Even with as creative as I am, I still have a very strong Left Brain side. If you didn’t know, I have diagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which is a mental anxiety disorder where someone has repeated unwanted thoughts or feelings that consume them (obsessions) & make them resort to unhealthy behaviors (compulsions) to get rid of the obsessive thoughts (Psychology Today). Because of that, one of my first responses to any situation or question is to immediately try to rationalize it or explain it. Can you imagine how difficult that must be sometimes with the way God works? We can’t explain or rationalize His decisions & plans! That’s why they call it faith, right? Yet I still find myself asking God repeatedly why? Why things haven’t worked out in my life the way I planned. Why certain things are more difficult for me than for someone else. Why He “lets” such horrifying things go on in our world that I see on the news. Why?
I’ve been waist-deep in the book of Ecclesiastes lately & I stumbled upon Ecclesiastes 11:3-5:
“If clouds are full of water, they pour rain on the earth. Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there it will lie. Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap. As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things”(NIV).
When I read that passage, I felt a sense of calm wash over me. With OCD, these waves of calm are often short-lived, lasting only long enough for the bully in my brain to scare me with the next fear or crisis. But in those moments of peace, you feel some relief. And that’s something.
The root of the passage is that we simply can’t explain away everything that God is doing. We can’t point to a specific explanation for why things happen the way they do. It’s right there in black & white for us on the pages of His Word: if we spend all of our time trying to decode God’s will, we won’t ever get anything done & we will have spent our lives struggling to understand something unexplainable. Working hard & trusting Him is all we can do. There’s something about seeing it written in the “Owner’s Manual” of my life that gives me permission to let the compulsion to rationalize things rest & just trust.
During much of my journey with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder I’ve had one particular scripture alongside me: Exodus 14:14. It soothes me. It gives me those moments of calm when I’m spinning out. I know now that Ecclesiastes 11:3-5 & Exodus 14:14 are going to be spectacular teammates.
<3 Elaine
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Love this passage, Elaine! Thank you for being so honest with your illness. I suffer from anxiety, too though not from OCD and I can not imagine how difficult that is. My anxiety takes a physical form in migraines and tummy troubles even when my heart and soul are at peace. I imagine that may be the same type of frustration you deal with. We know God is sovereign but could somebody convince our subconscious of it? I pray for the Holy Spirit to invade our subconscious minds now and bring us lasting peace. I hope you will pray that with me! Be blessed!
Thank you for sharing! I have OCD as well and its a struggle for me too. I ask why 1,000,000 times a day and try to seek out explanations for everything and assume that there *has* to be a connection between each and every little thing and my mind is consumed by those thoughts. You made me chuckle when you called your OCD a bully, because my therapist says that living with OCD is like living with a terrorist or hostage-holder in your head 24/7 and its so accurate.
Thank you for sharing your experience and this verse as well as the one in Exodus. One verse that comforts my OCD-fueled anxiety is 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10 where Paul talks about asking the Lord to remove the thorn from him and God replies “my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” To me its God says my grace is enough, period. With OCD I spend so much mental and physical energy avoiding things because I think something bad is going to happen and I think I can control the outcome, but these verses remind me that God is going to take care of it.
xoxo
jenn.
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