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The Fog of Fear
Identifying the Reasons We’re AnxiousI have yard envy. I had to confess before we continue. Yes, I know I sound like the grumpy old guy who yells, “Stay off my lawn!” at little kids, but hear me out. I live next door to a family that should win an award for how well they keep their lawn. It’s always lush and full. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t entertained doing a picnic over there.
My lawn, on the other hand, is patchy with lots of spots where the grass has died, even though it gets plenty of water. The problem is that it’s full of weeds. My yard looks like a bald dude who’s using Rogaine to try to grow hair but it’s coming in kind of wild and irregular in a few random spots around his head. I don’t know why, but I am amazing at growing weeds but awful at growing grass.
Every spring is another season of trying to remove weeds and grow grass. Years of doing this has given me a bad back and a PhD in weed removal. I’ve learned that if you don’t remove the weeds, they will choke out the grass around them. They quite literally suck the life out of your lawn. And unless you pull the weeds out by their roots, you still have weeds. You think you’ve removed them, but they have not gone away and will keep growing.
Sometimes when I’m out in my yard—crying, or lying defeated in a dirt patch, or thinking about how if I torched my neighbor’s yard, mine wouldn’t look so bad anymore—I realize those weeds are a picture of the anxiety and worry in our lives. If we don’t deal with them, they choke the life out of us. In fact, the origin of the word worry in English comes from an old German word meaning to strangle or choke. Worry and anxiety strangle us mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically.
Also, like weeds, if anxiety is not addressed at its roots, it isn’t going away. We might think we’ve removed it, but then we’ll discover we haven’t, and it will continue choking the life out of us. The roots of the weeds in our lawn are underground. And, like weeds, the roots of our anxiety are also beneath the surface . . . of our minds and hearts.
Good news: it is possible to remove weeds in your lawn, and it is possible to remove the anxious feelings in your heart. Like getting rid of weeds, it’s not easy, but you can do it.
Jedi Jesus
What do you think Jesus preached about when he gave a sermon? Remember, it was two thousand years ago, so he probably wasn’t warning of the dangers of dating apps, Zoom fatigue, or Netflix and chilling.
We have some of Jesus’s preaching recorded in the Bible, including his most famous talk, called the Sermon on the Mount, because he delivered it from a mountainside.
In this teaching, Jesus addresses the topic of . . . anxiety. Imagine that. I guess people have been anxious for a long time!
In the chapters ahead, we will explore more of Jesus’s teaching on anxiety. For now, I want to focus on a few penetrating questions he asks his audience in the Sermon on the Mount. I think we’ll find they are still relevant to our anxiety today.
Jesus says,
I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. (Matthew 6:25)
Jesus covers what his audience would have worried about: food and clothing.
In that day, there wasn’t a local grocery store or a fridge full of food. Chick-fil-A was not open on Sundays, and . . . well, it was never open back then. Restaurants didn’t exist. You got up every morning hoping you’d have enough to eat that day.
There also wasn’t mass production of clothing. Most folks had one or two outfits total. They couldn’t go buy a new outfit at the mall, because there were no malls! Anxiety about “What if we run out of food?” or “What if our clothes wear out and we can’t afford to replace them?” was real.
But Jesus says, “Don’t worry about that.” Whatever you are stressed about, he would tell you not to spend time worrying about it. More on why ahead, but let’s take a look at a genius question he asks next:
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? (verse 25)
Let me pause before going on. Why do you think Jesus asks that question? Is he looking for an answer or being rhetorical? Since he is Jesus—and, you know, God—it’s safe to assume he knows the answer. Jesus wants to force his audience to put the objects of their worries into a bigger perspective. He was the original Jedi-mind-trick master.
He is basically saying, Hey, guys, does food equal life? That’s all life is about? If you had all the food you needed for the rest of your days, would that be like the best thing ever? Really? Is the point of life really acquiring food?
His audience would have known, Of course food doesn’t equal life. Food is important, but life is not equal to just food.
This leads Jesus to ask the logical question of Then why would you spend so much of your life worried about it?
Remember, the Bible’s definition of worrying or being anxious is not “to have an occasional anxious thought”; it’s “to dwell on our anxious thoughts.” Jesus is saying, If there is more to life than food and clothes, why would you give so much of your life to being anxious about them?
It’s his attempt to pull the people back so they can better see the objects of their anxiety. When we are anxious, we get so nearsighted that it’s difficult for us to see anything other than the thing we are anxious about.
One reason is because anxiety is amazing at taking something small and inflating it to enormous proportions. Jesus is helping his audience deflate the power of their worries by putting them into perspective.
Fog Machine of Fear
I read once that a dense fog large enough to cover seven city blocks a hundred feet deep is made up of just one glass of water expanded into millions and millions of droplets. Whaaaaa? Something so small can expand into something so big.
In the same way, the object of our anxiety is always smaller than the size it grows to in our thoughts. Anxiety operates in our minds like a fog machine with a glass of water, expanding and stretching our fear-filled thoughts as far as we will allow it.
A thought so small like I am not sure where I am going to live after my roommate moves out enters the “fog machine of fear” in our minds and gets stretched way out of proportion, with us ending up in a panic. That simple idea can stretch into something like this:
I am not sure where I am going to live after my roommate moves out. I need to find a roommate to pay half the rent or I can’t afford to live here and I’ll be kicked to the curb. I don’t know anyone looking for a place to live. Maybe I should post something on Craigslist or Facebook to find someone. Great, then I’ll end up with a psychopath who murders me in my sleep. Oh no, my options are homelessness or being murdered! Either way, my life is over.
Without trying, we end up in a “fog of fear” of our own making. It’s paralyzing and miserable. But remember, enormous fog comes from a small amount of water. What if we could see our anxiety as a glass of water rather than the giant fog? Dealing with it would become much easier. The good news is, you can. Let’s figure out how.
Copyright © 2021 by David Marvin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
