Strategies for Dealing with Anxiety, Part 1

When I opened the bathroom door, my five-year-old son was standing there drying off from his shower. He had called me in, distressed. Pointing to his belly, he asked, “Dad, what is that?” I leaned over to take a look, but didn’t see anything abnormal. I then felt his belly, but didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. My son was sure something was going on with himself. In an effort to calm his anxiety, I did something really dumb: I made up an answer.

 

I said, “Well, I’d say what you’re asking me about is called a pore.” “What’s a pore, Dad?” he asked. I said, “You know how you sweat a lot? Your body is covered in these little pores, and when your body gets too hot then your pores open up to let water out. It’s your body’s way of trying to cool off.”

 

Seventeen years later, we still don’t know what possessed him to ask the next question. He asked me, “Does blood ever come out of our pores?” To which I replied, “Yes, in fact there are certain dread diseases like Ebola virus which, when you get that, all your pores open up, all your blood and bodily fluids come out, and then you die. And now it’s time to go to bed.”

 

Brain dead, I took him straight from the bathroom and that horrific visual, and tucked him in bed. I then walked down the hallway, through the dining room, into the living room, and plopped on the couch next to my wife. Like an old-fashioned typewriter, little feet came quickly tapping down the hallway a few minutes later. And then a cry from behind us, “Dad, I have Ebola virus!”

 

I called my son over to me and tried to strike a logical note. “Have you been to Africa lately?” “No sir.” “Have you been around any monkeys lately?” “No sir.” “Where’s the blood?” “I don’t know, but I have Ebola virus!” “No you don’t.” I then walked with my son back to his bedroom, tucked him in again, and left him there to sort it out. Alone.

 

Unwittingly, carelessly, I had stirred the deep waters of my little son’s mind. We know that because about once a month for the next six months he would come out of his bedroom with another dread disease or illness. One month he was having a coronary. The next month he was having a stroke. Then he had a pulmonary embolism. With each new catastrophe, I stuck with my same approach: logically, dispassionately, trying to talk him out of it. With the same response from me to him: no, you don’t have that. Go to sleep.

 

In the six month he came out of his bedroom convinced he had cancer. I started in on my logic. “You have cancer? Where is the cancer?” “Right there, on my leg” he said. He pulled up the left pant leg of his pajamas and pointed to his shin. “There.” I took a look and saw what I would describe as a small patch of dry skin. My first thought was the same, that this is nothing but imagination going over the cliff. But as we walked down the hallway to his bedroom,  it hit me that logic in this case was not going to get us very far. I couldn’t say, “Little boys don’t get cancer” because, as it happened, there was a boy at our church who had cancer. And that boy died.

 

Now, in the sixth iteration of knocking on death’s door, I tried a different tac. I tucked my son in bed, then laid down beside him. I snuggled up, wrapped my right arm around him and said something close to, “You know, it’s possible that right now both of us have cancer and don’t even know it. But you know who does know? God does. Jesus does. We believe God knows everything and that He’s good. God’s in control of everything going inside and outside of us, so let’s talk to Him about it.” I then started praying for and over my son, and within minutes he was asleep.

 

In my desperation I had stumbled upon a strategy for dealing with anxiety. It was always there, in the Bible, but I had missed it. And yet, mercifully, it started coming to me. I had incarnated something to my son that he could feel and experience; something had displaced his fears. One  Biblical strategy, among others, for dealing with anxiety is to realize that you can overcome a lesser fear with a greater fear, and one emotion can overcome another emotion.  

 

For example, Jesus and the disciples were out on the sea when a wild storm kicked up. Jesus was sleeping, and His disciples thought they were going to die. “When Jesus woke up, he rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Silence! Be still!’ Suddenly the wind stopped, and there was a great calm. Then he asked them, ‘Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?’” The disciples were clearly afraid for their lives, which Jesus acknowledges. But Jesus then rebukes the disciples for looking in the wrong direction. By being captivated by the storm rather than Him, Jesus was saying that the disciple’s fears were misplaced.

 

Then something more. After the disciples witness Jesus calming the storm, they continue being afraid—not of the storm, but of Jesus. “The disciples were absolutely terrified. ‘Who is this man?’ they asked each other. ‘Even the wind and waves obey him!’” (Mark 4:39-41). And with this fear comes no rebuke from Jesus. Why? Because their fears were now properly located.

 

A greater fear overcomes a lesser fear. One emotion overcomes another emotion. This reality comes up multiple times in Christian Scripture. See Luke 12:4-5 for another example. Finally and ultimately, “We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. We will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows we have not experienced his perfect love” (1 John 4:16-18).

 

Do you know this love? The self-sacrificing love of Christ is more than a propositional truth.  God’s love for us in Jesus is meant to be experienced, felt even, in order to change us, comfort us, free us, encourage us, sustain us, move us. A few days from now, Christians will begin a weeklong spiritual journey that culminates in the high point of our religious calendar. We call it Passion week. In light of all that’s provoking anxiety around and in us this season, it might be a good time to seek out the intense love of God. Don’t look in, look up. Set your thoughts and affections not on the storm but on the Savior.

 

Because Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).