Troubled hearts

Fear and anxiety are directly connected emotions, you can't have anxiety without fear, but not all fear turns into anxiety. From my own experience with anxiety, to me it felt like when I would really struggle with anxiety or panic attacks, it was as if whatever particular fears I was feeling at that moment were playing on a loop in my brain. When you feel that fear over and over, it can be so overwhelming that you feel like you can't breathe, and that you are trapped in it. The first time I experienced this personally, I thought something was medically wrong with me, until someone pointed out that I was just having a panic attack. A panic attack? No, that couldn't be right. I didn't get panic attacks up to that point, so that had to be wrong. The longer I thought about it though and analyzed my symptoms and thought patterns, I knew the assessment was accurate. The physical symptoms I was feeling at that moment, were a direct result of the fears that I was allowing myself to hyperfocus on. In other words, it was all in my head.

We live in a culture that embraces a victim mindset for many reasons, so my opinion on this issue may not be popular with everyone, but I believe it to be true. Although I leave room for some medical conditions that may make someone more prone to anxiety, I do believe the majority of those who struggle with it could treat the condition if they were willing to engage with it, rather than try to mask it. The thing is though, it can be a terrifying thing to do. Remember how I said that anxiety is based on fear? Well, in order to target the anxiety then, one has to really look at the fear itself. Again, drawing from my own experience, I would be willing to surmise that most anxiety causing fears are rooted in deeply painful events, typically from our childhood. I think it is hardwired into every human being to have a natural response to pain of wanting to avoid it. This makes sense when you consider pain in the physical realm. If I place my hand too close to a flame or other heat source, I can get burned, so I naturally pull my hand away when those nerves began to sense the impending danger of increasing heat. God has hardwired our bodies for survival, so it is extremely logical that we would have natural pain avoidance techniques, without even having to think about it.

Although fear can eventually manifest physically in our bodies, I would have to say that the origin of fear is strictly in the mind. Fear reflects something that we believe in a given moment or situation. If I feel fear while standing on the edge of a cliff that is high above the ground below, I probably feel fear because I believe that I will die if I slip and fall. When fear manifests as a result of a physical situation like that example portrays, it's a lot easier to understand because it's right there in front of us. Anxiety can be a tricky thing to try and figure out though, because the fears that drive it are often buried inside of us. Besides the fact that anxiety is being driven by things that are not right in front of us, add to it the natural pain avoidance response that we all have built into us, and you've got something that is going to take some work to figure out. I think that for most people though, it is possible to do, if we are willing. We have to be willing to reject a victim mindset though, and to take ownership of our thought patterns, and to be willing to look at our deepest fears if we are going to get anywhere.

So does the bible have anything to say about anxiety and fear? It does actually, it has a lot to say about both of these. I would suggest to anyone struggling with fear and anxiety, to read through the book of Psalms, these writings were instrumental to me when I was working through the worst of my anxiety just a couple of years ago. For this writing though, I want to take a look at one particular example from the book of John. To set the stage for this example I want to look at, we are coming off of what we nowadays refer to as Palm Sunday, where Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. Jesus knows his time on Earth is coming to a close, and he again refers to his coming death as he addressed the crowd in Jerusalem, and again in a more personal setting with his disciples during the last supper. It seems that after telling his disciples how he was going to die at the hands of the religious leaders several times, it is finally starting to sink in, and Peter asks Jesus where he is going and if he can follow him. Even though the disciples had been with Jesus for a few years at this point, it seems that despite everything they have learned from him, Jesus recognizes the fear building in his followers' minds as they grapple with the fact that their beloved teacher and leader is about to leave them. It is quite possible that as they began to wrestle with the many fears and questions swirling in their minds, the disciples probably began to feel anxiety over the situation. I have to think they were feeling fears and doubts that they probably didn't want to even acknowledge were present in their minds.

So what does Jesus say to them? He says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me," -John 14:1 NIV. When I look at this response from Jesus, I see that he was addressing the root fears that he could see were beginning to build. He was telling them to look at the facts, or the truth that they knew from all of his teaching up to that point, and to anchor themselves to it, so they wouldn't be carried away by anxious thoughts. Jesus goes on to tell his disciples that despite the fact that they don't seem to know what he's talking about or where he's going, he says directly to Thomas after he declares that they DON'T know where he is going, that actually "You know the way to the place where I am going," -John 14:4 NIV. So what is going on here exactly? Well, although we can't know with absolute certainty, because the bible doesn't elaborate on what each disciple is thinking or feeling in that moment, I think we can logically make some assumptions that are probably accurate.

In this example, I would imagine some of the disciples reaction is them still putting the pieces together. It's one thing to hear information and to learn from teaching, but it's another thing entirely to actually apply that teaching to real life. I can almost see the wheels turning in the disciples' minds as they hear Jesus reminding them of things he'd already taught them repeatedly, thinking to themselves, "Oooohhh, so THAT'S what he meant by that!" We are capable of the same sort of learning delays, where we absorb information into our left-brain, but when we encounter our first real world example where the teaching would apply, it may not initially register with us that this is what that teaching was all about...until it does, and then we really get it.

