Anxiety: Here, There, and Everywhere | Part 2

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

That was just ridiculous.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, about 38% of that's true.

So let's just start there.

I did just get back from Omaha.

What a glamorous place to be.

This is my spiritual gift of sarcasm.

Landed at the airport and they said, just get an Uber.

I'm thinking, great, 22 minutes.

It wasn't a fluke, it's Omaha.

This is their schedule for Ubers.

I was also watching the news in my hotel room before I went out, and they do apparently in the Midwest every evening a pollen count, which is a riveting report on square inches.

But what was fascinating is they talked about this particular winter going into spring, how the pollen count is high, and then they actually had a doctor on.

And she said that if the pollen count is high enough, everybody gets allergic.

Everybody.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's just like anxiety.

You can't see it, you can't smell it, you don't know it's there, but you've got it.

And I would say one of the most promising things in this series was Ryan's sermon last week to have a senior pastor that's not just willing to get up and preach on anxiety as though you have it and he doesn't, but to show up and say, Me too.

So many years ago, one of the things you did leave out about in my biography, Ryan, is I used to be a nurse and I used to work in the emergency room.

And I remember one night one of the LVNs who had worked up on the medical surgical floor with me when I had been up there came into the emergency room.

She was a couple years younger than I was.

She was having a baby.

Problem was, she didn't know she was pregnant.

Now I know what you're thinking.

Of course she knew she was pregnant.

And that's what I thought.

So we're helping her deliver this baby while we're trying to calm her down, helping her realize that she's having a baby.

And then after the baby's born, I came and sat with her, and this is what she said to me.

Do you think if I knew I was having a baby, but I didn't know I was having a baby, that I would have come to the emergency room where I work?

All of a sudden I realized she didn't know she was having a baby.

Of course she wouldn't do that.

She had to get on the phone and call her boyfriend and not say, Oh, I'm pregnant, not sure what we're gonna do, but you're a father.

See, here's the tricky thing about anxiety is it's here, there, and it's everywhere.

And it's most dangerous when you don't think you have it.

And I know if you're like me, I've gone through periods in my life where I've listened to series like this and thought, oh, this is so helpful for other people.

And what's true is everybody struggles with it, and the more unaware you are of it, the more subconscious it is in you versus somebody who just does all the typical anxiety things, the more dangerous it is.

Why?

Because anxiety is such a powerful force, and it's such a universal force, and you have this enormous force going on inside you and you don't know it's there, it's a problem.

About 70 times in the Bible, it says, do not be afraid.

Now you will have heard that it is said 365 times.

This is Christian weird talk, and we need to stop it because they will say it's one for every day of the year.

It is not 365 times in the Bible.

It is about 70 times.

But 70 is a lot, and it is probably the most off-repeated, you could call it a command, you could call it an invitation, you could call it an awareness to say if the Bible says it 70 times that it's worth paying attention to.

Years ago, when uh John and I worked at a church in the Midwest, we had a training session, and a woman came in and put a flip chart up on the wall, and we started just talking about sin that we're aware of in our lives.

And so she started having us call out stuff, and obviously in a room like that, you don't go to the darkest, deepest places, but we just started calling out stuff that we struggle with, and she's writing on the flip chart, filling it in, we're all resonating.

Yes, I've struggled with that.

Oh, I know somebody in the room that struggles with that.

And about two-thirds of the way down on the flip chart, she drew a horizontal line like a math problem.

And then in capital letters under it, she wrote two words.

She wrote fear and pride.

It's like, oh wow.

Yeah.

Every one of those sins, you could tie a thread to one of those two words, and she was helping us understand that with these issues in our lives, the the work is not behavioral modification, the work is to go down deep and try to find out what it's attached to and do the internal work.

And then this was 35 years ago.

I've never forgotten it.

She went over to the word pride and crossed it out and wrote fear underneath it.

Almost everything that's troubling in our lives has the root of fear at some level.

Has the root of anxiety.

Here's what I want you to do for the next few minutes.

I want you to think about something that you feel anxious about.

Oh my gosh, yes, that video, I kept waiting for the guy to go splat.

It felt like an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Some of you are too young to know what that means.

You can Google it later.

Um, if you just woke up yesterday and heard about the bombing in Israel, there's lots of things to be anxious about.

It could be something personal in your life, it could be for somebody else, it could be something involved at work.

