Stress Tolerance

According to people around me, I have every right to be stressed out, overwhelmed, and unbelievable anxious - all of which give me every right to devour ice cream in mass quantities. I typically have a hard time believing it- perhaps because I tend to bury that stress in said ice cream around 2 a.m....

After all, we serve an amazing God who has taken care of our every want and need. We don't deserve His goodness and grace and yet he lavishes uncountable blessings on us every day.

But, considering that since December, Luke finished and graduated seminary, we spent 2 1/2 weeks in Zambia, I lost my job, we moved halfway across the country, started new jobs (several of them), have to balance the hours between multiple bosses and jobs, found out our leasing mananger in Dallas got fired so they're not honoring her decision to let us out of our lease early and coming after us for the money, spent a week back in Dallas for a conference followed by a few days in Chicago followed by three weeks in Charlotte and now we're settling into a new church, making new friends, and raising support to move to Zambia. Oh, and all of this while trying to establish healthy boundaries in an important relationship in my life and seeking my true identity outside this relationship. ... Breath ... I guess we have reason to be a bit overwhelmed.

Oy. So when we were at SIMCO (our missions orientation), they had us take a stress inventory. We were given a list of possible stressors in life all with a number value and asked to think about what we would experience our first three months on the field. The idea was to show us that when we totaled the list of the items we checked, we would be far above normal or even manageable levels of stress - getting us to think about healthy ways to handle that stress before we go. That said, Luke and I then filled out the inventory for the last three months of our life - and the total was way higher. This was two days after I was having the discussion with Luke about how good God is to us and how easy life seems to be. Apparently we have a pretty high stress tolerance.

That said, this morning was definitely a "bury your thoughts in ice cream" morning (not the healthiest coping mechanism, but hey, sometimes I don't realize all that's going on until after I have made those choices). Frustrated with myself and feeling like I wasted all sorts of time, I was kindly reminded on the phone by a good friend and mentor: "Tiffany, you've been through a lot. Don't beat yourself up."

So after a great de-stressing, de-programming bike ride, all I really want to do is curl up with a good book in comfy pjs (healthy coping!). But, off to work. And then work all day tomorrow. And then, we're escaping life for a few days to go way far north and enjoy God's good creation. Just wish we didn't have to drive 8 hours to get there.