While I don’t have answers for the causes of my anxieties, I do know what to do with the anxiety itself. Do as my therapist, a man full of faith, has taught me. Don’t just ignore the anxiety and push past it. That’s what I’ve done too often in the past. The old saying “Get a ladder and get over it” is like saying “open the presents and get on with the holidays”. When I sat down to eat that Thanksgiving turkey I didn’t rush through it. The process itself has value and there is value in learning to face the anxiety head on, not just get over it.
Face the anxiety. Process it and the thoughts that swirl around it. Feel the feelings (fear, sadness, anger). Work out the anger (good for the physical body as well). Then turn this processed anxiety over to God.
The fear, for me, comes in being out of control. When I am not in control of my world, it feels as though my world controls me – and to no good. When the fear comes, I freeze like the proverbial deer in the headlights. If I try to push past that fear without facing it, the fear stabs me in the back.
So as I process that anxiety and those feelings of fear, I learn to face that fear with the confidence that comes from what I know about God. That He is all powerful. That He is completely just and totally love. That He will indeed carry me no matter what. I am secure in Him – even when I don’t feel like it. Even when I fail.
Even when I fail. Doesn’t matter what others think. Doesn’t matter what others do. These things may change my environment, but that cannot affect my anchor, my standing, my relationship in Christ. When I am flush with a fresh word from God that He is both in control of my world and has a firm grasp on me, then my anxieties wilt. The causes of those anxieties don’t disappear – they are there as much as they ever were. But the fear of those causes fades in the face of my renewed strength.
2008-12-29
2008-12-15
Anxiety and Authenticity - Part III
In the word itself – the word of God that comes to me – is the strength I need. That word from God to me is my daily manna. I’ve tried to store it up. It doesn’t work. God’s word to me, God’s word through others, can fill a reservoir to draw on as needed, can inform the word God has for me at a specific moment. But God wants to meet with me daily. As He did with Adam and Eve in the garden.
This word is not the routine itself. It is not merely the discipline of meeting with God. That is the problem with stale habits and traditions. The form is not the word. We won’t hear from God just because we have a routine.
But the form gives place for the word to come. How can we hear from God without those forms? We are more likely to hear from Him if we set aside place in our lives to hear from Him. That is the strength of regular time with God, of regular time of coming together with His people. In relationship, quantity time and quality time are not the same, but it is hard to have quality without quantity. So setting aside time for hearing from God is one thing.
A second thing is also required. I am reminded as I write that expectation is a necessary ingredient. The old ketchup commercial so effectively expressed the feeling of “anticipation” – the expectation that through the long wait, the ketchup will come. The joy of dating when we are in a relationship that is moving toward commitment is that something special may come of that date. Dating, even the relationship itself, gets stale when we lose that sense of anticipation, of expectation.
The old tarrying custom of Believers in earlier decades was filled with expectation that in waiting on God something was going to happen. But eventually that activity of tarrying became an end in itself. When I was a teenager, a group of us started gathering for a prayer meeting because we were motivated to pray. The prayer meeting grew and with it a sense that God was at work in our midst. Then came the day that we were encouraged to come to the prayer meeting so that we could pick up that sense again. By then, the value of the meeting had been lost.
We don’t get back to the sense of expectation by reviving the habit of tarrying – or by adopting any other particular style of spirituality – any more than we can revive the sense of impending discovery in our married lives by dating as we did before we were committed. We can still date, but the secret is not the form. It is coming to the current forms of the relationship with a sense of anticipating that something fresh will happen.
This word is not the routine itself. It is not merely the discipline of meeting with God. That is the problem with stale habits and traditions. The form is not the word. We won’t hear from God just because we have a routine.
But the form gives place for the word to come. How can we hear from God without those forms? We are more likely to hear from Him if we set aside place in our lives to hear from Him. That is the strength of regular time with God, of regular time of coming together with His people. In relationship, quantity time and quality time are not the same, but it is hard to have quality without quantity. So setting aside time for hearing from God is one thing.
A second thing is also required. I am reminded as I write that expectation is a necessary ingredient. The old ketchup commercial so effectively expressed the feeling of “anticipation” – the expectation that through the long wait, the ketchup will come. The joy of dating when we are in a relationship that is moving toward commitment is that something special may come of that date. Dating, even the relationship itself, gets stale when we lose that sense of anticipation, of expectation.
The old tarrying custom of Believers in earlier decades was filled with expectation that in waiting on God something was going to happen. But eventually that activity of tarrying became an end in itself. When I was a teenager, a group of us started gathering for a prayer meeting because we were motivated to pray. The prayer meeting grew and with it a sense that God was at work in our midst. Then came the day that we were encouraged to come to the prayer meeting so that we could pick up that sense again. By then, the value of the meeting had been lost.
We don’t get back to the sense of expectation by reviving the habit of tarrying – or by adopting any other particular style of spirituality – any more than we can revive the sense of impending discovery in our married lives by dating as we did before we were committed. We can still date, but the secret is not the form. It is coming to the current forms of the relationship with a sense of anticipating that something fresh will happen.