But I just want you to let something float in your mind and your heart for the next few minutes so that while I'm talking, you're thinking about what is being said in light of one of the things that you might struggle with.

So for a few minutes, I just want to go through scripture because people who are obviously anxious get labeled that way, and the rest of us get off the hook by thinking, well, that's something I don't struggle with that much.

But you see, anxiety takes so many different forms.

And I'm just gonna go pretty quickly through four characters in the Bible who were anxious and what their one word is, how it came out in their body and in their lives to help us all consider that it doesn't just look like talking about our problems too much or wringing our hands or pacing.

There's lots of different ways.

The interesting thing is it starts very, very early on in Scripture, in the third chapter of Genesis.

Here, God has created this amazing world, and then before he brings people into the picture and asks them to co-partner with him in the redemption of the world, he designs a garden for us.

He brings Adam and Eve in and he says, You have everything you need.

Everything you need.

One of the books that Ryan quoted out of last week is called Managing Leadership Anxiety by Steve Cuss.

And Steve says in his book that at the heart of anxiety is the belief that you're not getting something that you need.

Adam and Eve, you have everything.

Except this one thing I don't have.

And they figured out a way to go after it.

And they had great hopes going after that that maybe, I don't know, it would be everything they needed, and it didn't go very well.

And they began to realize all of a sudden that they had made a big mistake and they had violated the one thing God asked them not to do.

You remember the story.

It says they lived naked in the garden and all of a sudden they were aware that they were naked.

And what did they do in response?

Adam and Eve, Genesis chapter 3, verse 8.

Genesis 3:8

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

Just stop right there.

This is free, this is not about anxiety, but I love the fact that God created this garden and he didn't hang out with them all day long.

He came later in the day.

Again, it's just great to let scripture really inform how we view God.

And then it says they hid from the Lord among the trees of the garden.

They hid among the very things that God created to be a place of beauty for them, but in their anxiety, they hid.

Fight or flight response.

They were in the flight category.

They hid.

And sometimes our anxiety takes the form of shutting us down, walking away from a conversation that needs to be had, figuring a way to blame the other person because we have to hide what we've done.

Saying, well, I remember in our in our marriage early on, um, about two years before I got a handle on this, I would say to something to John about something that was hard for me, and he'd say, Well, I'm a lot of things, but I'm not that.

Well, it sounds like he's admitting he knows he's got issues, but I'm you're right, I'm probably wrong.

After about the 15th or 16th conversation over two years, I'm like, so what are you struggling with?

What do you, what are your issues?

And both of us found ways to hide early on in our marriage to protect the other person from seeing the real us.

We hide, we walk away, we do the flight response.

There's another character not long after that named Jacob.

Jacob had a brother named Esau and says from the very beginning when he was born that Jacob was a little bit of a schemer.

And as Jacob grew older and he realized his father was getting ready to die, and that meant all of the inheritance, which is something Jacob thought he needed, was going to go to his older brother Esau because that was the custom.

And so in cahoots with his mother, he comes up with a way to fool his father, who's on his deathbed and losing his vision, that he actually is the older brother, and he gets the blessing, and he gets the inheritance.

And at the end of that time, Isaac said to the older brother Esau, Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing.

Jacob, in his anxiety, believing that he needed the inheritance that wasn't due to him, went into control mode.

Anybody here control your drug of choice when you get anxious?

When I worked with Pat Lancioni doing business consulting, uh, we would do two-day offsites with teams, and then we would come back once a month, and we would work with the executives and the teams.

And I did a fair amount of coaching of CEOs.

And one of the recurring themes among many of the male CEOs was their uncomfortability when one of their women executives cries.

And I would always say, You're afraid of water?

Like, come on, you're a big guy.

You can't possibly be afraid of that.

And so we would just start to unpack the meaning behind it.

And I said, I've seen you in meetings get a little angry and raise your voice and get a little stern.

That's her version of what you're doing.

Hers just comes out in tears, yours comes out in control.

When we want to control things, it's a sure sign that somewhere we're feeling some form of anxiety.

And it doesn't take us very long as we get older to realize that very few things are really in our control.

The good news is all of this becomes, when we can name it, I'm hiding.

Oh, I must I must feel anxious about something.

I'm trying to control the situation.

What am I anxious about?

This all becomes a place for us to deeply meet God.

To say, I need your help.

I need to understand this better.

