I’ll never forget the night my mom called and all I could hear was sniffling on the other end, “I have cancer.” As I hung up the phone–living half way across the world –I was suddenly filled with the most intense anxiety I had ever known.
There are things that happen in life that we may not expect. Scary things. Seemingly unfair things. Things that cause the kind of anxiety that keeps us awake at night. The heart-fluttering, palm-sweating kind of angst. And when we turn to God’s Word for solace, this all-too-familiar line in Philippians 4:6 gets me every time:
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”
If I’m honest, sometimes I wish I could go back in time just so I could look the Apostle Paul straight in the eye and say, “Seriously man? I mean, do you really think it is possible to live an anxiety-free life in a world of terrorists, earthquakes, cancer and covid?”
We may not be able to get a direct answer on that, unfortunately. But perhaps he would remind us that the Bible doesn’t consist of stand-alone verses from which we can draw simple and often cynical conclusions. Rather, we are part of a larger story that tells us that the harsh reality we often see and experience in our world today: 1) isn’t as God intended to be; and 2) isn’t the end of the story.
So what? Does that change anything?
Take a look at Paul’s follow-up to the previous verse: “
“And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus”
Philippians 4:7, emphasis my own
Paul says that there is something profound that happens when we turn to God in prayer, especially in the most anxious-worthy situations (and they will come no matter who we are), that brings a supernatural peace beyond our understanding.
This is counterintuitive because if you’re anything like me, you want to know the why things happen the way they do. We often think, If only I knew why this was happening or what the outcome was going to be, then I would not be so worried about it. We hang onto our anxiety because we think we are entitled to it. We think God owes us an answer. But Paul here is flipping the script that feeds our worrying ways. When we pray, he says, something happens. We may not know exactly what it is and we most likely won’t have more answers, but we can know that when we call upon our living God and lift our deepest most crippling anxieties to him, He acts on His promise to be with us and help us through any trial.
Sometimes, all we can do is throw our hands up and cry out, “Lord, I don’t like this, I don’t get this and I hate this!” But I believe our muffled cries and warm tears are enough of a prayer to move God’s troops in to place guards around our hearts and minds, so when anxiety, worry, fear, discouragement and despair threaten to creep in, they will be kept out because of this single fact: we are in Christ.
Today, just today, I pray, that truth will make all the difference.