What Does Anxiety Feel Like? Is There Hope?

Anxieties are agitated things; thoughts that pace the floor, feelings that bite their lips, a right thumb pressing deep into the left hand, pushing and scrubbing muscle and skin.

Anxieties found me before I was a pastor. Bouts of anxiety dapple the biology of my kin. Add to that my own share trauma along with ordinary cares proportionate to my age and vocation and both body and soul contribute plenty to these ants-in-the-pants-moods that crawl about with their jitters and creepers.

Becoming a Jesus follower and a pastor did not un-anxiety me.

Haunted Houses

When I was a boy I pleaded with my Dad to let me go into a haunted house. The last room was doused in strobe lights that bounced off checkerboard floors, ceiling and walls. Awash in disorientation a hand reached out from an unseen cove and grabbed me. Instinctively I ran . . .straight into the wall. I knew I had to get out but I could not see the door even though it was right in front of me. My Dad yelled, "run for the door!" I got up and ran again and this time I hit the wall again and came crashing down.

Anxiety is like standing in a haunted house, awash in strobe light in a checker board box with a haunted hand and a voice telling you to run for it.

It doesn't matter that the strobe light was bought around the corner in the daylight nor that the checkerboard floors were painted on, or that the hand was just a dude trying to make a living. Anxiety makes it scarier than it is. No matter how simple the path to the door and no matter how clear the directions someone gives you, you find yourself on your rump, a throbbing welp swelling on your forehead.

It is a kind thought and helpful teaching to hear early anxious Christians say that we can turn our anxieties into prayers (Philippians 4:6ff). Is it really true that I could turn all of my throbbing haunted house head whelps into talk with God?

Flies, Restless Legs, Palantirs and Illusory Images

But how could God have patience for that? I mean, anxiety makes a distraction out of ordinary moments that otherwise would bless us. Like flies at the dinner table, we must swat and throw our hands as we try to share with each other about our day. Next to the dinner table, our dog bites the air and clinks its teeth trying to catch these gnats that dizzily fly around us.

Anxieties are like mosquitos, harassing our attempts to rest. The bloodsuckers bomb the skin when all we wanted was to lay gently in a hammock among breezes at dusk. Dripping hot with humidity, we run for cool air inside the house, itchy welts stinging our legs.

Speaking of legs, anxieties makes a mess of them at night. Two legs can push and shove each other into a quarrel behind the back alleys of my knees. They crash their fight into my shoulder blades and throb there too.

These harassments in ordinary moments, times of rest, and at night can act like those Palantirs in fantasy stories. We try to see into the future but all we see is doom.

Anxiety alerts us to fear. A threat, real or imagined, hides behind the bushes of our night thoughts and stalks them. Finances, reputation, expectations, what we wish would have happened but didn’t. What we fear will happen but hasn’t. All our sins-real or imagined, the “but what ifs” of friends, jobs, kids, sickness. The imagined enemies in the community, at work, the church, or enemies that aren’t imagined, real traumas, foul memories. This constant and felt vulnerability stomps up and down on the steps of our minds. The sun shines outside where friends smile and being loved is real but the hurricane pounds the inner coasts of our being.

Anxieties in caregivers expose the romanticisms of our ideal selves. At lunch tomorrow I will likely hold my Bible with hands that tremble and a heart rate too high. I will speak prayers out of haywire feelings and seek to offer the presence of pastoral care on less sleep than I want. "A pastor doesn't struggle like this," I tell myself. Others sternly agree. With such thoughts, I invite condemnation and shame to join the party and the spiraling continues.

But I remember the “turn your anxieties into prayers” idea and a feisty thought sparks within me. What if we don’t have to listen anymore to the finger-wag frowns of people who’ve no idea what this dark-water faith-experience is like? What if there are other voices, kinder, sturdier, knowledgable. Voices that calls us beloved?

“Give all your worries, anxieties and cares to God, they say, for God cares for you.” (I Pet. 5:7)

Is it possible that God is like my best friend Jessica? “You doing ok?” she asks. “No, I think I’m on the verge of a panic attack.” I say. She draws near, places her hand gently on the back of my neck, leans in to touch my forehead with hers, and says, “I know this is hard. I’m here with you.” Is that what it means that God cares for us when we are in the midst of our cares?

