Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic Magazine, described his life-long struggle with anxiety in an article written in 2014. With incredible candor, Stossel described some of the most debilitating experiences with his illness:

“I wish I could say that my anxiety is a recent development, or that it is limited to public speaking. It’s not. My wedding was accompanied by sweating so torrential that it soaked through my clothes and by shakes so severe that I had to lean on my bride at the altar, so as not to collapse. At the birth of our first child, the nurses had to briefly stop ministering to my wife, who was in the throes of labor, to attend to me as I turned pale and keeled over… On ordinary days, doing ordinary things—reading a book, lying in bed, talking on the phone, sitting in a meeting, playing tennis—I have thousands of times been stricken by a pervasive sense of existential dread and been beset by nausea, vertigo, shaking, and a panoply of other physical symptoms… Even when not actively afflicted by such acute episodes, I am buffeted by worry.”(1)

While I often worry, I have never experienced the kind of crippling anxiety that Stossel describes in his article, or that I frequently hear about from dozens of individuals in search of relief from chronic anxiety. Yet many of us feel as if we are always on edge or we sense an underlying feeling of dread. For our world is often a very frightening place. Indeed, the time that we live in has been described as the “age of anxiety.” Perhaps this is true, in part, because our 24/7 access to technology ensures that we are immersed in global images and headlines of terrorism, epidemics, the threat of environmental collapse, violent crimes, economic woes, international conflict, and political strife. Particularly in the West, the incidence of anxiety-related diagnoses are increasing among individuals of all ages, including among teenagers, college-students and young adults who have grown up in a technological age full of anxiety-producing images.

Even if one’s experience with anxiety is not as profound or pervasive as Sossel’s, it can still be all-consuming. For at its root is a fearful imagination that generates an outlook of suspicion and inadequacy: The world is a terrifying place; there are not enough resources; no one can be trusted and I am not enough. Viewing one’s existence in this way generates a mindset of scarcity and inadequacy which in turn perpetuates worry and anxiety in an endless cycle.

It is noteworthy, I believe, that Jesus chose to address worry and anxiety among the many other important topics on which we have recorded teachings. In fact, Jesus addressed worry in what has come to be called The Sermon on the Mount, which most scholars agree is the central teaching for following in his way. In this sermon, Jesus presents an alternative imagination—or way of viewing the world—that is not based on fear or scarcity, but on fullness and abundance.(2) Jesus describes the kingdom of God—a way of being in the world based on the way in which Jesus taught, lived, and operated. Here, in the sermon in which Jesus instructs his followers to “love their enemies” and that they are “the light of the world,” Jesus also includes worry as an equally critical topic.

While it is not likely that Jesus had anxiety disorders like Sossel’s in mind, perhaps he included teaching on worry because of its function on multiple levels of human existence. Jesus recognized that anxiety animates a particularly powerful imagination or outlook on life that is grounded in fear: fear that prevents open-hearted living and fear that precludes full-presence in each and every moment. So powerful is this imagination that Jesus prefaces his teaching about worry with a reminder of its totalizing power: the eye is the lamp of the body, so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!(3) In other words, one’s outlook shapes one’s total orientation.

Jesus instructs his followers to not be anxious for their lives. Instead, he lays out a different imagination—again, a deeper perspective that can hold our anxiety about security and want. Jesus uses two illustrations from the natural world to explore this deeper imagination. He asks his followers to consider the way of the birds and to contemplate the beauty of flowers as an antidote for worry and an invitation to reconsider our notion of security. Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns… Observe the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin.

Where I live, we can have very strong winds coming off the bay. When we do, which is quite often, I get to watch the most spectacular array of eagles, gulls, ravens, and hawks coasting on the thermals. They are not in a hurry to get anywhere; they are content to be blown by the wind, even tossed about and blown off course; they do not appear to be consumed by any other task than to be carried by the wind. I don’t see the birds around my house and in my yard losing their feathers or wringing their wings in anguish over finding food—even though they have no guarantee of their next meal. They do not operate out of a sense of scarcity even though they are completely dependent upon their environment for provision and care. In the same way, the variety, intricacy, and beauty of flowers and plants is not gained by striving after those attributes, or as Jesus says by “toil or spinning.”

