You can just talk to God as you go about your day, asking Him to direct you in the choices you are making and to empower you for the jobs you need to get done. As you acknowledge that God is always with you, you will keep Him first in everything you set out to do, and He will show you a direct path that will lead you to peace. You will experience pleasure, knowing you are partnering with God in all you do.
Following the moment-by-moment leading of the Holy Spirit will cause you to enjoy every day of your life. The Spirit of God is creative; His mercies are new every morning, so if you follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit, He will keep your priorities straight. He will make sure your time with Him is right, and that your family time is right, and that you are fulfilling the work He has for you to do.
God will also energize you by grace to do whatever He leads you to do. If your priorities get out of order, you will labor in vain and tire quickly. In the next chapter we will look at how making healthy choices will help avoid stress, exhaustion, and upset so you can learn to enjoy your quiet times with God.
Peacekeeper #12
PROTECT YOUR HEALTH
N
o matter what people own in life or what their positions are, if their health is not good, they will not enjoy anything. Good health is one of the greatest treasures we have; it is a gift from God. The psalmist wrote, “Bless (affectionately, gratefully praise) the Lord, O my soul, and forget not [one of] all His benefits—Who forgives [every one of] all your iniquities, Who heals [each one of] all your diseases” (Psalm 103:2–3).
The apostle John wrote, “Beloved, I would that you prosper and be in health, even as I know your soul prospers” (see 3 John 1:2). We should do all we possibly can to protect our health, both physically and emotionally. It is sad to see people in our society regularly abuse their bodies and then wonder why they get sick.
I have discovered that it is much harder for me to remain peaceful under any kind of opposition if I also have the added stress of not feeling well. If I am really tired, it is more difficult for me to get along with people or display the fruit of the Spirit.
I have had long periods of time in my life of not feeling well, and I have heard the doctors say over and over, “You are under stress.” Their diagnosis always frustrated me because I did not know how to live any way other than under stress. I thought I had no choice except to do all the things I was doing, even though I often admitted, “I can’t do all this. It is too much.”
Stress-related illnesses are rampant. I asked Dr. Don Colbert, a nutrition expert whom I greatly respect, to share how stress affects our health and nerves. He wrote, “Approximately 75–90% of all visits to primary-care physicians are for stress-related disorders. Chronic stress has actually been linked to most of the leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis, and suicide.”
Dr. Colbert agrees that individuals must learn to protect themselves against stress, saying,
Few people realize that the fast-paced lives they are living, the increasing demands on their schedules, and the way that they cope or react to stress or stressful situations are all in their control. Yes, we all have a choice to continue this hectic schedule; we can choose to react by becoming more and more frustrated, or we can learn to limit the demands on our everyday lives and react in love rather than frustration.
The following excerpt from Dr. Colbert is a report he shared with me of how the Canadian physician Hans Selye accidentally discovered the effects of stress on the physical body.
Selye’s vision was not to discover the effects of stress but to discover the next new female sex hormone. He had made an extract from ovaries and injected the extract solution into rats. However, Selye was not very skillful with his injection techniques. He always dropped the rats and spent much of the morning chasing the rodents around the room, using a broom to get them out from behind a desk or a sink. At the end of a few months, Selye discovered that the rats had developed enlarged adrenal glands, shrunken immune tissues, and peptic ulcers.
Selye, however, thought this was due to the ovarian extract that he was injecting into the rats. So, he tested another group, and he injected them with only saline solution. Due to his poor coordination, however, he also dropped these rats, chased them around his lab, and also got the broom after them. At the end of the experiment, the control rats had also developed the enlarged adrenal glands, the shrunken immune tissues, and the peptic ulcers. Selye then figured out that the cause
was not what he was injecting,
but
the tremendous stress he was putting the rats under
while trying to inject them. He had literally stressed the little creatures out. Dr. Selye determined that when stress is maintained long enough, the body undergoes three distinct stages: (1) the alarm stage, (2) the resistance stage, and (3) the exhaustion stage.
The alarm stage is the fight-or-flight emergency system that God created in our bodies for survival. The brain sends a signal to the pituitary gland to release a hormone that activates the adrenal glands. Adrenaline then sends the body into high alert. The brain becomes focused, the eyesight sharpens, and muscles clench as the body prepares for fighting or fleeing. This amazing alarm system has enabled multitudes of people to survive vicious attacks from animals, auto accidents, and other traumas. The body’s hormonal system returns to normal when the perceived attack is over.
However, this alarm reaction is being activated hundreds of times a day in many Christians due to deadlines at work, financial pressures, arguments with a spouse or children, traffic jams, as well as all the common stresses of modern life. In other words, frustration, anger, guilt, grief, anxiety, fear, as well as most other emotions, will also set off this alarm system, which can then lead to a heart attack or stroke.
Dr. Selye’s second stage of stress is called the resistance stage. When someone is undergoing a chronic stress such as having a child on drugs or alcohol or in jail, long-standing marital problems, a chronic illness, long-term unemployment, or some other situation over which he feels he has lost control over an extended period of time, [this] generally leads to the resistance stage of stress. This is another emergency system that God has placed within us so that we may survive periods of famine, disease, and pestilence. During this stage, our cortisol and adrenaline levels become elevated. Cortisol is very similar to the medication
cortisone,
which doctors give to treat asthma, arthritis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as numerous other illnesses. However, release of cortisol can lead to elevation of blood sugar, which can eventually lead to diabetes and weight gain, especially in the abdominal area. Over time, it can result in bone loss, which can lead to osteopenia and osteoporosis. Elevated cortisol also leads to hypertension, memory loss, sleep deprivation, and a compromised immune system.
