I drove by a certain telephone pole next to a certain field yesterday, and just had to return this morning to take its picture.

It reminds me of an illustration from Dr. Seuss’s Wacky Wednesday. It looks so silly. If you just glance at the top, it’s a normal telephone pole, complete with wires. But when you allow your eyes to travel down, you realize that there’s a huge chunk missing. You see that it’s not normal at all. In fact, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

In this case, my guess is that the “something” was a car. A driver — reckless, drunk, asleep, distracted, who knows? — made contact with that pole, and knocked its foundation right out from under it. There’s a stump left in the ground, but the majority of the pole isn’t “grounded” at all. It has no internal support.

This happens in life too. You might appear, to those who just cast a casual glance your way, to be perfectly normal. Just one more person in an endless row of people. But if someone takes a moment, looks more closely, they might see that something has gone horribly wrong. Perhaps something, or someone, blindsided you, took a huge chunk right out of you, knocked out your foundation. Suddenly, you’re not grounded at all. Nothing is normal, nothing seems right.

Look again at the telephone pole without support. Do you see what I see?

It turns out that the pole hasn’t fallen down because it actually does have support. Maybe not through direct contact with the ground, but rather because it’s connected. While going about its daily duty of holding wires in place, it became connected to other poles. The strength of those poles has allowed the broken one to continue to hang in there (quite literally) when it was struck by tragedy.

I am too independent for my own good. I try to shoulder every responsibility myself, I shy away from asking for help, and I even apologize for asking people to pray for me. The pole taught me a lesson, though. It is often our connection with others that holds us up when the unforeseen attacks. Our pastor frequently reminds us that God never intended for us to walk through this life alone. Community with others is one key way that He upholds us in times of weakness and devastation.

I’m also reminded that I am to be one of the “whole poles” in the lives of others. When those around me feel like everything is falling apart, I can help to keep them upright, often just by being there. You can probably think of someone in your life right now who is broken, someone who needs to borrow a little of your strength.

Whether you’re the broken pole or the whole one right now, remember: Connection is not an optional nicety; sometimes it’s the difference between falling down and going on. Don’t hesitate to lend some strength to those who need it. And don’t hesitate to accept that strength from others when you are the one hurting.

Yesterday was one of those days. I woke up feeling immediately overwhelmed, and that’s never a good sign. I felt like all my obligations and responsibilities had talked behind my back and decided to gang up on me. And just for fun, I added a few more obligations to the pile, ones that weren’t necessarily mine to bear, but I was going to handle them anyway.

By 7:00 a.m., I had already cried on the phone to Chad, who was out of town at the time.

By 7:30, L. and I were going for a brief car ride, after dropping C. off at the bus stop, and I was praying.

I prayed for peace, I prayed for strength, I prayed for help. And then, very quietly, I was reminded in my spirit of the verse that says, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Oops. Here I was, essentially asking God to help me have peace while I insisted on dwelling, obsessing, and worrying about things that were “coming up.” God reminded me that he wants to give me his peace and strength, but that I need to watch where my mind is going. If it’s falling apart because of something that’s happening next week, then I need to reign in my thoughts. I need to look at what God has placed directly in front of me and trust in his strength to get through one — and only one — step at a time.

In the afternoon, after I had gotten through several of those “next steps,” I decided to do something radical: bake banana bread. Yes, rather than stewing while surfing the internet, rather than making list after list about things that I can’t control anyway, I chose to get out the flour and sugar, the overripe bananas and vanilla extract, and make something yummy.

I purposely chose a recipe that I don’t have memorized. Baking to the tune of a memorized recipe allows me to go on autopilot, and autopilot = more time to worry. Instead, I followed a recipe that had a few differences. Not enough to make it taste different, just enough to keep me engaged in the moment.

I dealt with the ingredients, one item at a time. I followed the recipe’s instructions, one step at a time. I didn’t think about my worries, I didn’t stress about my obligations. I focused on what was right in front of me.

The results were fantastic.

First, I was rewarded with a full-size loaf of Chocolate Chip Banana Bread and 4 mini-loaves of Banana Pecan Bread (one of which C. consumed almost entirely on his own last night!).

But more than that, I was rewarded with some lessons that I need to apply when I find myself in the midst of worry and stress:

1. Stay engaged in the moment. That might mean taking on a physical task (baking, cleaning, wrestling with L., playing a video game with C.). When I withdraw into myself, that only feeds the worry.

2. Take things one step at a time. A new recipe turned into a metaphor for life yesterday. I can’t put the batter in the loaf pan before I’ve creamed the butter and sugar. In the same way, I can’t fix next week’s problems today, especially not by worrying about them!

3. God is faithful. Worry is one of those issues that has plagued me for as long as I can remember. I make some progress, learn some lessons, and then fall right back into my role as Chief Worrier. But God is patient with me. He continues to bring to my mind reminders from His Word, he continues to use circumstances (or banana bread) to teach me, he continues to give me strength for the moment.