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.”