An Anxious Kind of Mind: A True Story of Rising Above Anxiety Disorders by Randy Fishell

Author:Randy Fishell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: SBC Books
Published: 2018-05-11T22:00:00+00:00

TEN

“It” Has a Name

My seminary dean got straight to the point: “We need to get you out of here.” I was in my second year of the two-year graduate-level seminary program, and I was just flat burned out from reading such scintillating volumes as Lectures on Systematic Theology and The Sabbath in Scripture and History. My seminary dean knew full well that I was not wired to survive such fare for long, and now he was bending over backward to provide academic credit for some previous writing that I’d done on the subject of youth ministry. The German theologian-turned-seminary dean was known as a rigorous scholar with very high academic standards. He graciously lowered them on my behalf, and his effort to help boot me out of Seminary Hall and into the real world as quickly as possible was deeply appreciated.1

By this time, agoraphobia had a relentless grip on me. We’d moved from our tiny upstairs apartment into a small, older house owned by the university. (When we had a seminary professor over one evening, he looked around the interior of our home and stated, “Yes, I remember when these houses were the cream of the crop.” That was before they were all razed; today there is a vast expanse of grass where this section of student housing once existed.) No passersby could have known the level of psychological trauma taking place inside the student shack situated at 17 Maple Street.

The Master of Divinity coursework included being assigned to help out at a local church. I was slated to assist a church in Eau Claire, Michigan, about six miles from the university campus. To my great delight, the church had an attached school, and attached to the school was a dilapidated greenhouse. This is going to be perfect! I thought. With my background in greenhouse work, I quickly got permission from the school administration to rehab the little structure. My goal was to have the eighth-graders grow tomato plants, the proceeds of which would benefit their various class endeavors.

Toward the beginning, driving the six miles to the school was challenging but not impossible. Many were the times when I came close to giving in to the panic symptoms that swept over me. But over the course of several weeks, I found that I could make the drive relatively smoothly—during daylight hours. But an increased sense of foreboding crept up whenever the sun went down. I soon discovered that, at night, I could not drive alone a distance of more than three blocks without experiencing severe panic.

The tomato plant venture was a grand success, at least in terms of building relationships with the eighth-graders. The class didn’t get rich from it, but the greenhouse was in good shape and, hopefully, the kids had learned a little bit about growing things.

The good news was that tomatoes don’t need any care at night. The “bad” news was that the eighth-graders had invited me to deliver their commencement address at year’s end, an evening event.

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