On Anxiety

The worry about tomorrow is most likely our most common collective fear. There’s no mistaking the prevalence of anxiety in our culture, which has many contributing factors but leads us all to the same point- uneasiness for the unknown of the future. 

For most of my life I’ve shared this struggle intimately, and when I became a young professional it became increasingly worse. I’ve worked in the sales business the past decade and it’s a highly transactional form of direct selling. Every day it’s going out on appointments, presenting your product and hopefully getting a couple orders. It seems like my entire livelihood comes from drumming up business out of nowhere! Even though my sales job is a unique example, I believe it’s a representation of what many of us feel in our lives- we often feel lacking in the resources to get what we need. And on our own, we often do.

When I think about Jesus’ mind on anxiety I first see that it’s nothing more than a human tendency rooted in scarcity. If we put in our hearts the truth about God we remember that He has proximity and total capacity - He sees us, He feels us and He will give us exactly what we need (Philippians 4:19).

Matthew 6:25- 26 also gives us one of the clearest demonstrations of how we are to live, trust and accept the Lord’s provisions:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear? Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

The comparison here to the life of a bird is simple but powerful, and I believe the analogy is to show that all birds technically do in their lives is to just be a bird! They don’t sow into the future or save for tomorrow. While the message for us isn’t that we shouldn’t at all be mindfully disciplined for our futures, it is more about the provision we are offered when we are living the way that God created us to be. When we are living out our divine purpose, we need to not worry about our reaping because it is promised that we will be provided for. What peace that brings.