Lately I have met another person troubled with anxiety and panic attacks. I never realized how widespread this is. Basically it is an emotional obsession, and a person has to have a strong will to break the obsession, and get on with life.
As I mentioned in another message, when I was a young seminarian I was tormented with anxiety attacks. It is a horrible experience to endure especially for any extended period of time, but it can be overcome. In the other message I discussed what I did to stop my anxieties, but with some people it may be more difficult
The origin of anxiety attacks is fear, fear of what might happen to us or to those we love, or fear of some widespread impending danger.
I think the ultimate remedy when nothing else helps is total abandonment to God. This may sound like an unrealistic fantasy, but it is a genuine reality. Four times in my own life I was in the most troubling circumstances. Once when I was promised a chance to go to
Rome for my studies, only to find out that the superior general of the order had forgotten about his promise. The whole future course of my life was at stake. I made up my mind I would let God take charge of my life, so I made the very difficult decision to abandon my life to God’s will. When I did my life changed dramatically, and I was given assignments that could have destroyed me, but in the process I learned a lot, and learned how to cope with so many complex and frightening circumstances. Only twenty-five years later, after very complicated and troubling assignments, that I managed to survive, did I realize that God had been preparing me for a very special assignment. But, all along the way, I was never prey to anxiety or panic attacks.
Finally, when my health broke and I had to retire from active work as a priest, and I was left without resources, did I realize that I might not live much longer. The strange thing was I had not anxiety or panic attacks. I had long ago turned my life over to God in ‘holy abandonment’ as spiritual writers would call it. Shortly after that, I wrote and published “Joshua,” which I had known for almost five years God wanted me to do. I also realized that the whole rest of my life, as complicated as it was, was the necessary training God put me through to prepare me with what I needed to write “Joshua” and all the twenty some books I was able to write after that.
Now that I have written all those books and have reached another phase in my life, this could be the most frightening, but the strange thing is I am not subject anxiety or panic attacks. I am just calmly waiting to see what else God has in mind, and I have the strong feeling that he is going to keep me working right to the end, and will have to postpone my retirement till later on.
So, try abandoning yourself to God, and let him do the worrying. He’s good at it, because he’s got a whole warehouse of solutions.