Moses, who is one of my favorite characters in the Old Testament, had spent many years out in the wilderness working with animals because he had killed an Egyptian when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt.

And then all of a sudden, after a very long time, about 40 years, God comes to him in a bush that was burning.

And Moses went over to see what was happening, this bush that burned but didn't get consumed, and he had an experience with God, and God basically told him, Hey, I've chosen you, Moses.

I mean, again, this is a little free piece.

God picks the most unlikely reluctant people in the Bible to lead.

That's for another day.

It's fascinating.

And then over and over again, God tells Moses, I'm ready to bring the Israelites out of slavery after 400 years.

You're the one I've chosen to do it.

And in a series of three different moves, Moses just keeps making excuses.

He's an incredibly reluctant leader.

And then finally, he says in Exodus chapter 4, 13, oh God, just send somebody else.

Exodus 4 · chapter mention

Just get it away from me.

He avoided it.

He was nervous.

He had anxiety about being chosen, and he just wanted to avoid another form of flight.

I don't know about you, but I avoid things that I'm not good at.

I avoid things that I don't want to do.

And I don't recognize that I'm avoiding it often until they just start to pile up, and then I get even more anxious.

But when you start avoiding something, start to pay attention, whether it's a person or a task or a situation, might I be anxious here?

Because the more we have words for it, the more we can slow down and make our discipleship include my anxiety, God.

I need to meet you in my anxiety.

And then Saul, who was the king.

As Saul became more and more aware that as he was the king, that his son Jonathan's best friend David, who was just a shepherd, was gaining in popularity among the people and was doing things beautifully for God.

And in fact, it says that people in Israel were singing, Saul has slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands.

And Saul was getting annoyed and angry and anxious because he thought his kingdom might get taken from him, because Saul believed that he needed to be king to be important.

And so Saul sent the men, it says in 1 Samuel 19, sent the men back to see David and told them, Bring him back so that I may kill him.

And Saul's form of anxiety, when he felt it, he moved to attack the situation that he felt anxious about and the person that he felt anxious about.

What's your word?

There's way more we could go through, but there will be a word somewhere where you begin to understand that this is how I most often respond when I'm feeling anxious.

We can do all of them, but it's really important not only to sit with the issue that I asked you a few minutes ago to hold in your head, but then to understand what's the word that is the trigger to me that says, I'm feeling anxious right now.

And if the Bible tells me 70 times that I need not to be afraid, what am I afraid of?

You see, circumstances are a terrible driver for our lives.

And yet, if you're like me, if I'm really honest, it's almost always circumstances that are driving how I'm feeling and thinking and experiencing life.

Here's some things that Jesus told us in John chapter 21.

John 21 · chapter mention

Jesus said, somebody's gonna lead you to where you do not want to go.

Said that to Peter.

Right after he told Peter that he was giving the keys of the kingdom to lead when Jesus left.

Someone's gonna lead you to where you do not want to go.

I don't know about you, but I would be very anxious if somebody said that to me.

A couple of years ago, my husband left a voicemail on my phone when people were still actually listening to voicemails, and he said, Hey, I've got an idea, you won't like it, I'll talk to you when I get home.

I'm like, Why do you why do you do this?

Why do you feel the need to start my anxiety early?

When you could just wait till I get home and spike it.

Jesus said, Somebody's gonna lead you to where you do not want to go, to the disciple that Jesus asked three times, Do you love me?

These are the people he loves, he talks to like this.

Jesus said this to his disciples and to us in this world, you will have tribulation.

Take it to the bank.

Stop counting on your circumstances to lower your anxiety and to believe that I'm good.

And Jesus said, Here's what you have to do if you're gonna follow me.

You have to deny yourself and pick up your cross.

So Jesus is telling us you are going to experience lots of anxiety for your whole life.

And so, for the next few minutes that we have left, I just want to talk about what do we do with this?

When you're feeling anxious.

Dallas Willard used to say that God has yet to meet anybody except in reality.

And if we, he said, faithlessly disregard situation after situation as not being right, we will simply never find a place to meet with him in his life in our lives.

Our job, for the most part, is not just to try to pray the anxiety away, it's to name it and sit with it and live with it and invite God into it.

Now, I'd rather just pray it away.

And if that doesn't work, I'd rather pray it away and pretend that it did.

Oh, yeah, I'm feeling great.

That prayer time was just, I'm not anxious anymore.

I don't believe you.

