When God called him to go to a land he would later receive as his inheritance, Abraham obeyed and left his home, even though he did not know where he was going … and lived in tents as a stranger, even in the promised land, because he was looking forward to a secure city built and designed by God (Hebrews 11:8-10).

When we are young it is pretty normal to live life more in the future than in the present. Everything is something to look forward to: our next birthday, Christmas, family or summer vacation, the end-of school year picnic (one of my personal favorites), a career as an all-star pitcher. Apart from the occasional fears (despite my early baseball fantasies, my knees knocked whenever I approached the batter’s box), such prospective thinking is positive and as much a product of frontal lobe development (lack thereof) as anything else.

The aging process – and by that I mean attaining our teens and twenties – begins to take a toll on whatever illusory equanimity we may have possessed with regard to the future. Each year we face life’s increasing complexity: college applications, boy/girl drama, moving to a new city, summer employment, negotiating the relationship we have with our parents, or whatever else attends the responsibilities, choices, and decisions of growing maturity. Unfortunately this new, fairly modest grounding in reality is often enough to make premature worrywarts out of young souls who don’t have nearly the emotional capacity to handle the angst. At its most extreme, such nascent anxiety grows into the crippling disease of what I would call “fear addiction.” To quote my mother, “I fret if I’m not anxious.”

Over time, I have found that my mother was not alone. Anxiety seems to be one of the primary social and spiritual disorders of the human spirit. I don’t know if there is more apprehension afflicting us 21st-century types. After all, we don’t contend with regular outbreaks of the plague, marauding bands of brigands, or lions, tigers, and bears. Perhaps we simply face a broader array of amplified distress-catalysts, both real and imagined. Our world seems to thrive on using frightening and alarmist language to stoke our fears. For example, the old “breaking and entering” of someone’s property is now described as a “home invasion.” And the Sheriff’s alert tells me that it was “near me,” even if that means five miles away in an area of town that bears no comparison to ours. The same goes for economic necessity, political disruption, relational pressures, environmental disasters  – in all these things, anxiety assails our minds and rises all-too-naturally from our hearts in response.

Anything as universal as anxiety will obviously engender numerous theories as to its nature, causes, and cures. In both secular and religious circles, researchers and writers divide anxiety into “normal” and pathological types, the latter being a large group of what just about everyone knows as GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorders). The assumption is that we all regularly experience anxious reactions to stress. Some even believe that anxiety is helpful in that it, along with fear, motivates us, warns us of danger, and helps us make prudential decisions when choosing between fight or flight. The most common positive term that people use to describe “normal” anxiety is that it is adaptive; it is an evolutionary mechanism that allows us to make appropriate adjustments to various circumstances and stimuli in our lives.

I see at least two significant problems with this normalization of anxiety. First, the estimate of how many people suffer from GAD runs anywhere from 25 to 40%. I would say that sounds like the bad kind of anxiety is incredibly common. I wonder if the ubiquity of garden-variety worry is simply a launching pad into the pathological kind. Second, if anxiety is supposed to be not just ordinary, but even useful, then why does Jesus not seem to characterize it as such? Is it possible that anxiety, in and of itself, indicates a disease state? We might even agree that anxiety is, in fact, an evolutionary adaptation – one of those fig leaves that we have put on to cover over our sin of unbelief. So it is not a tool for the Garden, but for a fallen world full of danger, mistrust, and enmity.

But if we think more closely about what anxiety really is and where it comes from, it becomes clear that its value is extremely limited. As with every human frailty, the beginning of anxiety is inseparable from the first rejection of God’s loving care and its resulting disobedience. Adam and Eve’s life was profoundly uncomplicated. Till the ground; take care of the animals; enjoy the Lord’s creation to your heart’s content. Just don’t mess with the fruit of one tree. It all goes wrong when the Serpent introduces doubt (Did God really?); elaborates on it with a lie (God is wrong, you won’t die if you eat); and makes a half-false promise (You will become like God, knowing good and evil). The demonic dialogue becomes the birthplace and breeding ground for anxiety. What if we’re missing out on the our best life possible? What is the Lord keeping from us? Will he really bless this whole enterprise of Garden building? Will our children ever get into Eden U.? Will we even be able to have children? The anxiety of unbelief takes hold and becomes normal, and we are its children.

What does normal anxiety look like in our lives? I think there are two kinds. The first is what I see as the real GAD, with its roots in the first sin. Generalized anxiety looks around and feels the instability and confusion of our environment. The world promotes its own fear factors, and amid the tumult gives off the idea that no one is in control. Now someone has to play God, and the door is open for both the imperial self and the despot, neither of which can fulfill the promise of bringing security and order. Generalized anxiety is what happens when we have seized divinity and made it our own. It leads to the sense that doom lies just around the corner, especially when life is going well. It is the devilish foreboding that God is just waiting to even up the blessings score with some kind of retributive, karmic blow to our well-being. Nonsense, to be sure, but no less powerful for being nonsensical.

We obviously don’t stop at generalized anxiety. No, we inevitably move from GAD to SAD (Specific Anxiety Disorder). New idols arise, outcomes and states of being that we need to occur if we are to be happy. Will my children live as Christians? How long will my job be secure? Will the Lord use me in a fruitful way? Is there sickness in my future? Do I have enough for retirement? How will I find the right spouse? What will God “do to me” if I surrender my life completely to him? All these focussed worries, along with the vague, unspecified ones, are a repudiation of the Lord’s goodness. They drive us to rely on stand-in gods based on the preposterous lie that the true God is not fully reliable, not entirely gracious, not completely well-disposed toward us. Of course, trusting in idols merely increases our anxiety, invites more fear, and spawns useless superstition, since believing in them is simply playing a losing game of spiritual lottery.

Meanwhile, Scripture insists that there is a God-antidote to all this called hope – faith looking forward. Having spent this week somewhat dissecting anxiety, my focus for next time will be this idea of future faith. My question between now and then is this: Where do we suffer from GAD and SAD? What are the general and specific fears that rob us of an intimate trust in the Father? Can we name our anxiety idols, beginning with ourselves and radiating out from there?

Holy Spirit, prepare our hearts for the Father’s good plan, and give us rest in the promises of Jesus, who every day bears us up in his mercy and grace.