When you believe you have everything you need, you are not anxious. But when you believe you’re missing or in danger of losing anything you think you need, you experience anxiety. Thus, anxiety comes from the gap between what you believe you need and what you believe you have.
But this immediately exposes a major problem with the presence (or lack) of anxiety: human ignorance. Consider the man driving down the road to the hardware store. He has no anxiety despite the fact that he is three seconds from a life-changing collision. Similarly, consider the woman trying to pay her bills with inadequate funds. She is anxious despite the fact that she is about to receive a surprise promotion at work the next day.
Naturally, the most common anxieties come from what we believe about the present and the future, as do the most common calms. But the future is a remarkably elusive quarry. And even when we think for sure we know how it will unfold, mere moments can prove otherwise.
That’s why at some point, thinking people must decide whether they believe God is a loving Father or not. If, on the basis of good Biblical theology, we conclude that God is everything He says He is, then we realize that calm when things are going well and anxiety when they don’t are both equally silly.
But trusting God and deriving calm from that assurance is not as simple as it sounds. In fact, as is the case with almost everything in the Christian life, it is beyond our capacity to do. That’s why those of us who choose to believe the truth about God still often find ourselves at war with insubordinate anxieties. It’s also why those who do enjoy faith-based-calm do a terrible disservice to others when they pretend they somehow earned it by adhering to good doctrine.
The reality is that the ability to derive our mood from God rather than from either good or bad circumstances is itself a gift from Him. And thus pretending we can merely choose it hopelessly condemns those who don’t have it and ridiculously insults the Giver from Whom everyone else received it.
The day before my show was cancelled, I had peace on the basis of the false expectation that no real danger existed on the horizon. The day after my show went away, I had peace in the face of turmoil purely on the basis of God’s grace. And having held the two in such close chronological proximity, I can only say that I would always rather have the peace of knowing God in uncertain times than the peace of knowing circumstances in more encouraging ones. And I wish I could give you a simple formula for having it, too. But then it would be the calm of Andrew’s system for alleviating anxiety rather than the calm of receiving God’s gift. And who am I to presume to synthesize what only God can grow?
No comments:
Post a Comment