How Dedicated Christians Handle Anxiety

Well, it’s Friday and my Thursday was a carbon copy of my Wednesday.

Ah, the romance and excitement of a writer’s life.

I enjoyed the thrilling adventure of sitting 12 hours at my desk searching for punctuation mistakes in the Strangers ms. Know how when you’ve been out in a row boat all day and come home at night but the boat is still rocking even though you’re not in it? Well, I close my eyes and still see a computer screen floating before me.

However, the last remaining task with this book is formatting the index and I’ll be all set to send it off to the printer for proof pages — which I am confident will not reveal one single mistake this time. HA!

Also, today Ginny should find out if she’s among the 22 people being laid off at her office. We probably should feel more anxious about this.

I can’t tell if we are in a state of holy resignation to accept the will of God in the matter, or if we are in a state of stunned denial — but the end result for us is pretty much the same: We just don’t give a damn what happens.

You know, there’s just so much crap, even tragedy, you can take before going into system overload and shutting down. At that point you just go into familiar routine ignoring the irritants around you; like during the Great Fire of Jacksonville in 1901, there was a lady who escaped carrying an empty canary cage, and a man who rescued a bundle of old newspapers from his burning home.

I can’t say that Ginny and I are in that state of shock but there may be a few symptoms… For instance:

Nothing much on tv so we have been enjoying some black and white 1950s science fiction vcrs. These movies didn’t make B Grade when they first came out and the years have not improved them a bit. Yet we have enjoyed them thoroughly even with the tin pie plate flying saucers. This week we’ve watched such thrillers as Teenagers From Outer Space, The Amazing Transparent Man, Bloodtide, The Brain Machine, and Hercules Against The Moon Men — and no, we don’t own these, we check them out of the public library. These things were cheesy when I saw them in theatres as a kid, but they are just our speed at the moment.

I suppose if we were a more pious couple we’d fast and pray about our situation, but to tell the truth, tonight we intend to watch Hercules And The Captive Women — with popcorn.