Connecting with God in the Midst of Anxiety

  By: Megan Brewer, IMH

Most of us are familiar with some level of anxiety. We feel it to one degree or another throughout our life and many of us are feeling it more in the midst of this unpredictable and unsettling season. While we all tend to experience anxiety at some level, everyone’s version of it is a little different and will need to be understood in the context of your unique circumstances. 

 

This remains true when we look at anxiety through the lens of Scripture. Pay attention to what you notice when you read or hear someone reference Philippians 4:6-7

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus”

 

How do you tend to respond? If you are like me, the very first thought that might enter your head is one of instant and yet unintentional disconnection from God as you try to will yourself to not be anxious. Because Philippians 4:6 begins by saying “Do not be anxious about anything,” if we stop there, which can be our practice too often, the place most of us will go is to work in our own ability to try and stop the feeling of anxiety.

 

What is it exactly we are trying to stop? We are trying to stop what we will call the anxiety response. Anxiety actually has a function and purpose in our life. It causes us to take something that makes us feel out of control and think about it happening in the future. When this happens, our anxiety starts to prepare us to deal with that thing through initiating the fight or flight response. This response kicks in when something seems threatening to us personally or to something or someone important to us; it feels out of our control and too big to handle. Anxiety moves us towards a response to contain whatever chaos is headed our way. When we try to stop feeling anxious, we are trying to find some way of controlling within ourselves something that feels out of control. This response can feel lonely if we have too often had to contain a lot of chaos on our own when we were too young to know how to do it.

 

What we will see as we move through the words of Philippians 4:6-7 is that there is much more of an invitation from God to let our anxiety response move us towards Himself. As we do, He offers to help us hold the chaos that feels too big for us. This is not unlike a loving healthy parent who already knows the chaos is too big for you and so delights in moving towards you in your fear to let you know you are not in it alone.

 

Verse 6 does a remarkable job on giving us insight into what happens when we are anxious. The word “anxiety” in Greek here is the word mérimna, which means “to be divided into parts,” “drawn in opposite directions,” “to become fractured”. We know that when our brain is in an anxiety response, to have it be drawn apart is a good description of what it does. It pulls our brain and body into a state of fight, flight or freeze in order to get us ready for a threat. 

 

When our brain is working as it should, it is connected and integrated as a whole with all parts of the brain working together. But when we experience anxiety, our brain moves away from connection and safety and into the limbic center where it prepares you to get control of whatever is disrupting it. This part of the brain is designed to put us on high alert so we will be ready to deal with whatever chaos is heading our way. This process your brain goes through is part of your survival mechanism that has been kicking in for a long time in an attempt to help you cope with something that feels too big for you.

 

It is important to understand that our anxiety response is always at work linking our past experiences of chaos to our current one in order to produce how we respond. This is why a deeper look at anxiety is truly inseparable from the stories that have made up our life. What you do when you experience anxiety now is probably something you’ve been doing for a long time to contain what feels out of control.

 

When verse 6 says “don’t be anxious for anything” it is not telling us to ignore or pretend we don’t have anxiety. It does however ask us not to remain in that disconnected and pulled apart place anxiety leads us to. Instead, God invites us in verse 7, to do something we tend to struggle with doing when faced with something that feels out of our control. He asks us to turn towards what is making us anxious and face it with Him.

 

Verse 7 says- “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” It is an invitation to connect with Him through the chaos that is making your brain feel pulled apart. Now, we know that when we can name what is happening inside us, like how we are feeling or what our body is experiencing, it starts to bring our brain back together. We also know that when this happens in the presence of someone we can trust and are connected to, it creates a feeling of safety in our body that allows our brain to start to move back together and out of the anxiety response.

 

It is interesting how verse 7 asks us to offer supplication - asking or seeking God’s help in the midst of anxiety, and here’s why. How often do you find yourself in the middle of anxiety praying for God to take away your anxiety? Or asking for Him to help you not be anxious? This is not necessarily a wrong thing to pray, but it often unintentionally functions as a strategy for us to further avoid what makes us anxious and try to just get it to go away without dealing with it. But God has more for us than that. Like a loving parent, he wants to help us grow through our anxiety by helping us face what is causing it along with Him. But we can’t face something we don’t risk looking at long enough to understand. 

 

So, as we talk through what is making us anxious and we trust God to be in it with us, something interesting happens. Oftentimes as we pour out our hearts to God, our brain starts to integrate and we almost naturally move into a space of praise and gratitude. We see this often modeled in the Psalms. The Psalmist will petition God regarding something that feels way too big and out of control. He is not stingy with his words and emotions but pours them out before God in detail. Then we notice something interesting happen. He switches over to declaring the promises of God in his life and praising Him for who He is in his circumstances. We see something of this pattern in verse 7 as we are invited to move from prayer and supplication to thanksgiving. When we risk feeling and naming what makes us anxious, it creates space for other places inside of us to remember what has been true about God in our life and choose to transition in our heart to focus on those things.

 

As verse 7 concludes, it says “and the peace of Christ will guard your heart and mind in Christ Jesus.” The word peace here in the Greek is eirḗnē and means “to join,” “to tie together as a whole”. Peace is the opposite of the anxiety response created by chaos. It is where our body and mind were originally meant to live. It is the result of intimate connection and care from our God who asks us to let our anxiety be a reminder to bring Him the chaos of this world that exists in our lives. But as we talked about before, bringing Him our anxiety is not simply throwing it into His hands and walking away to find something to avoid the feelings. It’s taking the risk of letting the things that feel out of your control bring you into the presence of God and choosing to trust Him with the experience you would rather avoid.

 

Not all of us have had good models of safe people in our lives, and when we do not, we tend to find strategies to survive chaos on our own instead of with others. If this is true for you, notice what you experience at the thought of bringing uncontainable chaotic things to God. What happens when you sit with those things long enough with Him to really start feeling the impact in your body? What you do when you feel that will tell you something of how you have learned to try and contain chaos alone, and that will reveal something of how your heart has been responded to in the midst of feeling out of control. If this is you, know it is OK to start here. Start wherever you are, even if that means anxiety about believing God will meet you in your anxious places.  

 

Anyone who has been in good therapy will know that when you are willing to risk looking at the parts of your experiences that feel overwhelming and too much for you alongside someone you trust to help you work it out, you heal. When you begin to heal, you become more of who you were created to be than you were before. If we are willing to look deeper at what Philippians 4:6-7 says, we will find it to be a place of deeper invitation into the connection we were made to have with God. This connection heals and redeems the places chaos has sought to disrupt. 

 

  To schedule an appointment with Megan Brewer,
  Please call our office at 407-647-7005.
  www.lifeworksgroup.org