This is Panic 18 - "Talk about suffering here below"

Hello all, February is upon us and I was wracking my brain about something to write for the latest installment of TIP and then last Friday, I got ill. I hit the wall of tiredness and coupled with a bad back and just feeling rubbish I started to panic a bit. Now when panic sets in, I generally as a first point of call in my head go "God not now" and I realised it was time to tackle a particular issue.

I've got to admit that a part of me had been ducking this issue on here for a while because I didn't want the blog to come across as preachy and like I was saying that religion is the way to cure your panic attacks because it's more complicated than that. However this is a big part of my life and it makes sense to me to talk about how it affects me.

I am a Christian. Now I realise that for some people that word carries a lot of connotations and ideas so I will break it down further. I believe that Jesus Christ is God, that God came in human form, died and 3 days later rose from the dead.

Now this is not a big thing saying "convert! convert!" (though hey if you want to, great) nor is it going to be a massive philosophical discourse but it a big question that I get as a Christian is "how can you believe in an all loving god when there's so much suffering in the word?" and I want to explain it. If you want to get into the more philosophical side of things, drop me an email.

Now believe me, I wonder a lot why I've suffered from panic attacks for nearly 9 years. I, like you, have tried a bunch of different methods and yet I believe in a God who created the universe and can do ANYTHING and yet he won't snap his fingers and make me better.

From a Christian perspective, the world was created perfect and is now not. Whether you take Genesis as literal truth or not, you don't need a theology degree to accept the notion that the world and the people in it are flawed. From a Christian perspective that is how we attribute all the bad things in the world. For me it's the reason that allows me to be anxious so much and why anxiety even exists.

The big issue here is free will. Evil exists in Christian philosophy because of mankind's decision to either choose God or disobey him. Therefore bad things happen. I believe that because God allows us the choice to go towards him or away. I chose to go towards him.

That's the basic philosophy bit. Bad stuff happens because man has fallen away from God.

Why does God not click his fingers and make me well? The answer to that can go one of two ways.

One way to my thinking says that God uses our adversities to teach us lessons. He doesn't magic my anxiety away, nor does he exacerbate it but he uses thew situations that arise to teach me lessons about Him, His will for my life and myself. That is what I think in my more rational moments.

The other way is I have no idea. That sounds like the ultimate kop out but I can't comprehend everything God does. It's impossible, He created everything. That's how I am when I am feeling more irrational.

I realise that this has jumped from one idea to the other but it's hard to compress the entire subject into one blog post and this is a subject I wanted to talk about. It is a struggle for me to try and match these things up. I have this problem and I have a God who loves me. Does it match up at first sight? No, I'll admit that. Digging deeper sees me able to do it; I have a medical condition that affects me but it's not because God doesn't love me, it's because the world is flawed. God can use this flaw I have to improve me and hopefully when all the lessons are learned, He will take it away.

Amen to that.