And I think you're missing an incredible opportunity to go deeper with Jesus.

Uh Less and Leslie Parrott, that really is their name.

They're a married couple.

There are Christian psychologists up in the northwest section of the country.

But they say that conflict is the only way to intimacy.

I'm having trouble with the connection.

Me too.

Me too.

Mostly because the first time I heard that, I thought, that sounds like really bad news.

Conflict is the only way to intimacy?

That's not, I don't want to hear that.

That is such a profound statement.

And I think it's one of the reasons why when you read the Gospels, that Jesus is so often saying difficult, hard things to people.

Because he knows that that's the way to get us down to the parts in our soul that we hide and run away from and avoid or try to control that need to be surrendered.

We just sang a few minutes ago about surrender.

It's such an easy word to sing, isn't it?

I call it the S word.

It's a really tough word.

If conflict is the only way to intimacy, then the very thing that we want with each other and the very thing we need with God, we avoid.

We pretend it doesn't exist.

And so I think it's really important to pay attention to the ways in which God is calling us to master our anxiety and not let it rule us.

The first thing I would say is you have to pay attention to it and own it.

You have to grow in your self-awareness.

So often when people will say, Well, what do you feel anxious about?

So often, especially Christians, will say, you know, not really not much.

Or just the opposite, everything in my life.

But to actually be self-aware enough to name it and to own it, not be ashamed of it.

It's very human.

But to give it a name, I have a good friend who actually calls her anxiety Gladys, and I can remember that because that was my grandmother's name.

I was like, I don't know how I feel about this.

But she said, I just need a name for it.

And so I talk about Gladys a lot, and I talk with Gladys a lot.

And I talk to Jesus about Gladys.

And giving it a name just helps.

You can name it or not, but you have to.

A name for it.

You have to own it and know that it's true.

When you own it too, being able to understand when is distraction from it healthy.

I just sometimes you just need a break from your anxiety when it gets that high.

And we all have times when the anxiety that we experience is pretty low level, other times where it's moderate, sometimes when it's really, really high.

And sometimes distraction is a gift.

We need it.

We need to put a healthy compartmentalizing boundary around that anxiety and live our lives for a while, but we have to go back and live there with it.

I've had times in my life where my anxiety has been so high, and I don't think of myself as a naturally anxious person.

It was off the charts.

I remember at work walking down the stairs and leaning against the wall where nobody could see me.

And the only prayer I had was I said Jesus probably 75 times.

I just leaned against that wall and said, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

I couldn't say it anymore.

And I've had times where my anxiety has been so high that my prayer was not to pray.

Because the more I prayed about it, the more anxious I found myself getting.

And my not praying was actually a form of surrender.

Sometimes we have to be just this honest with ourselves.

Say I'm feeling overwhelmed.

I don't see a way out.

When it's that high, it's almost impossible to ignore.

I think it's even a little bit more dangerous.

It's more overwhelming here.

It's a little more dangerous when it's moderate or slight.

Because it's causing us to do and be and think all kinds of different things, and we're not aware of it.

So growing in our ability to be aware of it, to check in with ourselves during the day, to invite God to check in with us, to invite our friends and community.

How is it, what do I do when you see me anxious?

I remember being in a small group many years ago, and one of the people in the group, we asked this question amongst each other.

And one of the men in the group was able to say to somebody else, to another man in the group, when you get anxious, you shut down, you stop talking, you get really quiet.

And at first, the guy said, I don't think I do that.

And you know, the rest of the group's like, yeah, you do, yeah, you do.

And then later on in the conversation, one of the women said to one of her friends, you talk so much when you get anxious.

When Brian said, I talk fast.

Sometimes that's just me being excited about an idea, and other times it's my anxiety.

And the girl, I mean, you would have laughed if you had been there.

She just went on about 80 miles an hour for the next two minutes about why she doesn't do that.

And we're just all like, uh, like right now, what you're doing right now.

Um, pay attention, be a student of yourself.

St.

Augustine, who lived about 300 years after Jesus, fascinating character.

If you ever want to go deep into one of the early church fathers, he's a great one to start with.

Very unusual story.

But he said that the um the knowledge of God always begins with the knowledge of self.

Not in a narcissistic way, but in a way that understands that God is so big to understand that if you can just start with understanding how he made you, you're gonna go very far over time to be able to understand other people and to understand who God is.

