Anxiety and the God of peace: A Reflection on Phil. 4
This post is the first in my 2023 Lenten series, where we’re following Jesus into the wilderness on his journey to his death and rising, and looking at places in our hearts and our broken world that are in need of resurrection and renewal. All the writings in this series will end up right here. I’m glad to be on the pilgrimage with you.
I haven’t always been an anxious person. Cautious? Yes, to the core and from the start, as my parents would tell it. But as our first child grew in my womb, anxiety also grew into a persistent presence in my heart and mind.
God has brought a measure of healing in the intervening eight years—not only of the intensity of my anxiety, but also of my view of who God is to me in the midst of it. The healing has been (at times, infuriatingly) slow and incremental, but with deep roots growing down that have caused life to spring up in other places in my heart that needed to be revived by the Spirit.
The healing is also still in progress. I’m not yet where I hope to be, but the presence of anxiety is no longer a crippling source of fear for me. I have experienced Jesus’s perfect love, courage, and overwhelming nearness in my anxious moments more than anywhere else. Walking through anxiety has clarified what is valuable to me and allowed me to examine those things in the light of God’s goodness. It has been my teacher in this season, even if a less-than-fun one.
There is a persistent temptation when faced with all the things I cannot control to live within hypotheticals. If I allow myself to feed that temptation—or even, sometimes, without my permission—I can embody those hypothetical situations so fully that I am experiencing the emotions of it as if it were my present reality. Perhaps you’ve experienced something like this too?
In those moments, the well-loved passage of Phil. 4:6-7, memorized as a child, often comes reflexively to mind: “Be anxious for nothing. But in everything through prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
Can I tell you something? In eight years of varying levels of my struggle with anxiety, quoting that verse at myself has been helpful exactly ZERO TIMES.
Phil. 4:6-7 is often treated as recipe for peace. A little prayer, a little gratitude, a little willpower to quash that anxiety, and bam!—peace that passes all understanding. Except, that is not really how we experience it. Often, feelings of peace still elude us, even after we’ve done all that vv. 6-7 instruct us to do.
I wonder if something deeper and truer, something with the power to heal, has been hiding in plain sight all along, situated just on the periphery of these verses often quoted to weary hearts. The greater context of Philippians provides the hope that vv. 6-7 alone cannot. We even miss the encouragement in the verse literally right before “Be anxious for nothing:”
“The Lord is at hand” (v. 5).
And only a few verses after, Paul says, “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (v. 9).
It is not gaining access to the “peace of God,” but rather the abiding presence of the “God of peace,” that gives us hope in the midst of anxiety. Verses 6-7, then, are not merely biblically-ordained coping techniques or good advice to help us “be anxious for nothing” and experience feelings of peace. They are gifts from the God of peace that enable us to know him in his fullness and experience oneness with him—true peace. In my story, the healing God has given has looked like the comfort of people who love me and understand what I’m experiencing, counseling, prayer, receiving communion, learning about and utter astonishment at how God made our brains to work, and life from his Word. But it is his actual presence with me—not primarily his gifts—that has breathed life and hope and love into these anxious days.
It is when I pause to acknowledge the nearness of the God of Peace when I am overwhelmed with anxiety that I recognize and experience his grace. A word of wisdom from Kathy Keller has been very grounding for me in these years of healing:
“God doesn't give hypothetical grace for our hypothetical nightmare situation. He only gives us grace for our actual situation.”
When I am stuck in the hypotheticals, I often find myself flailing for evidence that his grace will meet me if the worst happens. In these moments, I need his grace, but not for the what-ifs or the hypothetical things that suddenly set my heart pounding and body responding as though they are my reality. I need his grace for the situation I actually find myself in, where I am overwhelmed by anxiety, where my mind cannot access what is “true, honorable, right, pure, lovely” (Phil. 4:8).
Here’s the thing: Hypothetical grace, though it seems like it can give us reassurance, a way to take the fangs out of my worst fears, has no potency. It cannot give peace, it cannot heal. God meets me with real grace for the real things I’m really struggling with right now. And if one of these “nightmare hypotheticals” were to come to pass as my anxiety insists they will, his real grace would meet me there too. But if I’m focused solely on what-ifs, looking for evidence of him on up ahead in my imagined future, I’m not noticing his hand on my shoulder right here and now.
When my mind is gripped by the fear of what could be, I literally imagine that—his hand on my shoulder—as a form of prayer. I notice his scars. I look at him and express my fear. He looks in my eyes, nods, and gives a knowing smile. He understands how bewildering it is to be human. Then, hand still on my shoulder, he turns and looks at what is actually happening right in front of me, perhaps my kids playing or the weaving of traffic as I drive across town or the dinner I’m making. I follow his gaze back into my present reality, and I “think with God” (a phrase and concept I learned from Jim Wilder) about this present moment, asking him to attach my thoughts to his thoughts about it all. And I notice how the grace of his presence is permeating this moment, and that I am loved and safe.
The truth is, for a variety of reasons, feelings of peace—what we so often mean when we talk about “the peace of God”—may seem elusive, like grasping for water or smoke. We cannot always access those feelings on-demand. But we are not left exposed to the elements of our own imaginations. Jesus, the God of Peace, who imparts his own oneness with and trust in the Father as a gift to his people, is ever-present, always accessible, giving real grace to our anxious hearts, moment by moment.