Posted on 11/19/2010 12:47:44 PM PST by Making_Sense [Rob W. Case]
Today, I want to discuss stress. We live in a time and age where stress is common, rampant, and so intense that it has become a tremendous challenge sometimes to simply maintain composure. Stress is a draining mechanism that can easily take our focus off of the Lord and dwell on our own troubles. Now, to us Christians, there are three major types of stress we should examine.......
Work-Related Stress: Back in June, a friend of mine and I went to a restaurant we both like. When the waitress came to our table, she had a “brain freeze” for a moment. She just stopped completely and started staring at our food for a while, and tried to think which plate belonged to which person, and which side went with each dish. Never having seen that happen before, I politely reminded her which dish went to each person. For a moment, she totally lost her focus. After she served our food, She told both of us that she had been working longer hours (8, 10, and even sometimes 12 hour shifts), and that one day a waitress who was concerned for her, followed our waitress home because she was so out of it, that she felt that the stress for the day impaired her motor skills. She was so stressed out because the restaurant was not doing as good of business with the current economy that they ended up stretching the help they already have to the bare bones to help prevent hiring new people and consequentially give the waiters and waitresses that are already there more hours. She told me that even though she likes to make extra money sometimes, her body is not responding well to the stress. Our waitress was burned out.
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Yeah, things were so much simpler back when you couldn't be sure if your family would starve to death if the harvest failed. :-p
Sorry, but I find the "stress is so much worse now" meme to be rather ridiculous. Humans will always find something to stress about. At least until they understand that God really is in control, and that we can't add an hour to our life by worrying about it. People who have sincerely taken those biblical facts to heart will have their stress under control.
I agree. I wasn’t necessarily comparing the old farming days with today. And yet, as things like chores have become easier via technology, and we have depended on things like prescription drugs for healing, I guess it can be accurately said that new stresses (social, regulatory, etc.) have in some ways, balanced out the “absence” of some of the others. I don’t think that stress is so much worse now than the stress of those early farming days. It’s not as bad as what the farmers had. They had to rely soley on God for everything. Farming, healing, and strength to perform manual labor efficiently.
Yet stress has greatly increased within the past 5 years if you set apart the conditions we had 5 years ago and compare them with the conditions we have now. For example, at work even 4 years ago, we had 16 to 17 people in our department. Now, we have 6 to 7 people. The work load is stretched tremendously, and people (who have no grasp of what it’s like working at night) have a fit, and constantly imply the next day that nothing was done the night before.
Much of our stress today is caused by conditions that we either created or gave room to tolerate. Yet with God all things are possible and with his guidance, the impact of stress can be cushioned greatly.
Well we can either turn to the distilled waters or the Living Waters. Thats the choice.
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