Was struggling all week with one hell of a case of anxiety, brought about in a good cause. If I may muddle up some metaphors, I was trying to go back and untangle an old and very nasty knot in my life, one that had done great harm to me and others and in which I'd been intricately entangled. Going back to that knot (muddled metaphors coming!) took me through a personal landscape littered with spent ammunition, shellholes, and abandoned rusting ordnance. A very scary place for me. It has not been easy, and it will not be easy for quite a while yet. I'm sure this is the right thing to do--but I can't help being tense and edgy, short with my kids, and subject to fits of heart-banging, nervous starts, and sudden mini-explosions like corn popping.

So, sitting at the computer, unable even to play a stupid game of gin rummy and getting all wired up about that as well, I resolved to give over my anxiety to God: here, God, you take it. I understand that for some people, this decision immediately results in a great flood of peace and well-being. Some people are clearly better at this handing-over technique than I am--or maybe it's because I am such a slob at this religion business, can't even keep my Lent quarters-card up to date... I handed my anxiety over, quite sincerely, several times, without the handover making any appreciable difference. Some things are just beyond me sometimes.

I remembered, then, a conversation I had about four-five years ago with a dear friend, a rotund half-Hungarian Presbyterian minister named George, who is still one of my saints-on-earth people. We'd been talking about another problem that I'd been trying to hand over to God, without success, and George said:

"You try to hand this cross you're carrying over to God. You try to put it down. But doesn't want to be put down. This cross wants you to keep on carrying it, even though you shouldn't. Just think of that cross you're trying to put down, and see it as hopping down the road after you. And keep hold of a rolled-up newspaper, in your mind. That cross is going to keep on hopping after you, jumping up, demanding to be carried. When it does that, you turn around and hit it with the newspaper, like hitting a badly-behaved puppy across the snout to make it stop jumping up. And tell it that it belongs to God, and you aren't God."

My hopping cross of anxiety wanted to cling to me, to hang on tight; it didn't want to go to God, because God would put it to death and who likes dying? So much of our sinfulness--the stuff St. Paul means when he says "I do things that I don't want to do, and I don't know why"--is like this. It's as though it (whatever it is!) takes on a life of its own, a life that possesses our own lives in ways we don't like but seem helpless to do anything about. Our giving it to God will put it to death, and it clings the harder, not wanting to die.

Of course, the hardest thing is then to shift and see that my anxiety really is part of *me*, not an outside thing at all--it's a piece of my own soul hopping after me, and that's what I have to find some way of giving over to God. There's some comfort in two things: first, that God knows I can't do it all today, and second, that God knows where it's coming from and why I'm having such trouble with it.

Could be that I'm not able to give this particular hopping cross up now because I have some learning to do; if so, I must do my best to carry the thing as patiently as I can and figure out what it is that I'm supposed to be doing in my soul-work. Could be that something needs to change--some circumstance I don't know about, some other portion of my soul--before I can be at peace again.

I have to trust that God knows exactly what God's doing, even if I don't, that God will look after me and my anxiety, and that God will relieve me of the latter in God's good time. In the meantime, sometimes all a person can do is just to keep putting one foot ahead of the other for a while, and maybe that's what God wants me to do about this one, for now.

But I still lost the gin game.