Solve Your Anxiety Issues Already…

Living in the world today, you have likely been convinced that it is perfectly normal to have anxiety and that it is actually a natural part of life. And, although our overtly negative society has normalized and rationalized the experience, it is completely unnatural and is something you should seek to exterminate each and every time it encroaches on your life. Imagine that something or someone greater than yourself would purposefully design life to be an overly anxious affair and leave you no recourse in overcoming its daily onslaughts and attacks. Well, imagine no further because it simply aint true. Learn to rid yourself of any and all anxiety, code name vague fear, secret name, defeat!

Growing up as a particularly scary individual, I completely acclimatized myself to anxiety and couldn’t have even comprehended what it meant to have true peace. I, like you I suppose, found methods to cope, beginning with whistling, humming and chewing gum as a child, graduating up to self-medicating and other escape seeking behaviors as a young adult. In short, I was running from that feeling; that apprehensive, something is going to go wrong or something is going to get me or what if I end up here or there or some other undesirable destination, feeling… It was never clear enough for me to wrap my mind around it, but it was distinct enough to take away my rest. Then, right in the midst of my ego-driven, perpetual desire to work it out on my own, a nice guy named Jon taught me about God, loved me and introduced me to a class called Power For Abundant Living that changed my life forever.

PFAL, as we affectionately called it, taught me about my number one enemy, fear and how to overcome it with God’s Word. The class showed me the source of fear and anxiety and that it certainly wasn’t something I should embrace or learn to accept in my life. It taught me that I needed to control my thoughts and maybe for the first time in my life, learn how to think properly. And the result was one of the most unusual, odd things I had ever experienced in my life. Suddenly, unexpectedly, my heart was completely at rest and I was experiencing true peace, the kind that surpasses understanding. Wow! There is truly nothing like it in the world. It is the absence of all conflict. It is knowing you have absolutely nothing to fear in any capacity, in any way. It is how human beings were intended to live. In fact, we were supposed to get so accustomed to the peace we enjoyed that any threat to it or any disturbance was immediately detected, so we could act, so we could win.

But sadly, that is not how life works for most people. We live our lives pushed from pillar to post, hurried, exhausted, overworked, overtaxed with outrageous expectations for ourselves that we foolishly call success. Meanwhile our day collapses if we eat a donut for breakfast or miss morning meditations by 6 minutes or aren’t earning six-figure salaries by the time we are 28. There’s nothing wrong with self-improvement but is it ourselves we are improving or some fictitious version of ourselves we got from the Kardashians or Instagram or some other well-known spokesperson for society? We can’t even sit down in the evening to relax without some “don’t waste time” expectation nagging us to get back up. We’ve got work to do, by God, and if we don’t get it all done now some almighty total collapse is looming on the horizon! We work full-time, have work that needs to be accomplished at home after work and work to be handled on the weekend. If we stay in our PJ’s all day on Sunday we feel terrible because we’ve lost valuable yardage in the race of the rats! And you know why we are killing ourselves to get it all done? Because we are afraid! Because we think we must carry the entire load of living on our own backs and every step missed has the potential to spiral our lives into failure! We are party of the first part, party of the second part and party of every damn part in between! We think we are God Himself but instead of enjoying love and peace we are chock full of anxiety! It’s no wonder folks…

Philosophize, self-aggrandize, get more education, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, seek more opinions, more Google searches or more WebMD, you aint going to rid yourself of this persistent malady on your own. You need spiritual truth to combat the abundance of spiritual error. You need to finally concede that God never intended for you to figure it all out for yourself. He never wanted you to drive yourself into a frazzle making sure things always worked out. He only wanted to be party of the first part ensuring all of your second and third part parties worked out. If you’re honest, your anxiety is always related to some fear you have about something that you need or might need in the future. Or, your anxiety is based on some unchangeable, unrepairable mistake from your past that only lives on in your mind and not in actual reality. In both cases you are playing on an away field you cannot prevail on because neither time period presently exists. Anxiety, solely based on the present circumstances, prompts you to make changes, which you are fully able to do. Now, you’re playing at home!

Do yourself a solid and stop being so smart. Accept your limitations like children do and simply ask for what you need. Getting your needs met may involve some work, but good old-fashioned work never made anybody anxious. Cease from trying to carry a world of concerns you were never meant to carry. Stop pretending to be God minus all of the infinite spiritual power and intelligence and ability! In fact, stop pretending to be okay and blowing past that anxiety as if its normal, choosing to use your mouth to ask for assistance instead of using your mouth to ingest or swallow or inhale something to make you feel a little better. You, my friend, owe yourself and your Creator that much, don’t you think?

Just say no to anxiety with just some good thoughts…