Worry! It pervades our modern life. It is what we do
as humans. We worry about relationships. We worry about finances. In certain
instances, we worry about our safety and we worry if we will have sufficient
food to feed our children the next day. We just worry. And often, if there is
nothing to worry about, we worry about that! I’ve actually had clients come to
me to tap on just that specific idea. If they have nothing to worry about, they
will create something worrisome. Worry is what they do.
Philippians
4:6-7 reads, “Do
not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which
transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ
Jesus.” All our
fears, anxieties, and worry are to be placed into His loving arms. They are His
to carry.
I believe
Apostle Paul is referring to an attitude. An attitude of knowing who our Savior
is and what He has done for us. That knowing keeps us surrendered to Him all
day long, through the thick & thin of life’s travails, desiring to do His
will every minute of our lives. J. Vernon McGee wrote in one of his Thru the Bible entries entitled “The Attitude
of Prayer, “Prayer is an attitude of the life. It is
more an attitude of life than an action of the lips.”
Dr. McGee ended the short study with
this, “There was a famous preacher, years ago in the state of Georgia, who had
many very unusual expressions. One of them was this, ‘When a man prays for a
corn crop, God expects him to say Amen with
a hoe.’ You can’t just stay on your knees all the time and pray for a corn
crop. That’s pious nonsense. But to pray for the corn crop and then go to work
is the thing our Lord is talking about in days when men’s hearts are failing
them. “Men ought always to pray, and not to faint.” (Luke 18:1).
Prayer is an
attitude of awareness that God is with us, and unlike the New Ager’s
non-personal god, He is interested and involved in our every thought and
action. We whisper prayers of thanksgiving throughout the day, or ones asking
for help, if something difficult arises. We just know He is right there with
us, a prayer or thought away. He waits
for us to talk to Him. He desires that communication. If at Baptism the Holy
Spirit indwelt us, how can we do anything differently?
Now, that all said & done, we know nothing is that easy! After all, we are human, and our thoughts turn to worry, fear, discouragement, and anger. It is life, and it appears to be the way we are programmed. Or is it?
Now, that all said & done, we know nothing is that easy! After all, we are human, and our thoughts turn to worry, fear, discouragement, and anger. It is life, and it appears to be the way we are programmed. Or is it?
As we go
through the day, prayer should be our first response to everything that makes
us fearful, anxious, or angry, etc. A
lack of prayer will cause us to be dependent on our own abilities and thoughts instead
of depending on God's grace and mercy and help. Unceasing prayer is the
humbling of ourselves through continual dependence upon and communication with
the Father.
But what
happens when the fear, worry, or anxiety continues to rear its ugly head? What happens when we cannot seem to follow
that Biblical admonition to stop worrying? Do we not trust God? Is God not
answering our prayers? I don’t believe
that to be the case at all. God created us with a specific physiology. He knows
what He created and how we function within our bodies. God allows certain
situations to occur in our lives, sometimes for decades, to keep us growing
closer to Him, or to teach us something important, lessons required for us to
do a job God has appointed us to do for Him.
God’s
physiology goes something like this: We
learn worry early in our lifetime. Oh, it might be something that today we
would find inconsequential, like being afraid of the history report we must
give before the class tomorrow, or not understanding the science in an upcoming
big test. Worry and anxiety set in. The cognitive learning process instilled in
our mind has just begun. We brew up
unconsciously a mix of neurochemicals. Each mix is different, but specific to
us, for each emotion we feel. Our bodies memorize those chemical mixtures.
Time and
time we feel the exact feelings when we experience similar circumstances
because those special chemical mixtures are brewed and dumped into our blood
streams.
We become
accustomed to the feelings. Sometimes, we even like them because they are
familiar to us, or, as the body is prone to do, we like the kick of endorphins
it releases immediately after the neurochemical mix is released. Endorphins
relax us, and the body is programmed to do that to ameliorate the original
stimulating chemicals it released in emotions of fear, worry, or anxiety.
Over the
following decades, other problems arise that reinforce all that worry and fear
and anxiety. Each time, it seems we worry more and more, or the worry is more
deep set. Finally, by middle age, we find ourselves literally worrying about
nearly every single thing in our lives. We can tell ourselves a million times
that we have nothing to worry about – God has it all under control, but, for
some reason, that never really reassures us, and we continue to worry (Matt.
6:25-26, Luke 12:22-31). Eventually, the
guilt about worrying begins to set in, too, adding to the angst. We know in our
heart it is wrong and sinful, as it places us in control of our life, not God,
and we pray diligently to be delivered from it.
We all know
God can do whatever He finds necessary. Sometimes, He simply rescues us from
our deep-seated worry, setting us free. Other times, it continues, like St.
Paul’s thorn, leaving us overburdened and sick. God, at other times, brings
alongside us something else to assist us, and answering our prayers in other ways.
If you have
prayed for God to help you stop worrying about everything, perhaps it is now
time to consider using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).
Hindsight is
a wonderful thing! Now, after praying
for more than 40 years for God to “fix” my life, one that I felt was pathetic,
filled with constant negativity, self-doubts, self-hatred, and persistent
worry, He lead me to a permanent solution – EFT!
Would I right
here, right now, be doing what I now do – tapping with hurting people, teaching
other wonderful Christians to become Christian EFT practitioners, and writing
this article, if God had promptly and immediately, when I first asked 40 years
ago, relieved me of that early emotional turmoil. Absolutely not!
