Ed Welch once wrote that anxious and fearful people can easily slip into taking Scripture as a pill. This is true and quite problematic on numerous levels. When the life verse does not provide the comfort needed, suddenly the Scriptures become emotionally insufficient. I have seen the effects of such disenchantment among evangelical men and women. This is not to say that the Scriptures do not offer help for fear and anxiety; in fact, my argument is that the Bible is ultimately the true comfort for those vices. But the exhortation is to view the Scriptures in its total counsel and the sufferer in his total humanity, not as isolated mantras.
Now, at another opportunity, I hope to deal with various distinctions; among them, the differences between low-level and high-level anxieties and other important exceptions that need to come into the conversation. But for now, I want to focus just briefly on low-level anxiety; the kind that shows up too often and which some people are especially vulnerable to. Among the many glorious encouragements in the Scriptures, St. Peter’s words are needful, not as an isolated verse, but as a textual argument for a full-orbed understanding of counseling. The Apostle encourages us to cast our anxieties on him because he cares for us (I Pet. 5:6-7). Implicit in this joyful declaration is the idea that God is interested in engaging his people in a focused anxiety detox program. The words themselves present us with an ongoing communion with God in the midst of our fears.
Perhaps our first acknowledgment from this text is the profound care of the Father for all our low-level anxieties from our intense fears for the well-being of our children to whether someone perceived me to be stand-offish in a church setting. God knows your frame and he knows when you are most prone to break apart emotionally. Anxieties and fears are real things, otherwise, God would not have demanded to enter into a counseling session with us in such times. He understands the demeanor and disposition of our hearts infinitely more than our complex sentiments about our lives.
Low-level anxiety can be fixed by a verse or two, but we run the risk of viewing the human war against such vices as something that can be cured as quickly as a Chick-Fil-a waiting line. As a pastor, I have counseled hundreds of people with low-level anxieties ranging from the 65-year-old widow to the distressed 17-year-old utterly confused about what to do with life when he graduates, and even to the young child whose life seems to be constantly in turmoil. These anxieties can disappear with a few short sessions, but often they demand the introduction of rituals to sustain the bombardment of life’s unexpected chess moves.
The most common way in which people return to their cycle of fears after finding some security in God’s care is by assuming that we can ease our guards. But anxieties and fears are not things we turn off; they re-appear at the most unsuspecting moments, which is another reason for the Christian to engage in rituals of grace and at times even double down on them to ensure greater security.
The Scriptures, totus scripture, gives us a house to dwell in (textual security), not a room to hide in (verse security). The textual nature of the Bible gives us a much more holistic picture of our anxieties and woes. We commune with God in the context of his means of grace and his church. There is no security outside these mercies. And inevitably those who seek refuge in solitude find themselves even more trapped in endless scenarios of fears that entrench them in a vicious cycle.
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I come from a culture in South America deeply steeped in anxiety. COVID brought the worse of my culture and coupled with the tyrannical practices of governments to shut down face-to-face gatherings, anxieties and fears are most likely the greatest pandemic both in my American and Latin culture. For a host of reasons, some cultures produce a higher degree of anxiety. This stems from parental practices and most often perception practices in societies.
As I have wrestled with my own anxieties and fears, I have found solace and the care of God in many things, including the singing of Psalms, the companion of friends, the reading of good books and in writing, and most especially in the worship of God’s people. These rituals secure us in a fuller image of the Christian life. They do not remove even low-level anxieties from us, but they allow us to embrace life with richer zeal amid them.