So this self-awareness that is kind of a tough journey, but to commit, you know, reality show people should listen to these four things I'm about to tell you, to really pay attention to anxiety and to be able to name it and become very self-aware.

And then to without shame just say, yeah, I'm feeling anxious.

The second thing I would say is, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, Steve Cuss says in his book that anxiety almost always has it at its center that I am not getting something that I think I need.

So, how do I identify what it is that I'm grasping on to that I believe I need in this situation?

I believe I need to keep my job no matter what.

I believe I need to stay in this relationship or get out of this relationship no matter what.

I believe I need somebody to stop honking at me when I change lanes.

Whatever it is, the myth that I must have this in order for my life to be okay.

I have to let go.

I have to do what Jesus says to die to myself.

It doesn't sound like a very attractive premise to die to myself.

It's because it's a lot of work.

That life is a lifelong journey of surrender and loss.

Henry Nowen writes beautifully about this.

If you haven't read Henry Nowen, I highly recommend reading his material.

But he says life is really a series of loss.

And the older you get, the more the loss increases.

And to get very comfortable with and familiar with, I am grieving something that I thought I needed.

And now it's time to surrender it.

Not only is this not easy, I think sometimes it's counterintuitive.

A couple of years ago, uh, the organization I work with, we had Andy Crouch out.

He's a Christian who writes a lot about the intersection of faith and culture in very profound, deep ways.

And I was going through something at that time that was really difficult.

And uh I remember we had tables of church leaders there, and he taught for a while, and then people were asking him questions, and one of them asked him some question about suffering, and I was just standing in the back of the room listening, and he said, the only promise that we get from Jesus in our suffering is not that he will take it away, but that he will be with us.

And I said, Inside, that's not enough.

I think conversations like that are really critical if you're going to work through getting to the place where you can really invite God in to change your anxiety.

If we mindlessly believe that kind of stuff, well, it's okay, Jesus is with me, that's enough.

Um, that's behavioral modification.

It's the internal work to say, uh, maybe someday I'll believe that that's enough, but right now, I just want you to fix this.

I just want you to change the situation.

And honestly, I know you can because you're all powerful.

Don't understand why you're not.

This wrestling with God.

The book of Psalms in Hebrew, no, the book of Psalm means praise.

Mathematically, there are two-thirds psalms of lament and one-third praise.

There are verses that say, I hope my enemy's teeth fall out of his head.

This is scripture.

There is a verse in there that says, I hope my enemy's first child is stillborn.

Maybe mathematically, there's two-thirds lament in the Psalms, because the way to get to true praise, to really believe that it's enough that Jesus is with me, is through the conflict and through the lament and through the wrestling and the surrender of what it was that I've been grasping onto so desperately that I really think I need to be happy.

And the last thing, and this one is the most important, is to build your center in your soul with God.

There is a little place inside of you.

Could be in your head, could be in your heart.

I always feel like it's right here, but I don't care where it is in your in your mind, it's a little center where just you and God live.

And you will carve it out and pat the grass down and wear it enough that there's this little place where you can talk to him about all these things that you feel anxious about.

And eventually say, Yeah, it is enough that you're with me.

And then you will go back to your life and you will wear a little path so that you can get back to that center when you need it.

And sometimes you don't go back to the center very often and you need a machete to find your way back to that center and find the path.

And other times you go back and forth enough so much, maybe out of desperation or whatever, that the path is well worn.

But that's the place you need to build.

And honestly, you may have to on many days go back there 189 times.

And maybe you only get there for six seconds.

That's the journey.

The danger is when we have people that tell us, oh yes, I found that center and I live now out of that center all the time.

No, they don't.

That's not the way it works.

We need to challenge that myth and refuse to believe it.

So that with Jesus, we are fighting our way back to find him all the time.

I need you.

I need you.

I can't find my way back, and then I find my way back, and it's like, there you are.

I just need to sit with you for a few minutes.

And I need to remind myself of all the myths I believe and what's really, really true.

And what's true is it is enough that you are with me.

But you don't get to say that without the hard-fought journey to actually believe it.

Not believe that somebody else fought the journey and told you about it, but that you did.

Yesterday, when I was getting ready to leave Omaha to get back, so that I could be here with you guys this morning, I was staying at a very nice hotel, and the night before I checked with the front desk and they got a taxi because I wasn't trusting their 25-minute Ubers to show up at 7:30 for my early flight.

