Managing Worry and Anxiety By Jean HolthausSample

  Day 3

Challenge Your Distorted Beliefs about God

I once believed God loved me but didn’t like me very much. Common distortions of God make it easy to see how someone’s faith could contribute to worry and anxiety. If I believe God is unpleasable or might abandon me, it creates an underlying fear and anxiety I must constantly manage. Correcting our distorted understandings of God can help to eliminate this underlying worry so we can live with the calm, secure assurance we are loved by God, who will never leave us, will provide for us, and who cares deeply about every part of our lives. But how does this change occur?

Someone asked what I thought it meant that God loved me. We concluded love is defined in 1 Corinthians 13 by a list of adjectives. I looked up each word in the dictionary, starting with the word patient. I also looked up synonyms and antonyms until I felt I had a factual understanding of what it meant for love to be patient.

Next, I had to allow this understanding to impact my experiences. I asked God to show me the experiences I had thought were loving but were not patient. This felt incredibly wrong at first. Gradually, I wrote about how it felt to own that these experiences were not love.

Next, I began to own how I would like to experience God as patient. I wrote, “I want to feel like You aren’t mad at me when I can’t do things right the first time.” Later the same day, God pointed out the ways I responded to my children when they made mistakes while learning new things. I would tell them, “It’s okay, let’s try again.” In my heart, I experienced God saying, If you are a flawed parent and that’s how you respond to your children, why would you believe I would not perfectly do the same thing with you?

This was an incredibly intense process that took hours of studying. Over time, however, my concept of God has gradually shifted so I now believe He loves me and He likes me - even when I’ve messed up. As this shift occurred, the fear and anxiety in my life gradually calmed. 

What beliefs do you have about God that might be incorrect and feeding your fears? How might you test those beliefs?