENARIO Little Book for Survival.”

This series of books came out more than twenty years ago and they were written to be dry and humorous but also somehow dead serious at the same time.

The topics covered in this particular book include “How to Escape from a Bear,” and “How to Survive an Avalanche” and “How to Deliver a Baby in a Taxicab.”

What made these books so funny is the simple fact that most of us will never be in these situations.  I don’t carry around the book because I think I might have to deliver a baby in an Uber, I carry it for entertainment.

And for nostalgia reasons, wasn’t it nice, twenty-thirty years ago, when we didn’t live in a constant state of anxiety, bombarded by news 24/7 telling us that everything … everything was a worst-case scenario. 

A few weeks ago, I said that everyone these days is an overstimulated cat with nothing or no one to bite to make it stop.

I told my dad last week that I’d be lying if I said the recent shooting near my house and the incident with the man who came to my door and wouldn’t leave weren’t starting to get to me.  I’m tense.  Every time I hear the slightest sound from out front of the house, I pull out my phone and quickly check the Ring doorbell camera—which is why last night I caught something seemingly so scary, I swear I held my breath, and my heart stopped beating for a few seconds.

A car pulled up and stopped in the alley by my house.  A man got out, a white man with a scraggly beard.  He pulled a long wood pole/stick out of the back of his car and began to walk across my front yard to my door.  He was walking with a purpose and for a moment, I thought that purpose was to swing that stick at my house, to do massive vandalism, to cause pure mayhem.

For what reason would he do that?

Who knows?  The world is a crazy place these days.

But right as he got to the front porch, I remembered something.

I had ordered a rake from Walmart that morning.

He was delivering my rake.

In my defense, Ring doorbell cameras are not high definition.

The world these days is so stressful, every one of us should have a figurative anxiety toolbox that we can reach into, as needed, to pull out specific tools to deal with stress in a healthy manner.

For example, my toolbox contains tools like “take a walk” or “snuggle with the cat” or “eat some chocolate (not the whole bar).”  The truth is I have been having to dig deep into the toolbox lately.  A couple of days ago, I remembered “watch an episode of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting” was in my toolbox.  I now go to sleep each night, listening to Bob Ross’s soft, calming voice.

Even Jesus had a toolbox—I think the metaphor would have worked well for the son of a carpenter, but Jesus knew when He was being overstimulated—when He needed a break.  He never pushed through life.

In today’s reading from Luke 4:38-44, we see Jesus very, very busy, healing Simon’s mother-in-law from a fever, healing others with sicknesses and driving out demons and then we read, “At daybreak he departed and went into a deserted place.”

This was Jesus.  Whether He is asleep in a boat during a storm, or going off by Himself to pray, Jesus frequently understands the importance of sleep and rest and time with God the Father in prayer.

Last week, I added a new tool to my toolbox.  I was waiting for the trash to come and the longer I waited, the more apparent it became that, for whatever reason, the trash was not coming.  I was growing more and more anxious, but then I decided to do something I had only ever done one other time in my life.

I decided to plant something.

I had bought the world’s tiniest boxwood to plant out by my Little Free Library with the hope that the world’s tiniest boxwood would grow into something that could keep the garbage truck from continuing to run over my front yard.

The ground should have been soft from all the rain, but I only made it about three inches down before I hit rock and tree roots.  The area where my house had been built used to be a vacant lot and before that another house had stood there before being torn down.  The old house and the old trees that once lived there are not completely gone if you dig just a little bit.

Three inches would have to be enough for the world’s tiniest boxwood.  I gathered loose dirt around it and scattered some mulch to blanket it—I tucked in the world’s tiniest boxwood, hoping I had not dug it a shallow grave, but instead was giving it time to grow and dig its roots in.  I looked around and found large flat rocks to place around the plant and then I said a prayer, hoping that the world’s tiniest boxwood would live.

The answer to the world we live in these days, this soul-crushing, soul-sucking, soul-curdling world, I think is life.  It’s green things and forest bathing (as the Japanese call it).  It’s time spent breathing in the natural world.  It’s being surrounded by things that are raw and real.  And planting, gardening is something that brings us even closer to God the Creator.  The story of the human species begins in a garden after all. 

Incidentally, the garbage truck didn’t come that day.  I had to file a service request and make a phone call and then wait obsessively over the next 48 hours to see if my garbage bin would be emptied.  It was, finally, Friday morning.

In the meantime, the world’s tiniest boxwood continues to live and I will be using my new garden rake to help till the soil a bit around the boxwood, to lay out straw filled with fertilizer and seed to help the area by the alleyway to put down roots, to become something more than mud that gets washed away and instead become something with its own purpose, to help the grass grow—quite frankly to help anything grow at this point.  I will take even weeds.

So, think today, about what’s in your anxiety toolbox.  Is there anything in there that brings you closer to God, that gives you real purpose and hope in a crazy world?

Amen.