Struck Down but Not Destroyed: Living Faithfully with Anxiety

by Pierce Taylor Hibbs

Shapiro

To be okay is not to be free from all pain and suffering; it’s to be free in all pain and suffering because you’re indwelt by Christ.

anxiety is a spiritual tool in the hands of a mighty God. In that sense, it’s not something to flee from; it’s something to be learned from, something to use in order to draw nearer to God.

To be destroyed is to be no more. But to be crushed is to be reduced, to be emptied of all the false hopes of self-sufficiency. To be crushed is to realize that you’re thoroughly dependent.

My reader, please hear this: when you hit rock bottom, your ears and eyes begin opening. You hear and see more than you ever have before: too much.

God has a purpose for allowing us to be crushed by anxiety, and that purpose is helping us to hear his call.

Here’s the first bit: in order to understand your being crushed and the purpose it serves, you have to know who God is and who you are.

Why is God allowing you to be crushed by anxiety? The short answer: because he wants to communicate with you. He’s calling you.

The simple answer to the question of who we are is “creatures made for communion.” But we need to spell out what that means.

“That man bears God’s image means much more than that he is spirit and possesses understanding, will, etc. It means above all that he is disposed for communion with God, that all the capacities of his soul can act in a way that corresponds to their destiny only if they rest in God.”

God is a communicative Spirit, and we were made to commune with him.[5] These twin truths are going to have everything to do with how we see God using our anxiety to do great things.

Anxiety will help you drop any illusions that fulness of life resides anywhere except in the God who communes with himself (John 10:10), the God who has called you into communion with him. We are crushed to be called for communion.

In this chapter, let’s focus on how we develop patterns of behavior to cope with anxiety, to cope with the weakness, and how God can use those patterns to shape us and lead us to freedom in relationship with him.

I say “bare reason” because there’s a kind of biblical reason, which we’ll get into soon, that sheds much light on our anxiety and how God can use it to shape us.

These aren’t bad questions. In fact, we often need to ask them. But what many people simply don’t understand about anxiety is that you can’t always reason your way out of it.

Anxiety, in its most severe form, leads you around on a leash. It puts you in the back seat of your own life. And if you’re in the back seat long enough, you start to come up with coping mechanisms—patterns of behavior—that appear to ease your distress. Patterned behavior is our attempt to deal with perceived chaos.

Pattern-chasers—that’s who we are, made in the image of a patterning God. The trouble is that we’re prone to seek out and adopt patterns that imprison us rather than protect us or free us. We grasp for patterns that bring comfort, control, and pleasure; we shun the ones that offer shaping, surrender, and discipline.

Patterns that free us don’t remove hardship from our lives; sometimes they even push us towards it. But they always ground us in the true, life-giving promise of God—that he will always be with us (Matt. 28:20).

Yet, while patterns of behavior can bring us solace in a world that is unpredictable, they can quickly crowd out the place of faith in our lives. That’s when patterns become problematic.

Faith, in one sense, is pattern-breaking. It’s a walking away from familiarity and comfort.

Living a patterned life—something we all do by nature—can easily turn into living an imprisoned life, a life surrounded by walls that seem too large to scale and too thick to break through.

God will not leave you pattern-less; he will give you the pattern of listening to his own voice in the words of Scripture. And your anxiety can actually become the thing that opens your ears and turns you toward the one who is speaking.

Colbert’s answer was deep and beautiful, betraying years of maturity in coming to grips with grief: “What do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss, which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it’s like to be a human being.”

Anxiety makes us feel less human, but it has the potential to make us be more human.

Finding ways to break your imprisoning patterns is never going to be easy, but it’s going to make you more human because it’s going to lead you to sympathize with others. In other words, it’s going to lead you to communion. And that draw to communion is precisely what makes us human.

The centrality of speech in creation is absolutely vital, for it points to the very nature of reality as something spoken, something that requires the trust and engagement of those who receive or partake in that speech.[12]

And here’s the thing: once those roots sprout and grip the soil of the heart, communion with God grinds to a halt. You can’t have communion with distrust.