But If I give my cares to God won’t that be like a child at dinner who didn’t mean to but knocked over a glass of milk, which tumped your glass of soda, into the peas and meatloaf? The broken-damn-liquid breaks into the mashed potatoes with a bubbly white river that runs off the table into a puddled wet floor. The result is that the adults at the table want to shout “what are you thinking?” or cuss at you or remind you how you always seem to spill and spoil or how maybe you did it on purpose just to ruin everything and you need a “time-out” or worse.

It can feel hard to trust that we can take all of our haywire, floor-stained, spilt-milk, haunted-house wall cares and thrust them into the hands of God.

The early Christians believed that with all of this frenzy of ourselves, he cares for us still, welcomes us with our jitters, and can hold our weight. What if this were true?

Held Together

I mean, anxieties shout at us that everything that exists, whether virtual or non-virtual, is rioting, and no one can hold it or us together. Anxieties tempt us to believe that we must panic in the water and thrash about for any life preserver of relief that we can find. “No buoy you can reach for can hold your weight,” they say. So we bob and grasp for splash water angry to float just once with ease.

But sometimes in the dead of night, I repeat this prayer over and again, trying to lung-rest in its care. Jesus you hold everything I see and can’t see together (Colossians 1:16-17).

Everything real or imagined, foul or tricksy, obeys Jesus. This includes what ails me.

I want what the early Christians tasted. The care of the one through whom everything was created to bend toward my little pile of jittery thoughts and achy bones. Sheltering me The One Who Cares For Me can look into the red-eyes of every looter in my being and with plain strength say, "Enough!" "Be Gone!" "Be Still!" Jesus could kiss my storming soul with a kind word and say, "shhhhh . . . be at peace lovely one. Rest now.

The Gill Giver

Everything in me wants these fight and flight waters to subside. For some people, they graciously will and do! For such a person, your story has to do with being pulled onto the beach and chest thumped into breath through the CPR of Jesus' grace. You experienced a once-for-all renovation and you fidget no more.

But for others of us, it seems we are meant to learn that the presence, and not the absence of our anxieties will teach us the anchor we need and the grace-hope we could offer to others.

For us, our life, even our ministry ironically flourishes as we receive the fact that grace can hold its breath in the deeps, or better yet, grace has gills, it breathes under the waters that seek to overtake us.

For we anxious ones, we begin to say to others,

"Under the oceans of this beautiful and terrible world, I am learning to breathe!"

If you ask, “what can it feel like to be a person of anxiety who loves Jesus?” Along with every miserable feeling I described above, there is also this. It is as if Jesus air tanks our lungs. Sometimes we realize it and we begin to laugh. We realize that we are learning to float! Shouts, and praises, and thanksgivings of deliverance bubble up. We smile underwater. It's like being given fins or flippers. If we were on land it would be as if Jesus' grace was putting dancing shoes on our feet and entered with us into movement and melody.

I’m not sure what you make of me when I say that I feel “called” by God to speak of Jesus as a human being, as a pastor. But I hope you can see that I do not mean this tritely.

Drenched with sea stink and fins, wearing these too rarely used dancing shoes of mine, I speak Jesus’s words. "In the world we have tribulation," I say. "But take heart, Jesus has overcome the world!" (John 16:33)

People hear such a message, like me, lung-tired and treading water, they ask, "Really?" "How Can this happen?"

“Yes,” I say.

“But how?” they ask.

“I don’t fully know how it works,” I say. “The mystery of it baffles me. But I do know this. Jesus is the gill giver.”

The surprising result is that we anxious human beings and pastors can become makers of psalms; poets able by gracious experience to write songs of tears and rest, fear and laughter. We have stories, real stories, of rescue! We are veterans of a certain kind of labor, a particular kind of fight. We tell of the times Jesus met us in the deeps and on his back he swam us. He showed us the beauties of coral and noble creatures that non-anxious landlubbers hear about from people like us, but rarely see for themselves.