Opening my Eyes

I define stress as anything that causes me to feel tense, overwhelmed, generally negative, a "not going right" feeling.

In becoming aware of my stressors I realized that they come in all shapes and sizes.

I realize its all around me. Its in my home, its in my schedule, in my body, in my kids, in my husband, its everywhere.

Its that feeling of tension that rests in our chests, shoulders, necks, stomachs. Also, its the feeling that can move from a little "blech" feeling to outright that "what am I going to do!" feeling. Its a weight in our hearts, a weariness in our souls. Its worry, fret, its the jumping board for so many things.

It can be anything from every night when you go to feed the kids you have to search for forks, to everyday you have to pick up the same twenty-five toys off the floor, to the laundry is never caught up, to you are never home, to your car is too cluttered to find anything in, to you havent eaten in 8 hours, to where are all the bandaids?

I am talking about the little things that we deal with daily that combine to create a mountain of stress!

Thing is, we all have a list of things we deem "big" things to stress over. You know the list, finances, moving, divorce, death, health issues. These are the "big" things.These are often things out of our control, though sometimes they are things we can make better with effort.

Since there are so many things OUT of our control, lets focus on getting control of the things that we CAN control.

Lets pick at that mountain of stress one little thing at a time, and watch it shrink. So, that when that mountain gets an "addition" we arent looking at Mount Everest right off the bat!

Truly, if a glass is full to the top and one little drop is placed in it...it overflows. We gotta pour out some of that stress we can get rid of so that when the stuff we cant help but take in comes, we dont "overflow".

Andy Stanley calls it "Margin" - I love this lesson. He talks about how there are white spaces on the edges of the page for a reason, because if the words went all the way to the edge of the page and there were spaces between sentences and paragraphs you would get lost and have a difficult time comprending the content. Margin is the extra room for the things that will happen (i.e., leaving room in the budget for emergencies, dont plan away every minute so there is no time for resting, etc.).

We are creating margin, a glass half-emptied, a hill instead of a mountain.

Its a good thing.