Do You Find Safety in Structure?
I sat here ready to write and chaos hit me. It was a small punch but one that hit hard. I looked at the pop up Facebook comment in the lower right hand corner of my computer screen and saw my mother’s name listed as celebrating her birthday today. My Mom died several years ago. Her birthday had momentarily slipped my mind, but suddenly grief slammed me like a sledge hammer.
Chaos is like that. Whether in the smaller daily interruptions of life or trauma of natural disasters or pandemics, it assaults… leaving no one untouched. And resistance is our first response. Our natural response is to flee…to escape the chaos.
We have created coping methods to deal with chaos since childhood… mechanisms that we may think serve us well in the short-term but in the long-term prove destructive. Psychologists say there are two prominent forms of chaos resistance that we all seem to develop. One is structure and the other blindness.
John’s life is an example of someone who uses structure and control to survive.
John was in the army as a young man. Following that experience, for the rest of his life, when he hung up his clothes in the closet, he made sure there was a 2 finger distance between each and every hanger. He woke up promptly at 5:15 am every morning, showered and dressed, ate breakfast at 6:30 am and was out the door and off to work by 7 am. He returned home at exactly 5:30 pm and ate dinner at 6pm without fail…or he became angry and out of sorts. He regimented his life to protect himself from the chaos that invariably erupted…his method of chaos resistance was structure. John was my father.
You notice he used rigid, exacting structure to resist chaos… his response to the inherent fear. Chaos hints at the unknown and uncertainty of life…those things over which we have no control. We are threatened by anything we can’t predict.
In my book, “Dancing in the Storm: Successfully Embracing Change” I write, “And the truth really is that all of life’s moments are unknown. Everything is uncertain, except God, of course. And that’s the most reassuring exception of all. A great peace comes in knowing that there is a God and that He IS the God greater than the chaos. And He is the God who does not change. James tells is in the Bible, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
If structure is your method for coping with chaos, though it makes you feel safe, it is false security and a dangerous support.
It is a dependence on your ability to control life rather than trusting God with difficult situations. Maybe it has worked for a while…even a long while…but at some point you’re going to hit the proverbial “brick wall” and need to turn to God instead of yourself or others.
It may feel scary, but God can be trusted. You can depend on Him. He will come through for you, even if it’s not in the way you imagine. Jesus doesn’t promise life will be easy. He does promise He will be with you.
Before He physically left this earth His final words were: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
To find out what coping mechanism you use to deal with life’s chaos, you can take the “Chaos Management Quiz” or purchase Linda’s book found on our website, www.yourrefreshedlife.com. For more information, listen to our podcasts on Podbean, iTunes, Spotify or Pandora. Join us in a Biblical conversation, “Refreshing Reflections” about chaos on our YouTube Channel “Your Refreshed Life”. We’d love for you to email us with your thoughts or questions at linda@yourrefreshedlife.com.
