DO YOU TRUST ME?Would you mind if I shared some recent learnings on a personal level? So I had surgery on my rotator cuff, and am now assigned to use that arm for NOTHING for a while, keeping it in a sling. At the same time, I began physical therapy, but a really odd one. It is a physical therapy in which my task is: DO NOTHING! I lie down, and the therapist takes my arm, and I am supposed to do absolutely nothing with it while he manipulates up and down and in and out and around and around. Every once in a while (or maybe more), it hurts, I wince, and he pauses. And then he says: “It hurts because YOU are trying to help me. You are NOT supposed to be using your muscles, you need to relax them, let them go limp, and let me do the work. You have to trust me.” So I relax, and trust him….until it goes way out and I wince again, and he repeats the mantra!
Shortly after my first bout of this, I visited with a friend who had the same surgery some time ago, and she shared with me how she had learned during her therapy that, over time, the shoulder pain had caused her to kind of scrunch her shoulders to avoid the pain, which resulting in tensing up the muscles. In the therapy then, it became a major task to retrain the brain to relax instead. When she said that after I had seen the physical therapist, the combination of the two clicked for me. All of a sudden, I noticed how often I was tensing my shoulder and neck muscles on a daily basis, instead of just letting the arm relax and be held by the sling. So I have started really trying to pay attention, and it has taken an incredible amount of concentration to tell my arm and shoulder to relax! It’s crazy!!
When I went in for my second session, I had made significant strides in being able to relax and trust his movements with my arm. But there were times I still winced. Times he had to stop. Times he had to remind me: “Breathe. Relax. Trust me.”
I think God is probably telling me the same thing. And maybe he wants to tell you the same thing, too. There are so many things that demand so much attention, so many questions I have about relationships and the future and understanding God’s will for me in THIS moment and what plans need to be made and all the things I need to get done and what things need to be let go of and…, and…, and…, and…
It’s a lot like that song by Johnny Diaz, “Just Breathe,” which you can hear on YouTube if you don’t know it. Sometimes I think the most important thing we can hear from God…or at least that I need to hear from God…is the same thing my physical therapist is saying: Relax. Breathe. Trust me.
What are the hard things you are facing right now? What are the uncertainties that are nagging at you? What are the questions you stress over? What are the fears that have you in knots? What are the problems bigger than you can solve? What are the ways you feel that everything is spinning out of control? Is God trying to get you to realize you just need to trust Him? That you need to relax, trust him and just breathe? That you need to realize that he does know what he is doing, and he has not left the throne, and you are the apple of his eye (Psalm 17:8)?
Relax. Breath. Trust. I will give it a whirl again tomorrow morning. How about you?