Anxiety

ANXIETY

We are also too anxious about how we are perceived, about having a good name and about being respected in the community. We see this in Jesus’ warning about how we are to imitate the lilies of the field in their trust in God and his multiple warnings about not doing things to be seen by others as being good. But we’re always anxious about these things, all of us, and our fear here is not necessarily unhealthy. Nature and God have programmed us to have these instincts, though Jesus invites us to move beyond them.

More deeply, beyond our anxiety for our physical needs and our good name, we nurse a much deeper fear. We’re fearful about our very substance. We’re fearful that, in the end, we are really only, as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it, vanity, vapor, something insubstantial blown away in the wind.

That’s the ultimate anxiety and you see it already in animals, in their irrevocable and often violent drive to get into the gene pool, nature’s form of immortality. We have the same irrevocable (and sometimes violent) drive for immortality, to get into the gene pool. But, for us, that takes on multiple forms: Plant a tree. Have a child. Write a book. In essence, leave some indelible mark on this planet. Guarantee your own immortality. Make sure you can’t be forgotten.

We are so anxious about our substance and immortality and are always trying to create this for ourselves. But, as Jesus, often and gently, points out, we cannot do this for ourselves. No success, no monument, no fame, no tree, no child, and no book, will give ultimately still the anxiety for substance and immortality inside us. Only God can do that.

We see one of Jesus’ gentle reminders of this in the Gospels when the disciples come back to him buoyed-up by the success of a mission and share with him the wonderful things they have done. He shares their joy, but then, in essence, gently reminds them: Real consolation does not lie in success, even if it’s for the Kingdom.

Real consolation lies in knowing that our “names are written in heaven”, that God has each of us individually, lovingly, and irrevocably, locked into His radar screen. Real consolation lies in recognizing that we don’t have to create our own substance and immortality.

God has already done this for us.

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