Anxiety and the Unshakable

Hebrews 12:22,28  But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God…  Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken…

Anxiety is admittedly not my greatest struggle in life. I am in general, just not a worrier. I have plenty of other defects to fill that void. Furthermore, the most anxiety-inducing times in my life have almost all been self-inflicted.

So, I have this concern that those who are going through horrible experiences (at no personal fault) and those who suffer from anxiety will find my experience insensitive or irrelevant. My writing however, is always about my personal walk with God. It is all I have got and if you are reading, you are stuck with it. So, here goes.

I have over the last couple of years caused some drastic, life-altering events during which my family, career and future were all up in the air. In the worst of that destruction, everyday brought more bad news that weighed heavier and heavier on me, threatening to suffocate what little hope I had left. I finally came to know anxiety as I was drowning in it and had no one but myself to blame.

It was in this helplessness and hopelessness that the depth of my reliance on God started to dawn on me. As with most God ordained truths, the reality is paradoxical to us. It is only in realizing our desperate need that we desperately cling to God. It is only in our profound weakness that we learn to rely on him in the manner we were meant to.

We can be shaken and we can be wrecked to the core. God however, cannot be shaken and cannot be moved. Our eternal attachment to him is the one thing about us that the world cannot touch.

In my destruction I came to contemplate the worst that could happen and I realized even that could not take away that which was most important to me. In my utter helplessness, I came to rely on the one thing that I was meant to cling to all along.

I have a friend who, while going through horrible, painful trials, refers to those trials as opportunities to lean into God. He has figured out that the most anxiety-inducing events are the ones that cause us to rely on our immovable God the most.

Anxiety is the focus of my mind’s eye on self. What if the world does not turn out the way I expect it to? Faith is the focus of my mind’s eye on the Immovable. No matter what happens, the world cannot touch the eternal, unshakable reality of my relationship with God.