Jesus, if you want to...

I had my first bout with anxiety today. Some know that my history is rampant with purposfully avoiding hospitals and nursing homes. They just give me the hee-bee-jee-bees. I'm not really sure why, maybe CPE will help me figure it out. Myers-Briggs says that I am a borderline E/I. For the most part I like to pretend I'm a big bad E who has no situation to fear, but today I really felt the I in me coming out. We went in our groups of 3 to our assigned wing of the nursing unit today. Never before have I been so excited to appear at a place during naptime. Only two residents were awake at the time, so the three of us paraded into their rooms like baptists looking for converts and introduced ourselves. The first woman was reading old yearbooks and really didn't want to be bothered.... gulp. The second lady was eating lunch and shouldn't have wanted to be bothered, but invited us in and had us all laughing within minutes. This was of course good for me, even though I for the most part was able to skirt the whole being pastoral thing for another day.

The "if you want to" part of the healing story jumped out to me today. I've kind of been saying that in the weeks leading up to this experience. "Jesus, if you want to you can make this process easy and relatively painless." If today is any indication, he has responded, "I want to."