Here is another possibility of what is going on with the disciples too, and I think this is probably closer to the truth, based on Jesus' words to them. I think that fear is starting to set in. Sure, they've heard Jesus say a few times now that he was going to suffer and die at the hands of religious leaders, but did He really mean it, and why is it happening so soon? If he is about to leave them on their own, all of their faith in him as the true son of God was about to be tested, putting it all on the line. There had to be so many fears that were starting to trickle in, threatening to destroy the wall of faith they had just spent the last several years building up. What if Jesus died, and what if he didn't rise again after three days like he said he would...what if then? What would happen to them as his followers if he was proven to be a fraud? How could they go on with life, could they really go back to the way things were? Jesus speaks directly to their fears and he says, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me." He knows where there thoughts are going, and they have everything they need to know about who Jesus was, but the fears are still there, and they don't end there. Peter denies Jesus three times, as was predicted by Christ himself. After Jesus died and was resurrected, Thomas doubts the reports of his being raised from the dead until he sees him for himself. There are more examples too, but all of these guys that were giving in to fear for a while eventually completely turn around and become powerhouses of faith and do incredible work for God's kingdom as they launched what would become the largest religious movement in the history of the world. So, what changed things for them? Experiencing the truth, that's what.

Reading about the disciples of Jesus may feel too far removed from our present day to be relatable to us at first glance, but I assure you that the principles are very applicable to everyone. Based on my personal experiences with anxiety and depression, I believe that most of it may be caused by false beliefs that we carry inside of ourselves, which we may or may not even be aware of, yet they may influence our behaviors on a regular basis. Anxiety is rooted in fears that we have, which are based on things that we believe, which almost always intersect with our identity in some way, which almost always trace back to real things that happened to us along the way, usually in childhood. These beliefs are often painful to reflect on, so our natural tendency is to try and avoid them, to build walls around them to keep things from getting to them and poking at them and making us feel vulnerable. Inevitably though, things happen in life that threaten those walls that we constructed, cracks begin to form, and those beliefs begin to seep out into our daily life. Maybe we have kids, and through raising them we witness events that trigger past memories and begin to make holes in our emotional walls, and the false beliefs start to come through. Maybe we get a new job with some big responsibilities we haven't had up to that point, and as we step up in our role we feel some of those old familiar feelings from something that happened as a kid that made us believe we were stupid and we would never measure up to expectations, and the beliefs surface. Maybe we get into a new relationship, filled with the hopes and dreams that we have inside of finding the right person we could get married and start a family with, but like has happened so many times before, something happens with that person and it triggers old feelings from our childhood when our parents divorced and we felt like our world was falling apart and we were not loved, so we sabotage the relationship. This list could go on and on, and on and on, there are a million examples of how this plays out in various ways in people's every day lives.

You see, the solution isn't found in gaining more head knowledge. Although it is critical to have good truth based information in our brain, it is clear that often times that mind and the heart are at odds with what they believe about ourselves, and we can call this state being "double-minded." Living in this state is extremely frustrating for the person who genuinely wants to find healing and freedom, because as we do the work of learning the truth about what we should believe in our present circumstances, we continue to find ourselves repeating the same behavior cycles, despite having all of this new information in our heads. Why isn't anything changing? What is often the case, is that even though we've absorbed all of that data into our minds, our hearts are still stuck in the past, believing things about who we are that are based on lies. In other words, we have learned about the truth, but we haven't actually experienced it yet. Very often, the only way an experientially held lie can be overcome, is by encountering an experiential truth, which is rooted in our identity in Christ, and revealed to us by the Holy Spirit.

God loves to free his people from the lies that we often believe about ourselves, as he has called us to live in the freedom he promised through his son Jesus Christ. The hard part about finding the freedom that the Lord wants for us, is that we have to find the source of the lies that are entangled with our identity. How can we find genuine healing and freedom, if we don't even know what we truly believe? If we choose to erect walls to guard our deepest fears and lie-based beliefs from being triggered, then we should not expect to receive any truth in response to our prayers as we ask the Lord to be freed from the burden of anxiety or depression. Walls do much to keep things from triggering our painful memories and beliefs, but they also keep God from gaining access to the very things we want him to free us from. God will not violate our will, he lets us make the choice to let him in, so where we place a wall, he will not be able to enter in unless we place a door there and open it up to let him in.

It can be a terrifying feeling to think about tearing down the walls we have carefully constructed in our hearts, or even at the thought of putting a door there to let anyone in. The payoff is worth it though, the ability to find freedom from the heavy load we've been carrying up to that point should be a welcome thought. We don't enter into the process alone either, we have a friend in our savior Jesus who walks along with us through the process:

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” -Matthew 11:28-30 NIV

So where do you start in this process, if you are wanting to find freedom from the lies you've held deep in your heart for so long? Pray for the courage to face your fears, because the fears will usually lead you to the false beliefs that are under the surface. There are often layers of beliefs, you have to get through those until you arrive at the core lies, those are the ones that are wrapped up in our identity, and these beliefs are almost always at odds with truth that God has revealed in his word about who we are to him. So take hold of the vision and purpose that God has for you, and his promises for your life. You were created with a purpose, and you are loved beyond measure. So let your heart be troubled not, and as Moses said to the Israelites before they were to enter into the promised land, as they likely wrestled with fear and anxiety over the journey it would take for them to get there:

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” -Deuteronomy 31:6 NIV.