Compassion
Wednesday, January 17th, 2007Recently I have noticed that I really get emotionally involved in my loved ones’ lives and situations. Sometimes it’s to the point where I’m the one losing all the sleep, and I’m the one holding on to old hurts even when everyone else has moved on…and sometimes, I’m only peripherally, if at all involved in the situation.
I know this is an integral part of my personality. I care deeply, and I value friendship and love above most other things. When I’m emotionally unhealthy, this spawns a deep need to please other people, often to the detriment of myself. This need clouds my judgment and often I can end up making things worse for everyone.
The bottom line is, when I see someone hurting, I want to fix it, especially if it’s someone I love. And I can’t always do that, so instead I just get all twisted up inside about the situation.
I was talking about this trait last night, and wishing out loud that I could just flip a switch to turn the anxiety off. But my husband reminded me that the same switch is connected to compassion, and once off, it’s really hard to turn it back on. I guess I’d rather keep it all on than turn it all off, but there’s got to be some middle ground in there, where I can keep the compassion but let God handle the anxiety.
Really, I’m not the one holding all things together - God is. It’s my responsibility to make known my requests to God through prayer and petition and trust Him to work it out.
Man, I am such a control freak.