Giving My Thoughts to Shia

I’m always jealous of people who say things like their worst fear is dying alone or wasting their life. I feel like that’s legitimate.

There is only one thing I’ve been afraid of my entire life: storms, tornadoes, anything that can be conjured up out of the sky that has the ability to wipe out everything that I know.
When I was little I used to go in my parents’ room or make my brother come sleep in my room.
I prayed for a solid month after my freshman year of college that it would not storm on solo during Walkabout like it had the past year.
Last night, we were supposed to get this crazy storm and, without even thinking about it, I grabbed my pillow and slept downstairs.

Reasons Why I Can Justify My Fear:
-My grandparents’ house was struck by lightning and it burnt to the ground when I was four. I remember digging through the ashes and the only things that were left over were coins that had melted together.
-My aunt and uncle’s house was struck by lightning and it left a hole in their ceiling.
-The transformer outside of my house was struck by lightning one summer and it melted all of our electronic devices.
-All of these places are within a two mile radius each other. So that saying that lighting never strikes the same place twice-wrong. It’s been scientifically proven that certain places attract lightning, and I’m convinced that I’m living in one of them.

When I was little, I used to cry to the point of being irrational because I was scared. My mom would tell me to think about something else. You know, think happy thoughts. So I would try desperately to think of stuff that I had to do at school the next day instead of thinking about all of the necessary precautions I would have to go through if I were the only one to hear the tornado sirens. I eventually started to imagine myself somewhere else.

The other night my brother and I were talking about the meanings of crazy dreams. For instance, what does it mean when you dream about a rabid horse? Or aliens? Or blacktop? He was on this website that talked about the importance of our daydreams-that it was important to pay attention to what our thoughts wandered to in the middle of the day.

I’ve become quite good at imagining myself somewhere else. The point is always to stop freaking out so I can relax and fall asleep and not have to go downstairs because I’m afraid. Well, last night I was with Shia LeBeouf.
And you have to understand-I don’t know if I perfected it as a child-but when I imagine myself somewhere else, it occupies my mind so much that I forget what is going on around me. It’s horrible for class, my eyes glaze over and I become catatonic and I completely miss what happened in the last five minutes.
So I closed my eyes and the first thing that popped into my head was Shia. We were in California and he lived right across the street from me. I called him on my cell phone, told him my fear, and ran over to his house in the rain. We sat on his couch and talked as it rained outside.

Let me just point out that it had never started raining outside in real life. I’m always anticipating so as to never be caught by surprise.
I ended up going downstairs and sleeping. Shia was not enough.
Right before I went to sleep, I thought about two things:
1. I was inside a house in a basement. Much better than being under a plastic tarp in the Smokey Mountains.
2. If there really was a tornado, I wouldn’t want Shia to come, I’d want God to. Then a thought popped into my head of someone reaching out to take my hand, and I was comforted.

I woke up this morning and my devotional was about “The God Who Calms Fears.”
I’m rereading Winner’s Girl Meets God and the part I read today talked about Winner giving up reading for Lent. Reading is her life. So she gives it up for 40 days in effort to give God something that means the world to her. She realized that she doesn’t just read for pleasure, but for escape. Lent reminds her, then, that she can’t just take her fears, sadness, and mistakes to the Mitford series, she has to take them to God.
It’s a simple truth, right? Cast your cares and fears upon the Lord?