The guy texted me, it was all confirmed.

Got up that morning, stood out there, texted him, I'm in the lobby, I'm ready, and he never showed up.

Did I mention I was in Omaha?

I think there's a problem in Omaha.

So I went to the front desk and I said, Hey, I have a situation.

Worked with the front desk last night, explained everything to him, and I am, well, I need to get to the airport, and I need to get there soon.

And the guy said to me, Well, we've done everything we can.

And I said, Oh, oh, I don't think you have.

Um, I trusted you guys last night to find me a ride, and I don't think I was my best self in that interaction.

Now, I do believe there was a part of me that legitimately had a fair argument with him.

And at the same time, it took me till I got to the airport, the valet finally drove me.

I said, I'll give you 20 bucks if you'll take me, said sure I'll take you.

To realize, oh, I was losing control, and I thought I needed, which I did need to be here, because Ryan's anxiety would go through the roof if I said, Well, you have to preach because I'm not gonna be there.

But there was not a very big part of me that moved to surrender quickly, and the irony was I was coming here to preach on anxiety.

That's really funny.

I'm still working on this.

This, my friends, is a lifelong journey.

It is the heart of the journey with Jesus.

A couple of years ago, um, we had Pastor Ken Foreman from Cathedral of Faith do a devotional for some of our pastor leaders, right?

I don't know if you remember if you were there.

But he talked about where Jesus says, My yoke is easy.

Now, I don't know about you, but I feel like Jesus said a lot of really weird things, and this may be in the top five.

Like, huh, you think your yoke is easy?

I don't experience it that way.

And then Ken went on to explain that in Jesus' day, if you were a farmer, and this was a very much an agricultural agrarian society, and you had two oxen, and you would invite the carpenter from the town to come out to your field.

And if it was obvious, he would know how to craft the yoke to fit the larger oxen more heavily.

But if the oxen looked very similar, he could by the he had been trained by feel and sight to be able to determine how to craft the yoke so a disproportionate amount of the weight fell on the larger ox.

And then after he explained that, Ken just simply said, Jesus was a carpenter.

This is what Jesus did for a living.

So when Jesus said, My yoke is easy, he wasn't saying, hey, mindlessly just believe that following me is a walk in the park.

That's not what he was saying at all.

He was saying, in this world you will have tribulation.

You will have a yoke on you.

This is not a leisurely thing to have a yoke on you.

And in that, I have created a yoke that puts a disproportionate amount of weight on me, not you.

I bought on Etsy a yoke for Ken.

I did.

Etsy's tough though.

It came from Ukraine before the war started.

And when it got delivered, I had bought him a little yoke to put on his desk.

It was seven feet wide.

I didn't read all the little details in there, but he has it in his office.

Because I said, you have no idea not only how much that message meant to me, but how much I repeat that telling of it because I think it's easy at first blush to listen to what Jesus said and to just shake your head, or to mindlessly adhere to it when you don't really believe it.

I remind myself of that truth often during the day when I'm in my little center spot.

Sometimes I don't even go to my center spot all day long.

Sometimes for weeks I don't find my way there.

Sometimes there's days when I live there well, other days there's days when I fight with a machete to get back there.

But almost every time I get there, I try to remind myself of the yoke.

And that whatever anxiety I'm feeling, and however it looks in my life, that my job is to place the disproportionate amount of weight on Jesus by saying, I think I'm anxious about all these things that I think I need.

Remember what Jesus said to Martha?

Oh Martha, you're worried about so many things, but you only need this one thing.

That's the journey.

And for awakenings to be a place in a community in our small groups, in our interaction time where we can actually have the conversation about, I'm feeling anxious about this.

And the I'll pray for you, that's lovely.

Please don't ever stop doing that.

But maybe even another sentence, what will you do this week when you notice it rising up in you?

I think learning to talk to ourselves, to have these conversations with our minds and with Jesus is such a part of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

Let's pray.

Father, I wish there was a cartoon bubble over every head in here, including mine, that was full of all of the things that we're anxious about.

So that we could see we're not alone.

So that we could see that other people don't be afraid.

For I am with you.

I am with you.

I pray that we would have the courage to name it, to sit with it, to talk to other people about it, but mostly to be with you in it, God.

I think that your kindness and your goodness is really reflected in the promise of I am with you.

And maybe it may it be true of all of us in our journey with Jesus in Christ's name.

Amen.

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