The place to go with our anxieties ...

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, 

and I will give you rest” 

(Matthew 11:28, ESV).

  It is one of the greatest common struggles known to humanity.  It is not new to this generation, as it has been an issue since ancient times.  The focus points and issues may have changed but the frailty of humanity in dealing with this struggle remains; as almost every human being deals with this chronic immobilizer and limiter of living full lives. This struggle is anxiety and it swallows up life and functioning for countless people.

     The situations, issues, focus points and causes of anxiety are varied and infinite. The ways of managing and coping with anxiety through philosophies, formulas, medications, theories and antidotes are about as countless and vast.  Friends, counselors and ministers devote many hours of genuine care and concern to those in need, who struggle with anxiety.  Sometimes the simplest approaches to this perennially annoying problem are of the greatest help such as normalization and empathic understanding and support can bring mastery over the devil of anxiety. 

     Although the formulistic, theoretical, and philosophical approaches help some people along the way; they mostly help the book sellers and purveyors of each new and improved approach to dealing with anxiety.  As anxiety raises its ugly head in the lives of people of faith, people are additionally burdened by good intentioned friends and ministers with memorizing more Scripture and finding ways of increasing their faith, as if faith alone is the answer.

     Anxiety in its mildest and simplest form is concern and in its immobilizing and uncontrolled form is over-concern to the point of disablement and dysfunction in daily living.  The sense of lack of control in anxiety adds addition weight to this already difficult problem.

     Anxiety simply is weight. It is a weight of thought, concern, focus and attention. As Christians, Jesus doesn’t speak to us of denying we are being anxious, discounting the weight of anxiety, of memorizing more verses or even increasing our faith; He speaks of coming to Him with all the weight of all we are carrying.  Anxiety is heavy and we can make it heavier by our struggle with it (Proverbs 12:25).  We can involve others in our anxiety as well as we struggle leaving strained and damaged relationships all around us in the aftermath. 

      Could the answer be as simple as coming to our Lord and Savior?  Our focus changes when we come to Him and listen to Him about the reality of anxiety.  His words about the “abandoning of the focus on the things we eat and wear and the trouble in one day as being enough for each day” are great places to start (Matthew 5:25-34).  It is also immensely important to pray in and through our anxiousness (Philippians 4:6); but are we missing something in our trying so hard to work through our anxiety. To pray, is to come into His presence but do we too easily and quickly depart from that place.

      Maybe, just maybe, it is enough to come to Him with the weight of our anxieties and stay in His presence long enough for Him to lift the concerns off our lives.  It is a sad thing to me, when we become anxious in our coming to Him.  Coming to our Lord and being still in His presence is trusting Him enough to take off the weight of our trouble in any moment as we find assurance in His presence. Jesus Christ is not a formula or even an answer but our Lord and God.  He must be allowed to be big enough as our God, to carry our every care and we must stay in His presence long enough as our Lord, for His words and His Spirit to be the truth in our trusting and living through all we face. This includes anxiety and everything else we deal with in our living from day to day.   We all have anxieties in some shape or form and as believers we all have "Someone" who can lift the weight of them off our shoulders.