Paranoia Strikes Deep...

I think of myself as a person who is really stable, strong, rooted in my faith, and all in all, not usually that paranoid. However, when stuff comes up in the news that freaks me out, all that stuff I just said disappears and I become this little 5 year old who's freaked out by EVERYTHING!

This happened today. I came back from my lunch break and saw my co-worker looking at something strange on Foxnews.com. I inquired as to what she was looking at it, to which she promptly covered the screen with her hands and said, "nothing that you want to know about." Which of course, brought about the same reaction as when someone tells you not to look at the man peeing on the side of the road as you drive by. I had to look, I had to see and I had to know what she was looking at. After much insistence and persuasion she showed me the screen.

At Foxnews.com she was reading about an underground experiment that will take place tomorrow in Switzerland (I think). This experiment is being done to try and recreate the big-bang theory. The fear behind it is that it could begin the destruction of the earth, according to this article. The article at Foxnews.com also said that it could cause a black whole in the center of the earth. None of this sounds very promising at all.

OK, so I'm college educated, I'm a Christian woman, I should not be scared of a news story that probably has been doctored to be more frightening than it actually is. However, these rational thoughts do not outweigh the irrational ones that seem to be clouding my mind this afternoon. I can't help but be consumed by the fact that tomorrow may be the beginning of the end. I have prayed all afternoon, every time I feel my heart rate go up and palms start to sweat, I pray.

There is one person that always seems to calm me down, well two people. The first person my husband. Geoff is such a rational person, who is not frightened by much. When I freaked out about the near earth asteroid that's set to hit the earth April 11, of 2036, Geoff was the first person that helped to calm me down. He reasoned it out with me that God is in control and that that's all that matters.

The second person is my dad. He's always been a calming force in my life. When I was in my freshman year of college, the US had been involved in the Iraq war for roughly a year. The talk of "WMD's" was running rampant on the news. Every time I heard this phrase my heart raced. I could barely sleep at night with the fear of Nuclear war hanging over my head. Finally, I decided to call my dad. He immediately put a stop to my fears by reassuring me that the only people that would want to nuke Idaho would be the crazies from Montana who want our potatoes (which to this day, strangely enough, still reassures me, calms me down and totally cracks me up).

So I've decided, tonight, the two people I need to talk to about this are my husband and my dad. And I'm sure, after talking with them, I'll be able to sleep soundly tonight.