Trust in God’s speech fosters communion. Distrust in that speech causes disunion. Union is the effect of faith in speech; disunion is the effect of skepticism in speech. What does this have to do with our patterns of behavior? Every pattern of behavior is built on trust in someone or something.

We can ask for faith in God’s speech and find corresponding words from Scripture to meditate on as we walk. This is the pattern that frees us, for it is the only pattern that puts our trust in God’s speech at the center of our decision-making.

That’s precisely because I was making an effort not to eliminate anxiety but to learn from it in my relationship with God. Recall the thesis of the book again: Anxiety can be a great spiritual tool in the hands of God.

When anxiety makes you weak, ask God questions that can make you strong. “What are you teaching me, Lord?” He always answers. And he’ll always give you the faith you need to wait for his reply.

Keep in mind the truth that we ended the last chapter with: weakness through anxiety is strength in the Lord.

In this book, we’re focusing on how God uses our anxiety in shaping our relationship with him. The key is the word relationship. A relationship requires trust. And trust requires risk in small, concrete steps.

As I tell my students who are working on improving their writing, the only thing that breaks an old pattern is a new pattern.

Like every other form of suffering, anxiety is a path to relational depth. Your brokenness is going to lead to his blessing. And the greatest blessing God can give us is his presence.

Before the conquest of Canaan, Moses reminded the people of the one thing they always needed to do: love their God and obey his voice (Deut. 30:20).

For there to be any hope, God will have to utter a Word that shatters all of our distrust, a Word that eternally establishes a path to communion with him by faith.

Our anxiety is a tool in the hands of a grand physician who knows our name, who knows where we are right now. God has all of our experiences in mind all the time. So, we can be sure he will use our experiences with anxiety to whittle away at our soul and shape us to the image of his Son.

Our goal, remember, is not to get rid of anxiety; it’s to use it and learn how God is shaping us through it. Whenever you experience a swell of anxiety, ask the following question prayerfully of your heavenly Father: What are you teaching me? In my experience, God is always faithful in answering that question—maybe not right at the moment, but if you ask it and seek out the answer, especially in reliance upon Scripture, you’ll find it.

We are building a framework, and the cornerstone of that framework is a simple truth: God’s primary purpose is calling us into a trusting relationship with himself, and he can use our anxiety to do that.

All of our suffering—anxiety included—has a spiritual purpose: to draw us into the sufferings of Christ so that we can experience his resurrection power.

That’s where we start: consider the feelings as spiritual medicine. Welcome the weakness, for in doing this you are welcoming strength, which comes at the end of the path of Christ.

You and I are made to be with God and with others. Buried in our blood is not a desire for communion, but a need for it. Without communion, our souls shrivel up and lie still like fish out of water.

You and I can take great comfort in that! When the waves of anxiety are crashing over us, when the white-water seems to be choking out our life and breath, we are not alone. We are with the God who knows. We suffer with Christ, not apart from him, because he knows.

When you’re dealing with anxiety, you feel out-of-control and helpless. You’re utterly convinced that someone else is driving your life. And you’re right! God is the one who is in control of everything. You’re not in the driver’s seat. You never were. But the wonderful thing about not being in control of your own life is that the one who has the greatest love for you and has made the greatest promises to you—that one is in control.

Your mind can’t be everywhere at once. It can’t be on your anxiety and on another task with the same degree of attention. If you divert your focus from anxiety to a concrete task in front of you, it begins to subside, or at least loses some of its potency.

We begin with a focus on God as our refuge. We end with a focus on God as our refuge. Our primary focus throughout every earthly trauma and travesty is God himself, the God who is with us.

Language is not merely part of our identity; it’s the heart of it.[18] That’s why my last directive is simply to talk.

The gift of talk is the gift of otherness. And when you’re dealing with anxiety, you’re extremely self-focused. You need that otherness to pull you away from yourself, to bring your attention to another.

One thing that I’ve learned over the last decade is that when anxiety lingers, God continually uses it to shape and form us. When anxiety stubbornly stays, God sovereignly shapes.