Thoughts on Life During Stressful Events
When stressful events happen, it is natural to feel a sense of trepidation and fear. The value of going through things beyond our control is that we get a better sense of our own shortcomings, and we learn to give ourselves and others more room to fail and to grow.
Right now I am writing from a small town out at the end of Long Island, NY, during the Coronavirus 19 worldwide epidemic. The New York City area, including my small town, has been particularly hard hit. We are all in isolation and have been for weeks, and it doesn’t look like this will be over soon. The news on the television and on our cell phones is a constant barrage of information on how this is affecting the world and what we should and should not be doing. My family is spread out over many states. My husband and I live with one of our daughters and her husband and two boys who are one and three. This daughter is pregnant with her third son due in the early fall. Our youngest son lives in Brooklyn with his sweetheart. They are both working from their apartment. Another son lives in Charleston, SC, with his wife and two daughters. His wife’s father has just had surgery. This makes the virus a true threat. We have twin daughters who live in the Pittsburgh, PA, area. Laura and her husband have two boys and two girls, all of whom are doing school work from home now, including their oldest son who is in his freshman year of college and the college has closed with all professors conducting class from computers. Anne and her husband have two boys and one daughter, doing schoolwork from home, and their oldest son is also a freshman in college, now home for the duration. Rose, our third daughter, lives in Cedarburg, WI. Her husband is working from home, as are their two sons who are in high school. Jeanne is in Washington D.C. Her husband is working from home and their three sons are also doing schoolwork by computer.
This is just one family among sooooo many, and it is interesting to see how much this virus has interrupted daily life. We are in touch with extended family in Milan, Italy. They are in “Lockdown” and are stopped by police if they go out of their houses. There the virus has sickened much of the population near Milan and way too many have died. We know people in Geneva, Switzerland, who are in isolation.
This is a time of stress for people all over the world, but all of us face stress in our own lives as simply a fact of life. And when stress comes, the way we deal with it can have real ramifications upon our lives. Doctors say that unrelieved stress can cause illness. We often have worked out our own ways of relieving stress such as working overtime or eating or exercise or buying something or using some kind of drug or mind numbing drink, or the like. Most of these measures can ultimately produce stress on their own, because we get too use to propping ourselves up with them. They become addictive.
So what is a person to do?? How can a person find a way to relax when everything around him or her is going in a difficult direction? Here is where we can begin to reach beyond the boundaries of nature and into the realms of the human soul. Mankind has within him the ability to commune on another level. We enter the realms of faith and belief in things outside of the five senses of taste, touch smell, hearing, and sight.
During stressful events it is so comforting for me personally to have a sense of the overarching love of God. I found out that He exists when I was 24 years old. Knowing that He is in control, and that love is His very nature, and that he has experienced the human condition with all of its joy and pain as Jesus Christ, can take the deepest hurt and pain out of loss, out of disaster, out of rejection, out of failure, out of illness, out of mistreatment, out of the sting of death.
We have just celebrated Easter. It seems fitting, somehow, that Easter comes in Spring (in the Northern Hemisphere at least), when life again comes to Nature. Trees and plants that have been in a suspended rest begin to grow again. The birds migrate to the north and insects and animals that sleep through winter come back out of hibernation.
Those of us who have been told to stay home are in suspension right now all over the world. Others have gotten sick and many are in a life-threatening situation, which means many others are risking their health to tend to the unfortunate victims of the Covid-19 virus, a tiny, unseen enemy of life.
Easter, Spring and new life, looking beyond our five senses to another reality, trusting that mankind has a purpose beyond this life, believing that we have a God who can bring good out of tragedy because He is Love; all of these draw a person from stress into a place of peace. And this is a lasting peace without addiction. As we look toward a future beyond our present reality, may we all see the Resurrection.