Finding An Anchor In Our AnxietyНамуна

How do you respond to Anxiety?

I’ve been doing some research on this subject, and also asking people this: How do you respond to anxiety? What goes on with you when you experience anxiety? This is what I found out. Out of all the people I asked not one person said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” If I had asked, “Tell me about fasting in your life,” some people would have said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, pass the chips and queso.” But when you talk about anxiety everybody says, “Yes, I know what that feels like. I feel it in the back of my neck, my lower back, my shoulders, my stomach gets upset, I feel nervousness, and worry and fear.” I also feel all these things when anxiety comes around. We live in an anxious world. In the summer of 2017, Houston received Hurricane Harvey, and right after the Las Vegas shooting episode happened. And if you looked at international news, there was the tension with North Korea, and you could also throw all the events that were happening with terrorism. There were a lot of things around us to be anxious about. 

America is an anxious country and are in an anxious city right now. People are saying, "I don’t know if I want to keep living in Houston with all these hurricanes coming through." There are so many things to be anxious about coming at us. One way to determine if anxiety is present in our society is that anxiety brings with it irritability. Anxiety makes us irritable. We are an irritable society. We’re upset with each other all the time. We’re in traffic yelling at each other. People are bickering on TV all the time. We’ve made an industry out of irritability. Everything gets lifted up, and we get really irritable. We start saying, what is going to help me with this? Maybe it’s two glasses of wine at night, maybe it’s some medication that I can have. How do we get through anxiety?

All throughout Scriptures we hear, “don’t fear, don’t be anxious, and cast your anxieties upon him.” Fear, anxiety, worry, they are all in the same pile of feelings we all experience. What you and I are anxious about might be different, but the feeling is all the same. The psalmist says, “I sought the Lord and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” On this plan, we’re going to explore these fears the psalmist speaks of, as well as the anchors that are available to us when we go through anxiety.