Jeremiah 8:11 – Anxiety's Signal
For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of My people slightly,
Saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ Jeremiah 8:11, New King James Version
As a new year begins, so does a new semester and an influx of new staff on the campus where I work. Although God's grace floods in with this novelty, my nervous system and habits of thought haven't quite acclimated to that grace.
Even though I am in a part-time role and Christ has proven His provision just about as unconnected with my high-stress striving as He said it was for the sparrows and the lilies in Matthew 6:26-30, the pathways between a job task that needs to be done on the job and a raised pulse or tightened stomach on my part are time-tested from earlier days and had not yet been jettisoned. When the list of things to get done for the new staff was a little longer than usual yesterday, anxiety fired out of proportion.
In reaction, I scolded that I could not avail myself of the campus's chapel services as a midday oasis. Whether or not it would make any rational difference whether background checks and timeclock data were entered in the morning or the afternoon, I scored whether or not I deserved to rest in Christ's peace, under His Word, with His community of likewise busy people for a half-hour. Then, worse, I scored whether my anxious response to the morning's tasks made me more or less worthy of such a gathering. Could I repent? Could I pull myself together and form an expression worthy of such a blessed little host?
I went anyway. Awaiting me was Dr. Shannon Warden's Word for this very moment. Head of the school's counseling program, she cautioned not to bury anxiety's impulses too quickly. Yes, she admitted, the goal is to be free of anxiety, but not at the expense of pretense which is the opposite of Gospel sincerity and vulnerability. Step back from the moment, she coached, and consider why God has allowed a thought which stimulates anxiety to enter our sphere. Use this momentary encounter to confess what we know about Him which is contrary to what anxiety's shrunken theology is hissing.
We often fail to grow in these incremental encounters. We often fail to admit they exist. Instead, we preach to ourselves the false gospel of Jeremiah 8:11. Instead of using a reminder of our vulnerability and distractibility as an opportunity to go straight to the Wonderful, Counselor Isaiah proclaimed, we pawn anxiety's prompts off on secondary relief short of Him.
As Jeremiah 8:11 indicts that the false prophets offer bromides of, "Peace, peace!" to the daughters of Jerusalem when there is no real peace, we settle for vicarious experience. We settle for the religion passed down to us and what it says about what we SHOULD feel rather than pressing through the veil and coming boldly to the throne of God's grace. Each anxiety is a reminder that I need to see my Heavenly Father's face directly.
To be satisfied with less is to be healed slightly. To be satisfied with less than an intimate experience of Him in that very moment is to be distracted rather than renewed, to be coarsened rather than quickened the next time something is wrong. It is to learn by habit to ignore the candid confessions of our souls in favor of what we assume a Christian should feel. Where there is no peace, instead, is an opportunity to ask for its outpouring.
Saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ Jeremiah 8:11, New King James Version
As a new year begins, so does a new semester and an influx of new staff on the campus where I work. Although God's grace floods in with this novelty, my nervous system and habits of thought haven't quite acclimated to that grace.
Even though I am in a part-time role and Christ has proven His provision just about as unconnected with my high-stress striving as He said it was for the sparrows and the lilies in Matthew 6:26-30, the pathways between a job task that needs to be done on the job and a raised pulse or tightened stomach on my part are time-tested from earlier days and had not yet been jettisoned. When the list of things to get done for the new staff was a little longer than usual yesterday, anxiety fired out of proportion.
In reaction, I scolded that I could not avail myself of the campus's chapel services as a midday oasis. Whether or not it would make any rational difference whether background checks and timeclock data were entered in the morning or the afternoon, I scored whether or not I deserved to rest in Christ's peace, under His Word, with His community of likewise busy people for a half-hour. Then, worse, I scored whether my anxious response to the morning's tasks made me more or less worthy of such a gathering. Could I repent? Could I pull myself together and form an expression worthy of such a blessed little host?
I went anyway. Awaiting me was Dr. Shannon Warden's Word for this very moment. Head of the school's counseling program, she cautioned not to bury anxiety's impulses too quickly. Yes, she admitted, the goal is to be free of anxiety, but not at the expense of pretense which is the opposite of Gospel sincerity and vulnerability. Step back from the moment, she coached, and consider why God has allowed a thought which stimulates anxiety to enter our sphere. Use this momentary encounter to confess what we know about Him which is contrary to what anxiety's shrunken theology is hissing.
We often fail to grow in these incremental encounters. We often fail to admit they exist. Instead, we preach to ourselves the false gospel of Jeremiah 8:11. Instead of using a reminder of our vulnerability and distractibility as an opportunity to go straight to the Wonderful, Counselor Isaiah proclaimed, we pawn anxiety's prompts off on secondary relief short of Him.
As Jeremiah 8:11 indicts that the false prophets offer bromides of, "Peace, peace!" to the daughters of Jerusalem when there is no real peace, we settle for vicarious experience. We settle for the religion passed down to us and what it says about what we SHOULD feel rather than pressing through the veil and coming boldly to the throne of God's grace. Each anxiety is a reminder that I need to see my Heavenly Father's face directly.
To be satisfied with less is to be healed slightly. To be satisfied with less than an intimate experience of Him in that very moment is to be distracted rather than renewed, to be coarsened rather than quickened the next time something is wrong. It is to learn by habit to ignore the candid confessions of our souls in favor of what we assume a Christian should feel. Where there is no peace, instead, is an opportunity to ask for its outpouring.
“To be satisfied with less is to be healed slightly.”
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, to be satisfied with less is to steep oneself in idolatry. That is, to allow our hearts to source contentment from something other than that for which they were created. When we face problems, we generally run to the quick fix with confidence that it will serve as a remedy. Ironically, we seek physically remedies for our problems, whose roots are almost always deeper, spiritual. In “The Knowledge of the Holy” Tozer finds that the self-existent God is the remedy for all problems, even when we shudder to find spiritual purpose. He writes, “Since we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all of our problems and solutions are theological.” I can hardly imagine how it looks to approach my own anxiety of work tasks and life activities as a theological problem. Therefore, I retreat into idolatry and seek to satisfy my anxiety through task completion rather than allowing God to work through my heart to treat the sinful core of anxiety. I pray that I would see these anxieties as theological problems rather than physical, and seek God’s peace in my soul rather than on my desk.