2008-12-08
Anxiety and Authenticity - Part II
There are times when I have wavered greatly in my faith. But I have never abandoned it.
I could not let go of God any more than I could let go of myself, including my questions. I discovered (ironically at the hands of one who worked to destroy my security in God) that God is bigger than my questions, and indeed welcomes them. Certainly that is the example shown me by the Psalmist Asaph.
Recently, Pastor Ray taught that our theology influences our actions, meaning that bad theology leads to bad behavior and good theology leads to good behavior. What I believe and what I do cannot be separated, this is true.
As an ethicist, I am often asked what ethics means? I have always said that ethics at its most basic component is living out what you believe. I can learn more about your theology from your behavior than if you just tell me what you believe. James says something along the same lines in his letter in the New Testament.
When I have struggled with anxieties and fears, I am not sure my theology has gone bad. What I am sure of is that my strength comes from having a firm grip on what I believe – or more precisely who I believe. The crux of the matter is do I really believe what I believe?
This I have seen again and again. The encouraging words of others, even my wife’s, and these various voices this morning in my devotional time, do much to help. But in the end, it is as Wilkerson writes, the word of God has to come to me.
I could not let go of God any more than I could let go of myself, including my questions. I discovered (ironically at the hands of one who worked to destroy my security in God) that God is bigger than my questions, and indeed welcomes them. Certainly that is the example shown me by the Psalmist Asaph.
Recently, Pastor Ray taught that our theology influences our actions, meaning that bad theology leads to bad behavior and good theology leads to good behavior. What I believe and what I do cannot be separated, this is true.
As an ethicist, I am often asked what ethics means? I have always said that ethics at its most basic component is living out what you believe. I can learn more about your theology from your behavior than if you just tell me what you believe. James says something along the same lines in his letter in the New Testament.
When I have struggled with anxieties and fears, I am not sure my theology has gone bad. What I am sure of is that my strength comes from having a firm grip on what I believe – or more precisely who I believe. The crux of the matter is do I really believe what I believe?
This I have seen again and again. The encouraging words of others, even my wife’s, and these various voices this morning in my devotional time, do much to help. But in the end, it is as Wilkerson writes, the word of God has to come to me.
2008-12-02
Anxiety and Authenticity - Part I
I think I know what to do.
I had written in yesterday’s entry of my personal journal, “Is turning this anxiety over to God more a matter of will or of knowing how?” In other words, am I just needing more will power or am I needing to know how to do it? This morning I admit it is both.
As I journal this morning, I think I know what to do and how to be strong. And not be overcome with anxiety. I learned to be strong as a boy growing up. But I came to discover many years later that that strength was in part a coping mechanism. The “in part” was my own strength. And that strength carried me – for a long time, in fact – until I ran out of steam. But it was, as I said, only a part.
Much of that sustaining strength came from a confidence in God that He would, and would always, carry me through. There are those words again. That promise He gave me in the spring of 2006 as this whole nightmare was beginning: “He will carry you.”
If I had only known where this path was taking me. But I had no idea. It is a very good thing. I could not have handled all that information at once. As they say these days, TMI. So he has given me the strength as I have needed it, one step at a time. I see that now.
I see it in the texts I read this morning – Proverbs 11 and Psalm 80 and Luke 1. I hear it in the voice of David Wilkerson has he writes of the Old Testament David’s courage to go on when all was lost at the hands of the Amalekites. I read it in the story of the railroad superintendent in In His Steps, as Alexander Powers is about to bring down his own comfortable world by doing the right thing. What is it that Eric Liddell says in the movie, “Chariots of Fire”? “From where does the strength come? It comes from within.”
I had written in yesterday’s entry of my personal journal, “Is turning this anxiety over to God more a matter of will or of knowing how?” In other words, am I just needing more will power or am I needing to know how to do it? This morning I admit it is both.
As I journal this morning, I think I know what to do and how to be strong. And not be overcome with anxiety. I learned to be strong as a boy growing up. But I came to discover many years later that that strength was in part a coping mechanism. The “in part” was my own strength. And that strength carried me – for a long time, in fact – until I ran out of steam. But it was, as I said, only a part.
Much of that sustaining strength came from a confidence in God that He would, and would always, carry me through. There are those words again. That promise He gave me in the spring of 2006 as this whole nightmare was beginning: “He will carry you.”
If I had only known where this path was taking me. But I had no idea. It is a very good thing. I could not have handled all that information at once. As they say these days, TMI. So he has given me the strength as I have needed it, one step at a time. I see that now.
I see it in the texts I read this morning – Proverbs 11 and Psalm 80 and Luke 1. I hear it in the voice of David Wilkerson has he writes of the Old Testament David’s courage to go on when all was lost at the hands of the Amalekites. I read it in the story of the railroad superintendent in In His Steps, as Alexander Powers is about to bring down his own comfortable world by doing the right thing. What is it that Eric Liddell says in the movie, “Chariots of Fire”? “From where does the strength come? It comes from within.”
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