(The Nationalist, January 2006)
Many people today feel under stress in one way or another. Coping with it is a topical issue, and you can do courses on it. In the Bible, there are examples of how people responded to it, sometimes well, sometimes not.
There’s a story of a man called Job, who said, ‘My life is only pressed service; my eyes will never again see joy’. He was not only stressed; he was depressed, and with good reason: his children had been killed in an accident, and thieves had stolen his cattle. To make matters worse, his wife had turned against him and blamed him for it all. Job didn’t cope well; he became depressed and wished he were dead.
Saint Paul seems to have been a workaholic, a man driven by a sense of responsibility. He spoke about being ‘the slave of everyone’, and ‘all things to everyone’. Things seemed to be getting on top of him.
Jesus is described in one Gospel passage as a man run off his feet responding to people’s needs. It says that, after speaking to people, he went straight to a house, and they told him about the illness of Simon’s mother-in-law straight-away. The whole town came crowding round the door. Although people did not understand him, they wanted to use him. They were always looking for something – food, healing, or help in one form or another. After a heavy dose of this pressure, Jesus got up long before dawn and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. But there was no rest then either. People went in search of him, and when they found him they said, ‘Everyone is looking for you’. There was no getting away from it.
They were all under stress in different ways, and they showed different ways of responding to it. Job was almost broken by it; Paul’s way was to put his head down and charge at the problems; Jesus tried to escape.
A philosopher once wrote, ‘What’s wrong with the world is that people are unable to sit in their room in silence for fifteen minutes a day’. The Bible says it, too, ‘Be still, and know that I am God’. It helps.
For those in a hurry: ‘Lord, that I may know myself! That I may know you!’ (Saint Augustine)