God used all
that horrible negative stuff to mold me (Isaiah 64:8) and make me as He wished
me to be and desired me to do for Him.
Romans 9:20
as written in the Message says it best: “Who
in the world do you think you are to second-guess God? Do you for one moment
suppose any of us knows enough to call God into question? Clay doesn’t talk
back to the fingers that mold it, saying, “Why did you shape me like this?”
Isn’t it obvious that a potter has a perfect right to shape one lump of clay
into a vase for holding flowers and another into a pot for cooking beans? If
God needs one style of pottery especially designed to show his angry
displeasure and another style carefully crafted to show his glorious goodness,
isn’t that all right? Either or both happens to Jews, but it also happens to
the other people. Hosea put it well: I’ll call nobodies and make them
somebodies; I’ll call the unloved and make them beloved. In the place where
they yelled out, “You’re nobody!” they’re calling you “God’s living children.”
Isaiah maintained this same emphasis: If each grain of sand on the seashore
were numbered and the sum labeled “chosen of God,” They’d be numbers still, not
names; salvation comes by personal selection. God doesn’t count us; he calls us
by name. Arithmetic is not his focus. Isaiah had looked ahead and spoken the
truth: If our powerful God had not provided us a legacy of living children, We
would have ended up like ghost towns, like Sodom and Gomorrah. How can we sum
this up? All those people who didn’t seem interested in what God was doing
actually embraced what God was doing as he straightened
out their lives. And Israel, who seemed so interested in reading and talking
about what God was doing, missed it. How could they miss it? Because instead of
trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what
they themselves were doing. They were so absorbed in their “God projects” that
they didn’t notice God right in front of them, like a huge rock in the middle of
the road. And so they stumbled into him and went sprawling. Isaiah (again!)
gives us the metaphor for pulling this together: Careful! I’ve put a huge stone
on the road to Mount Zion, a stone you can’t get around. But the stone is me!
If you’re looking for me, you’ll find me on the way, not in the way.
Emotional
Freedom Techniques is another of those answers to prayer. While He allows
worry, fear, and anxiety to be part of our human experience, one started in
response to original sin our first parents committed in the Garden of Eden, He
also instilled in us a mechanism to relieve just those emotions.
EFT, or
tapping, is a physiology process where by these fore mentioned emotions can be
permanently dismantled. How? By allowing the subconscious to bring to the
surface those early memories where the worry first began, and tapping away the
emotions attached to those events. As we can read in the next paragraph, we
must break the negative worry patterns in our lives in order to maintain our
health. Even our grandmothers understood that worry could kill us. Now, science
understands why. The old computer adage,
“Garbage in, garbage out” works within our own bodies. Every piece of
negativity we think or speak is picked up by the antennae on our cellular
receptors, and all 50-200 billion cells in our bodies have 50,000 to 100,000
cellular receptors on each. That is an awful lot of communication tools to pick
up negative vibes.
Dr. Allison
Adams writes in an article, “According to Dr
Lipton, all living things and all cells can only be in one of two modes. The
first of these modes is 'survival' whereby they are in a protective or bracing
mode and the second is that they are reproducing. For any cell in the body, to
remain for too long in the 'protective mode' eventually undermines the body's
defenses as normal replacement and maintenance cannot take place and the
adrenal system shuts off the immune system which can ultimately result in
various diseases.
Dr Lipton determined that all cells have
antennae that are tuned into the signals broadcast by the mind and that fearful
signals cause the cells to remain in their 'protective' mode indefinitely. Individual humans, he
maintains all have unique frequencies associated with all their cell membrane
receptors. Further, that many of the beliefs that we broadcast to our cells
are unconscious and were acquired in a semi-hypnotic state before the age of 7
years of age.
This
means that in order to get a different physical outcome, we must change the
broadcast and this can be done either by becoming very mindful of our
internal chatter, undergoing hypnotherapy (to access the same mind state as the
program) or by using one of the energy psychology techniques such
as Emotional Freedom Technique, body talk, Avatar, holographic
re-patterning or Psyche-K.” (http://www.thenaturalrecoveryplan.com/articles/cell-membrane-the-cells-brain.html).
It’s how God
created us when He breathed breath into Adam’s nostrils on the sixth day of
creation.
EFT will
break all that negative self-talk, those voices in your head, that cause you to
worry, or feel God doesn’t love you, or you are worthless to humanity, etc.
Free
yourself of those emotions of anxiety, fear, and worry through EFT, opening you
up to an awakened spiritual experience through God’s mighty grace. Somehow once EFT knocks back those unwanted
feelings, a whole new world of God’s grace opens up to us. It’s been there the
entire time, but we have been wallowing in base emotions, allowing them to
drown out our Savior’s voice. Instead of allowing worry or fear to persist, overwhelming
those cellular receptors, tap instead, allowing them to flood you with God’s
mercy and grace and love.
Allow God to
instill into you the peace of God that passes all understanding by using this
EFT mechanism God implanted in you at birth.
God bless
your walk with Him!
EFT is not a substitute for a physician's care. Call your doctor if you determine to need to do so. Please take responsibility for all of your physical needs.
Sherrie Rice Smith, R.N. (Retired)
Certified EFT Practitioner
Author EFT for Christians (2015)
