Paralysis by analysis

By John Stallings

A dense fog that covers a seven-city- block area one-hundred feet deep is composed of less than one glass of water divided into sixty thousand million drops. Not much is there but it can cripple an entire city.

This is emblematic of worry & how something so vague & foggy can become so confusing to the mind.

I heard about a very good man who experienced a nervous breakdown. This man would work all day, come home & walk straight to his bedroom, then sit for hours & cry. Obviously he wasn’t available spiritually, physically or in any way to his wife & family. When has wife would come in to try to talk to him he’d express to her his worry about whether their son who had been killed was saved, & shed tears over the prospects of his being in hell.

He’d agonize & wonder if his mother & father made it to heaven or were they burning in hell. I think you’d probably agree that this sort of thing is abnormal, but in truth this is what can happen to anyone if we allow anxiety, fear & worry to crawl into the saddle & dig their spurs into our side. Worry & fear can turn us into obsessive /compulsive thinkers suffering from paralysis by analysis.

We weren’t created with the capacity to worry all the time & be mentally & spiritually well. Fear isn’t native to us, faith is. We just live better with confidence & faith than we do with fear & worry. I heard an eminent doctor say recently, “We don’t know why people who worry & fret die earlier than those who maintain good cheer, but they do.”

Think about that. That isn’t a snake oil salesman trying to hype us up, but a medical man who lives in the trenches with the issues of life & death 24/7/365. This is why Paul wrote in Philippians 4:6-7,

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer & thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts & your mind through Christ Jesus.

A worry- wart will spend as much as 30% of their time just worrying. Contrary to what some people think, worry is actually a form of action. It’s endless- “Paralysis by Analysis.” Worry is incessant mental rehearsal convincing a person they’re moving toward a solution. Energy is spent uselessly & vitality is drained.

A good way of describing worry is its like shoveling smoke. Energy is used up but nothing of value is accomplished. It’s like spending time wishing skunks didn’t stink. But a person can’t just tell themselves to quit worrying. I’ve had the experiencing of trying to quit worrying on my own & it’s much like telling yourself not to think about elephants. Every time I’ve tried that a whole group of elephants showed up wearing pink sunglasses. We must exchange our thoughts for God’s thoughts & fill our minds with God’s Word.

Recently several of our greatest television preachers & pastors have gone to heaven. None of them were as my grandmother used to say, “Dead with old age.” They were getting a little older but I would have expected them to live far longer than they did. Now I know that I’m not God & it isn’t my business to second guess their deaths, but I can’t help but wonder if they passed too soon.

Psalm 116:15 says, Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.

I can’t tell you how many funerals I‘ve preached using this verse as a comfort to the families, that “God was standing at the portico of glory, beckoning for his child to finally be home with Him.” One day a minister friend of mine told me, “John, did you know that word precious actually means costly?” Well, that put it all in a different light. Now we see God presented with the high cost of losing great & effective people in His kingdom.

I’ve heard people talk about why God took their loved one, & they’ll say, “Well, you know heaven must be lonely & they needed another flower to bloom in God’s bouquet. I know God must have needed another tenor singer in heavens choir.” Dear friend, if there’s any place in the universe that’s not lonely its heaven.

Let’s go back to the ministers who’ve died lately & apply something my dad used to believe & speak of often. He studied the lives of all the famous preachers of the last one-hundred years. D.L Moody, the famous evangelist died at age 62. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great London pastor who was called “the prince of preachers” died at 58. The last year or two of Spurgeon’s life he was so sickly he spent most of his time in the South of France & mailed his sermons back to be read in his church.

My dad’s theory & I think he was right, was that stress brought on by too much popularity killed these men. They were in such world- wide demand that they abused their bodies traveling too much & working too hard. Also these men knew little about how diet & exercise affect the body so they spent most of their lives sitting & studying, hence many of them died with what doctors used to call, “Fatty heart deterioration.” One thing for sure, our bodies can’t tell the difference if we’re stressing out over some silly little things or if we’re being crushed by the weight of hurting humanity. Helping people is a noble cause but if we let people’s problems, even their spiritual problems get inside us; it can prove deadly.

There are certain natural laws of good mental & physical health we can’t break & do well, just as we couldn’t jump off a bridge, on our way to church & expect the law of gravity to be suspended for us.

A few years ago I lost one of my best preacher friends & we were about the same age. I knew him from a boy I always considered him to be in much better physical shape than I ever was. He was never a smidgen overweight through all the years I knew him. On a Sunday evening he was getting ready to go to church & had a heart attack & was dead before the paramedics could get him to the hospital. I can’t prove this is true but I’ve always believed that stress killed him. He was super-conscientious, a perfectionist, & very “military” in his thinking.

Let’s look at some things that cause anxiety & also a few ways to fight it.

1. A need to control can cause anxiety.

This quality can morph into a malignant motivation if not watched. Sometimes we can get over- inflated ideas of our own importance & forget the world will go on quite nicely when we’re gone. This thought helps us stay in touch with reality.

2. Deal with facts not hobgoblins.

A very sharp, intelligent person can think of more things to worry about before he/she put their feet in the floor in the morning that a “duller-knife” can conjure up in a week. But statistics say the person with the not-so-high IQ may well be more successful & will probably live longer.

Philippians 4:8-9 says,---Finally brethren, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of a good report, if there be any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy-meditate on these things. The things which you learned & received & heard & saw in me, these do, & the God of peace will be with you.

3. Humble yourself and pray.

1 Peter 5:6-7 says,--Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him for he cares for you.

Pride turned angels into devils. We need to let God search us & see what is inside us. Pride will install itself in our hearts & cause us to be self-absorbed & unable to see our lives in proper perspective. When we become self-absorbed, we’ll see our problems in a warped light.

Cain told God when he was approached about killing Able that he feared “everyone was going to kill him.” Of course this sprang from his guilt, because how could everyone kill him? A person can only be killed once the last time I checked. This was paranoia in Cain, aggravated by his pride. The devil will try to make us think “everyone” is against us, when it just isn’t true.

A young man went to his dad & told him he felt everyone hated him. The father answered him by saying, “Son, don’t say that, everyone hasn’t met you yet.”

Other people have more to do than to go around thinking how to hurt & defeat us, don’t you think? As long as we think everyone’s against us, we’ll continue to experience Paralysis by Analysis.

4. Release all your worries to God & rest in Him.

1 Peter 5:10 says, “But may the God of all grace who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little while establish, strengthen & settle you.”

When I was seven or eight I remember asking my mother one day, “Mom am I saved?” Her answer stills reverberates in my mind. She answered, “Son, nobody can answer that question but you.” I had said the sinners prayer & been baptized but I still had that haunting question. What struck home with me was that it was actually my decision & no one but me could make it. My eternal destiny was in my own hands. Because I was so young, I didn’t agonize over the dilemma, I just made a decision that day that I’d follow Christ until the day He comes or calls me home.

In 1 Kings 18:21 Elijah asked the people on Mount Carmel to make a decision. He told them if they wanted to serve Baal to go on & serve him, or if they decided to go with God, they should make a decision & stop halting between two opinions. He was saying in essence, stop sitting on the fence.

James said…For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, driven with the wind & tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. James 1: 6-8.

There are many landmines in the path of the believer not the least of which is procrastination. What decision do you need to make today? Will you make it & get on with your life or will you succumb to,

Paralysis by analysis?

John