Yesterday I had to go to the dentist.\u00a0 That’s not something I enjoy.\u00a0 In fact, it’s something I dread.\u00a0 I have TMJ problems, so holding my mouth open for a cleaning is a challenge and quite painful.\u00a0 I usually have a massive headache afterwards.\u00a0 Well, yesterday I already had that headache before I even went, so I was especially anxious.\u00a0 I imagined horrible pain for the rest of the day.\u00a0 As I sat in the waiting room, I could feel my heartbeat getting faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the book I was reading, the main character, Mack, was having a conversation with Jesus.\u00a0 Jesus asked him, “Where do you spend most of your time in your mind, in your imagination, in\u00a0the\u00a0present, in the past, or in the future?”\u00a0 I recognized immediately that I mostly live in the future, looking forward to and planning for what’s next.\u00a0 I believe this is why I struggle with anxiety a majority of the time.\u00a0 Later in the conversation, Jesus said,\u00a0“Mack,\u00a0do you realize that your imagination of the future, which is almost always dictated by fear of some kind, rarely, if ever, pictures me there with you?”\u00a0 That got me thinking about the “future” that I was currently anxious about.\u00a0 I was thinking all about the inevitable\u00a0pain while sitting in the dentist chair and the remainder of the evening, not at all about Jesus being with me.\u00a0 I thought to myself, “I don’t have to be all anxious about what’s going to happen over the next several hours because Jesus is going to be with me.\u00a0 I can just sit here and read this book and enjoy Jesus being with me\u00a0NOW as I read.”\u00a0 With that change of mindset, the anxiety began to dissipate.\u00a0 WOW!\u00a0 God is GREAT!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I had to go to the dentist.\u00a0 That’s not something I enjoy.\u00a0 In fact, it’s something I dread.\u00a0 I have TMJ problems, so holding my mouth open for a cleaning is a challenge and quite painful.\u00a0 I usually have a massive headache afterwards.\u00a0 Well, yesterday I already had that headache before I even went, so I was especially anxious.\u00a0 I imagined horrible pain for the rest of the day.\u00a0 As I sat in the waiting room, I could feel my heartbeat getting faster.\u00a0 In the book I was reading, the main character, Mack, was having a conversation with Jesus.\u00a0 Jesus asked him, “Where do you spend most of your time in your mind, in your imagination, in\u00a0the\u00a0present, in the past, or in the future?”\u00a0 I recognized immediately that I mostly live in the future, looking forward to and planning for what’s next.\u00a0 I believe this is why I struggle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}