Friday, December 2, 2011

I Have an Obsessive Thought Life

That statement is kinda twofold. It's both a confession and an honest acknowledgment and acceptance of who I am. While my obsessiveness is motivated by areas of insecurity, my obsessiveness also reveals something unique to me about God's character.

First, the confession. When I get excited, anxious, or really feel any strong emotion about something, that something will occupy my thought life almost unwaveringly for a long, long time. The stronger the emotion, the longer it stays, especially if it elicits any form of anxiety. Sometimes, though increasingly more often, my obsessive thoughts are an honest enjoyment of remembering what happened and the desire to hold on to it because it was good. More frequently though, my obsessive thoughts are a product of trying to figure things out, again particularly if the situation makes me feel anxious. There's a lie that's been implanted that if I can somehow understand everything about a specific situation, I will be able to figure out what's going to happen next. If I know what will happen next, I can prepare myself to handle it, especially if it will result in more anxiety. In order to protect myself, I obsess about a situation in order to make safe and wise decisions based on what will happen next. This (obviously) stems from trust issues and manifests itself as control issues. So yes, confessing to obsessive thoughts motivated by a fear that I'm gonna get hurt.

All that being said, I don't think my obsessive thoughts are always a bad thing. Sometimes, I will find myself thinking about something not in an effort to prepare myself for something bad to happen, but out of an honest enjoyment of thinking about it. Think about it, when you have a "God-moment" and you feel like you've really experienced something about Him, don't you find yourself thinking about only that purely because you've enjoyed that experience...at least for a little while? I think this motivation of obsessive thoughts, especially when those thoughts are of things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy (Philippians 4:8) is completely okay!

I know not everyone has an obsessive thought-life and some people have trouble holding a single thought for more than a few minutes, but I'm realizing that my obsessiveness reveals a bit of God's character. God is obsessed with me, and with you! He loves us individually so much that Psalm 139:17-18 describes it like this: "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand." And I thought that I thought about individual people too much!! I'm not justifying my obsessiveness motivated by insecurity, but if my unhealthy obsessive thoughts don't even come close to that many thoughts....HOLY CRAP!!! God's thoughts of me are motivated by His love for me, AND He has so many more of them than I do! Since I try to figure out my life by thinking about things over and over...and over and over...and God thinks about me more than I think about those individual situations, He definitely has everything figured out!!! To kinda mold it into my understanding, I imagine God sitting on His throne remembering things I've done in the past, thinking about things I'll do in the future, thinking about how pleased He is with me right now, excited about the ways He's going to reveal Himself to me in hours, days, weeks, months, and years ahead, and enjoying the specific ways He fashioned me!!!!  These thoughts "OUTNUMBER THE GRAINS OF SAND!!" I don't even think about myself THAT much and at least most of my obsessive thoughts are about myself and how different things are going to affect me and have affected me in the past.

In conclusion (haha), if God thinks about me more than I do, He really knows what He's doing AND it really is for the very best. I can trust Him completely!!

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