Have No Anxiety

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers, welcome. We have had a special week with some wonderful time spent in Duluth, northern Wisconsin, and along the St. Croix river. Plenty of blue sky and sunshine, along with the lush hues of green on the now fully leafed trees, kept us oohing and aahing as we walked and drove along.

While Joy fully enjoyed the view, during the time we were driving, she alternated her attention between the beautiful scenery and her knitting sweaters for Bundles of Love, completing two and starting on the third by the time we arrived home. Certainly Joy enjoys knitting anytime, but this is now just one of the “tools” she uses to calm her persistent and generalized anxiety, a new phenomenon since the accident.

Before the accident, Joy was probably one of the most “chill” individuals I have ever known, few things ruffled her or at least she seldom showed it. Since the accident, that calm has been replaced by constant anxious physical movements, while awake and asleep, and a mind that struggles to slow down, turn off, or settle itself. Joy does a wonderful job of managing this, she takes medication and uses her “tools” to keep it at bay and truly most days, it is well under control.

Yet, it is one of those things that is still another part of the “new normal” I am always talking about. So when I came across an extended passage from Frederick Buechner on the topic of anxiety, I thought it timely to share. Buechner writes:

Have no anxiety about anything,” Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet…

Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can’t help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen… Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it?.. Who knows the answer?..

“All life is suffering” says the first and truest of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet “the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything,” Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God’s will or God’s judgment or God’s method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best.

“In everything,” Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

The worst things will surely happen no matter what—that is to be understood—but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be “in Christ,” as he puts it.

Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, “Have no anxiety about anything.” Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, Rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4–7)

The anxiety may be a new “fact of life” for Joy, but she and I appreciated Buechner’s take on living well along side it. I often talk about how proud I am of Joy and this is certainly another example of her grace filled spirit, because despite her many new life realities, she truly does, “rejoice in the Lord always,” and I know that I, others, and Our Father, are all blessed by her displayed gracious courage and undying faithfulness.