The resistance stage is similar to having the accelerator of your car stuck to the floorboard. Your system is all geared up and is unable to gear down, even at night. Individuals in this resistance stage generally have insomnia, or they wake up at two or three in the morning and find it very difficult to fall back to sleep. After patients have been living in the resistance stage for months or years, they will eventually enter into stage 3 of stress, which is the exhaustion stage.
People have entered the exhaustion stage when they feel burned-out. Examples of this stage are individuals with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, most autoimmune diseases including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, and usually cancer. In other words, these people have had the accelerator pressed to the floor for so long that eventually they run out of gas, and the powerful, robust bodies that God has given them, which He designed for health, begin to degenerate and die. The body is more prone to bacterial and viral infections, allergies, candida, environmental illness, inflammation of joints, and severe fatigue.
*
It is obvious from this report that stress destroys the body’s immune defense system. Once the immune system breaks down, it can be a difficult and lengthy process to restore it back to full health.
To restore the immune system, people have to do what they should have done to begin with: Get lots of good rest; eat good-quality food, not junk food with no nutritional value; maintain peaceful lifestyles; and live balanced lives, which include worship, work, rest, and play. And people need to exercise as their systems permit them.
But we shouldn’t wait until we are forced into doing the right thing. Let’s act voluntarily and keep our health. The symptoms of stress are real, and though we can take medicine to mask or alleviate them, the root cause of many illnesses that we have is simply a stressful lifestyle. Unless we deal with the lifestyle, we will always have a new symptom pop up in some new way. The world will not change, so we must.
Dr. Colbert instructs people who are suffering from stress to avoid overcommitment and learn to be satisfied in order to circumvent overspending. He writes,
The majority of our stress comes from the demands everyday life places on us and our choosing to walk the frustration-walk instead of the love-walk: by trying to enforce unenforceable rules. By simply walking the love-walk instead of the frustration-walk, one will be able to pull the roots of stress out of his or her life.
Stress depletes our bodies, our immune systems become weak, and sickness and depression can set in. Some stress is actually good for us; you might say it exercises various organs in the body. God designed our bodies to handle a certain amount of stress; it is only when we continually push ourselves beyond reasonable limits that we break down under the strain. It is when we get out of balance that we open a door for sickness in our lives. Excessive stress over a long period of time eventually causes our organs to just plain wear out.
Each time we say, “I am exhausted,” we should realize that we are exhausting something in our bodies also. We recover from normal stress through proper rest; however, we can cause irreversible damage when we don’t get needed rest.
We live in stressful times, but by following Jesus’ advice and casting our cares on Him, we can live stress-free in a stressful world. If we will exalt Jesus, lift Him up, and put Him first by following the leadership of His Spirit, we will not end up exhausted.
Is Jesus exalted, or are you exhausted? To exalt someone is to put him above other things, to make him first. To be exhausted is to be completely worn-out, having no energy and being susceptible to sickness.
There is a popular worship song entitled “He Is Exalted.” I was trying to sing this song once during a time when I was extremely tired, and I got my words mixed up and sang to the Lord, “You are exhausted.”
He stopped me and said, “No, Joyce, I am exalted. You are the one who is exhausted.”
Remember, God will always energize us to do
what He leads us
to do. It is only when we go beyond His will to follow our own will or other people’s that we are likely to get exhausted. Second Corinthians 2:14 says that God always “leads us in triumph.” It is not His will for us to live defeated, weak lives; He wants us to be more than conquerors. His will for us is strength, not weakness and sickness.
A
RE
Y
OU
S
UFFERING FROM
E
XHAUSTION
?
Are you excessively tired all the time, and even after sleeping, do you wake up feeling tired all over again? Do you go to doctors, but they cannot find anything wrong with you? You may be experiencing some of the symptoms of exhaustion, or what I call burnout. Long periods of overexertion and stress can cause constant fatigue, headaches, sleeplessness, gastrointestinal problems, tenseness, a feeling of being tied in knots, and an inability to relax.
Some other signals of burnout are crying, being easily angered, negativity, irritability, depression, cynicism (scornful, mocking of the virtues of others), and bitterness toward others’ blessings and even their good health.
Burnout causes us to be out of control, and when this happens, we are no longer producing good fruit in our daily lives. Burnout steals our joy, making peace impossible to find. When our bodies are not at peace, everything seems to be in turmoil.
God established the law of resting on the Sabbath to prevent burnout in our lives (see Mark 2:27). The law of the Sabbath simply says we can work six days, but by the seventh, we need to rest and spend time worshiping God. Even God rested after six days of work. He, of course, never gets tired but gave us this example so we would follow the pattern. In Exodus 23:10–12, we find that even the land had to rest after six years, and the Israelites were not to sow in it the seventh year. During this rest, everything recovered and prepared for future production.
Everything
rested on the Sabbath: people, servants, and domestic animals. These were days of complete relaxation for the mind, emotions, and body. In Leviticus 26, we see that much turmoil and trouble come due to ignoring God’s ordinances.
Today in America, almost every business is open seven days a week. Some of them are even open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I have heard that after the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and began to establish America, a drummer walked through the streets, signaling everyone to go to church on the Sabbath. After church, they rested the entire day. Sabbath-breakers were actually arrested!
People say we are free from the law of the Old Testament and that keeping the Sabbath was part of that old system. That’s good, because people who broke the Sabbath then were stoned. Thankfully, we are not to be legalistic about it, but we do need to honor the spirit of the Sabbath principle. Jesus said the Sabbath was designed for man, which simply implies that we must rest at least one out of seven days. When we make ourselves available 24/7, we are in danger of burnout.