Word Pictures

I am a visual person. Sometimes it takes a picture for me to understand a concept, or to explain something to others like my complex feelings. Last year during counseling, my counselor helped me to identify a concept through a word picture and it has made a huge difference in being able to understand how my emotions take over, explain it to others, and prevent it from happening sometimes. Many of you have read my explanation of my sniper: the negative thoughts and feelings that unexpectedly arise and take me down. Here is a picture of that sniper. So far lately even with all the different things going on in my life, the sniper has been unsuccessful at taking me down. I am getting better at remembering my armor and those close to me are pretty good at helping me out when I forget.

I also struggle with anxiety. I use this word picture below of quicksand to explain how I feel when my anxiety takes over. It is as if I am the woman in the picture. My head is above the sand and I can clearly see the landmarks around me. But I have sunken down so far that I can't reach anything to help pull me up. I feel trapped and paralyzed by my circumstances, even if they are little things. I start to panic because I am afraid of suffocating and being completely buried.

The other picture for my anxiety is like this wreckage. Circumstances in my life have come in and blown things up, and everything that I need to do and everything that I want to do are all tangled in one massive heap and I am not sure where to begin to sort through them, to start picking up the pieces. This type of anxiety is different than my quicksand anxiety. In this type, I am able to move around, but I feel like I am not making any progess - the wreckage around me is overwhelming.

This summer has been an interesting journey for me. As I have shared before, I am facing death and life - sorrow and joy. Lately, due to the tiredness of my physical body, I have been kind of checked out emotionally. But before that, God had given me a new word picture of how I was feeling. It is expressed below by the picture of the stormy beach with the sun coming through the clouds. The storm represents the stress and the sadness present in my life. I am on a beach, where the sound of the waves can be overwhelming and scary one minute or calming and restful the next. But the sun, the glorious sun, is coming up. This represents the HOPE that God has given me this summer. Hope for the future in the upcoming arrival of my baby girl, and hope for the present in the time I've had with my dad and the reflections of the blessings that God has given us. And of course, the biggest type of HOPE you can have, the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.

I love this picture. This picture symbolizes life to me now. There will always be the storms since we live in a fallen world. But God always gives us hope - we just sometimes have to look for it amidst the clouds. There are always countless blessings to be enjoyed, like sand between my toes and the rhythm of the waves, regardless of the severity of the storm. God is always there with us.