Overwhelming to the point of panic

Sometimes I have anxiety. This is usually brought on by my own actions mixed with the actions of a world that just likes to pile on. "Hey, look at Will, he looks kind of busy... come on boys, let's jump on him and drag him down!" As a Baptist Pastor in Mississippi said to me, "The Devil doesn't want you to succeed and he'll do anything to prevent that."

Which, of course, leads me to a logical question, "Am I really doing anything that ticks off the Devil?"

Okay, yeah, there are some things - but those aren't usually the things that cause me to be overwhelmed. No, no... usually the overwhelming stuff is of my own doing. I've got a lot of pokers in the fire. A lot of those pokers were placed there by myself. In fact, there are days when I can't see the fire through all the pokers. Seriously, if poker collecting were an Olympic sport, I'd be a Gold Medalist every single year!

So last night, lying in bed trying not to think about the overwhelming amount of pokers burning in my mind, I closed my eyes and just prayed, "God, help me out of this mess."

The power went out.

Okay, it may not have been in that order. I don't think God has a PG&E hotline or anything (although that Monday Night Football power outage is still unexplained) but the end result might as well have been the same thing. I needed the power to go out. It forced me to sit in the dark, close my eyes, rest, relax, and simply bathe in the light coming from those red hot pokers.

I decided that the best course of action would be to get some of those pokers out of the fire as soon as possible. I looked at the long list of stuff I have to do, re-prioritized it on the basis of which items I could most quickly finish, and then, remarkably, the panic started to slip away.

What a great way to begin the new year. The panic is still there in the background waiting to jump out, but at least I have a plan now. Progress will be made and pokers will disappear. The Devil might still rise up to defeat me, but at least this time he'll really have to try hard since I won't be defeating myself.