Got stress?

 It’s nothing that a good yoga session can’t fix. A couple of stretching positions and some focused breathing can dissolve your troubles in a half hour. Between soccer practice, taxes, car repairs, bizarre co-workers, and bad hair days, stress levels are soaring in my California community. I guess a lotus position makes perfect sense.

Day spas are booming, too. A half-day’s program, with themes like “Utopia” and “Tiny Bubbles at Waikiki” sets you back about three hundred bucks. You need the first three hours to ameliorate the stress you incur with the cost of the treatment, leaving that last hour, baby, for a sweet fix. Sir Thomas More and Don Ho would be proud to be associated with such fine programs.

In my neighborhood, everyone likes the word stress. It’s blamed for male pattern baldness, bad marriages, lousy karma, and the common cold. Who knew? If I had known stress was such a killer, I would’ve signed up for yoga classes long ago and saved myself a lot of trouble.

God used to use suffering to get our attention, but he’s got less and less to work with these days. In the old days, priests used Paul’s thorn in the flesh and the afflictions of Job for their homilies on adversity. Amy Carmichael’s decades-long ministry to young Indian prostitutes left her bedridden, and Joy Davidson Lewis found her conversion from atheism to Christianity rewarded with early cancer. If only they had signed up with Tawny at the Aveda salon for a killer facial, maybe things would’ve worked out differently.

Most of the things we call stress are really self-imposed busyness that masquerades as authentic suffering. My husband’s seminary professor recently gave a surprising answer to the question “What’s America’s biggest sin?” His response? Busyness. Why not choose materialism or vanity or sexual addiction or pride? Perhaps because he recognizes that a crowded life purposefully obscures God from view. All these activities can camouflage suffering, and in its place? Stress—a cheap substitute.

Suffering, with its festering wounds, forces us to meet with God on his terms. Stress, on the other hand, is easily negotiated with escapist television or a trip to the mall. Suffering creates an environment in which we are faced with questions of sovereignty. Stress asks far less penetrating questions, such as How can I prioritize my time better? or Which night is best for Bible study? Real suffering leads us to wrestle with God. Stress leads us to a martini.

Don’t mistake my thinking here. I’m not calling for widespread boycotts of pleasure in order to borrow the keys to the kingdom. That would be old school asceticism. Nor do I mean to discredit modern life as though somehow the old timers were holier than we are with their Dickensian-style misfortunes. But we would be wise to read John Donne’s words who says “No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction.”  David, who would be the first candidate for Paxil if he lived in my neighborhood today, had no choice but to confront his great sorrow in the Psalms by saying, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word . . . It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.”

I don’t long for suffering to strike. I’ve felt its lashes before. But I also know that when it does, I will grapple with God in ways that I might not if I were merely tired, or overworked, or just plain ornery. I might have to take one of Donne’s beautiful sentences and make it my motto: “Affliction is a treasure and scarce any man hath enough of it.”

I don’t expect to find that posted at my neighborhood day spa anytime soon.