Anxiety and the Mission of God
Summary of this post:
Anxiety is personal and anxiety is social
It is unfair to view all anxiety as personal
Spiritual leadership means entering into the suffering and anxiety of others with the fruit of the Spirit, absorbing the anxiety of others and trading back to them, peace.
I personally know anxiety in its acute paralyzing form, and I know how it can take the form of a slow drip of energy in the background. Many of us do. We each have a personal experience, but what is more difficult to identify are its sources.
When we name the source, we have the opportunity to differentiate ourselves from the power that anxiety holds over us. By naming the source, we set ourselves apart from it and give ourselves the opportunity to no longer react to the fear, but respond to God.
Much of anxiety these days is treated as a result of personal trauma expressing itself in our day-to-day lives. That is no small thing and its power to impact our lives and those around us should not be underestimated. In fact, Dr. Diane Langberg says this, speaking not just of our North American situation but the climate of a global population expanding, and accelerating its issues with new technology, and accelerating ways to create generational pain and issues in the lives of ordinary people.
“Trauma is the mission field of the 21st century.”
In a conversation over lunch about this with a mental health professional, his response was:
“Anxiety is the only communicable mental health disease”
What he is saying is that anxiety is contagious, more contagious than any virus we have seen, and just as alarming. Other scholars suggest that our world is not just passing anxiety around, but is swimming in a sea of it to the point that we don’t even know how soaked we are in collective anxiety, for like a fish doesn’t notice the water, it is hard for us to see the fear that has become normal for us. Dr. Edwin Friedman noticed this twenty years ago warning us in 1999 (before 9/11, the 2008 financial collapse and the pandemic):
“The anxiety is so deep within the emotional processes of our nation that it is almost as though neurosis has become nationalized.”
As I worked on my own heart and helped many others in marriage, recovery, and life, I see anxiety and fear as the number one way that wise and educated people have their rationale coopted and their faith twisted in such a way that leads to—not the fruit of the Spirit, “love, joy, peace, etc.”—but into greater fear and less rational thinking.
This isn’t a new development in the life of humanity. Fear has always been the thing. Fear is the number one thing the Bible commands us against. “Do not fear,” says every angel.
Isaiah, the prophet, whose people were experiencing tremendous global upheaval spoke for the Lord clearly for all generations”
“So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Our ability to overcome fear is rooted in God’s presence in our lives. He is with us.
To bring it a little closer to home, he also speaks to the challenges of his people then and today:
“Do not call conspiracy everything this people calls a conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it.”
When baby Jessica fell down a hole some thirty years ago and needed to be rescued, the first responders made a strategic decision. Knowing that it would take an extended amount of time to retrieve the toddler, they chose to dig a hole parallel to Jessica. Why? They knew that the child’s fear was as much of a threat as her circumstances. The hole next to her would allow another human to come in and speak to Jessica so that she would not be alone with her fear. The non-anxious presence of the other person near her would soothe the young child’s fears and extend her resilience to wait for the rescuers.
In the history of redemption, God came as a person into our situation to both address our anxiety rooted in our separation from Him at the cross, and to model the mission of God. The mission of God is Jesus coming near to His people to rescue them from their sin and to release them to fulfill the mission they were created for. Jesus still comes near to us to release us from our fears in order to release us for mission.
Therefore, we move towards other people, each in our own ways, to absorb the anxiety and fear that this broken world has infected us with and to trade back the fruit of the Spirit that God has given us—"love, joy, peace, etc.”
This means that each of us needs a vital relationship with God that rids us of fear, that each of us needs strong relationships that help to peel back shame and expose the junk that holds back our courage. When that happens, God’s mission always follows for as we learn his healing power in our lives to free us from our fears, we become free to be who we are again, relational people who can authentically step towards others in love, with peace, absorbing their pain and fear and returning the overflow of the Spirit of God in our life.
-Marc
