God is Bigger than the Boogieman

 I watched a LOT of Veggietales growing up. I still sing the hairbrush song when things go missing, I know that everyone needs a waterbuffalo, and I will still lament that I've never been to Boston in the fall. (Apologies if these songs are stuck in your head now too!)

I've been singing "God is Bigger than the Boogieman" a lot to myself lately. Partially because it reminds me God is also bigger than Godzilla, and I've been contemplating finally watching my first ever Godzilla movie on the advice of a friend who knows more about Godzilla than just about anyone else I've met. But if I had to be truthful (and I've done Ruhi 1, I know that "truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues"!), it's also partially because I am being chased by the biggest anxiety dinosaurs right now.

It's not even that anything's wrong, per se - I've finally gotten to find out what living with my husband full time is like (IT IS AMAZING. Like even boring adulting like laundry is great.) and it's summer and work isn't too awful and I have an awesome Baha'i community I belong in and I have friends who I get to spend lots of time with as the world allows.

But that's the frustrating thing - like the anxiety dinosaur points out, none of this is logical. It's my brain being a tricksy tricksy meatpile. So what can help me feel better? 

Abdu'l-Baha points out in his Paris Talks that "[t]he mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness. Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him." Basically, all this fear stuff is teaching me to let go. It's not easy! When my brain starts going in mad circles, remembering I am just a small sapling trying to reach the sky feels impossible. I feel like I can dig my roots in deep and stretch my branches as far as they'll go, but it still feels like I can't possibly be enough, do enough, feel enough, detach enough. I am too small, and the world feels too big. And I know that the Bab reminds me that God "maketh victorious whomsoever He pleaseth, through the potency of His behest" (and there's a REALLY good song version of that by Badasht, here, that I love singing), but sometimes even that feels hard for me to grasp, because I feel like I am too small to even be worth the notice.

Luckily, once again, I turn to the stuff I've been learning in the Ruhi Institute courses (which are AMAZING and I love them. Seriously. Even if you're not Baha'i, I bet you'd be able to learn some cool stuff out of some of this) and it's got an answer for me from the Writings about how it's perfectly fine, because God's got my back. "Take thou thy portion of the ocean of His grace, and deprive not thyself of the things that lie hidden in its depths. Be thou of them that have partaken of its treasure. A dewdrop out of this ocean would, if shed upon all that are in the heavens and on the earth, suffice to enrich them with the bounty of God" (Arising to Serve, page 8) I love this passage for two reasons - it reminds me that I am SUPPOSED to reach out for God's grace, that I am not supposed to deprive myself of it, and also that His grace is SO big and SO much and SO powerful, that I need just the teeny tiniest bit to be able to do great things. 

So even if I am scared, even if I don't think I know what I'm doing, even if all I can hear is the roaring of the anxiety dinosaur, I can still rest assured that I'm not alone, that God's there, helping me grow and be strong and be the best tree in the garden that I possibly can, full of delicious fruit that I can share with everyone. And for me, that's enough. 

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