And Jesus asks us to consider their ways. We, who worry, are tempted to be driven by fear—a fear that drives the relentless accumulation of resources or a fear that tells us we are not enough. Jesus asks, are you not worth more than the birds? Will God not so array you as the flowers are arrayed? Jesus says, look to the ways of the birds and the flowers and see a different imagination, a way of being in the world that is motivated by trust. Such trust arises from faith and dependence upon the God who provides for the birds, and the flowers, and for all of the creation.

The call to an imagination that takes its cues from the birds and the flowers comes from one who was not removed or protected from a world that invoked fear and anxiety. Instead, Jesus entered into that world of scarcity and want, of fear and anxiety. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was in distress to the point of death and like Stossel described of his own anxiety, he was profoundly sweating to the point that it was like drops of blood.(4) Out of this distress, he cried out to God to deliver him from those who would betray and crucify him. And in his Sermon, he reminds his listeners that each day has enough trouble of its own. In the midst of that trouble, Jesus tells his followers that God knows what we need. Like the birds and the flowers—both of which are completely dependent upon an environment that can bring scarcity or abundance—Jesus issues a call to surrender to trust in the One who will provide.

In fact, Jesus suggests, surrender is the only viable option, for he reminds his listeners that we cannot add a single year to our lives by worrying. In fact, we likely lose years of our lives by worrying. And here is another invitation from the birds and the flowers: theirs is an existence completely centered in the present moment. And with a kingdom imagination, it is a present filled with opportunities and possibility. Seek first the kingdom, Jesus says, and all these things will be added to you.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Stossel, Scott. Surviving Anxiety. The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2014.
(2) Matthew 5-7.  See Matthew 6:25-34.
(3) Matthew 6:23.
(4) See Matthew 26:37-38; Mark 14:33-34; Luke 22:44.

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In one of the early scenes of The Matrix, the character Trinity meets Neo in a club and she tells him, “It’s the question that drives us.” Later Neo meets Morpheus, who describes this inherent curiosity as a “splinter in the mind.”

We are born into a world that is populated with stories, pregnant with multiple meanings. From our very entrance into the cosmos until death, the reality and presence of story envelops our lives. Like the deep-seated quest of Socrates to discover what, in fact, was the good life, we find ourselves asking questions and wanting answers. These questions are not mere curiosity, or intellectual pursuits; they carry enormous existential significance and importance. These questions haunt us.

Consider the following words from Lee Iacocca in Straight Talk: “Here I am in the twilight years of my life, still wondering what it’s all about… I can tell you this, fame and fortune is for the birds.” Our minds are splintered—or made numb—with pressing inquiry: What is the point of it all? What gives our lives meaning? Novelist William H. Gass expresses a similar nagging reality. “Life is itself exile,” he writes, “and its inevitability does not lessen our grief or alter the fact.” Journalist Malcolm Muggeridge notes further, “The first thing I remember about the world—and I pray it may be the last—is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling which everyone has in some degree, and which is at once the glory and desolation of homosapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.” Why are we here? Where are we going? Why do we at times find ourselves as strangers in our own home? Is there a greater story we are a part of, but ignoring?

In the Western world, we are progressively abandoning the metanarratives that for centuries served to define and give shape to our society and individual lives. Indeed, the very idea of a “defining story” is now considered offensive, imperialistic, sexist, or worse. The individual is left alone before a mind-boggling array of options and both the responsibility and the authority to reach a conclusion are totally rooted in the self. Yet, despite brave predictions of the demise of God or the eventual waning of belief under Modern conditions, the questions have not gone away. If anything, they are more at the forefront than we would have expected, given the nature and shape of progress.

In the opening pages of the Lord of the Rings, the narrator tells us of the process whereby history became legend and legend became myth and slowly it was all forgotten. Tolkien’s brilliant insight into what he deems our “real but forgotten” past is a telling representation of the story we are currently trying to tell. But if the world and our lives are the product of a divine creator, then though ignored or unknown, the echoes of our distant past and essential nature still call out to us. And they are calling.

“Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse.”(1) The heavens are yet declaring the glory of God; the skies are yet proclaiming the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display the love of one who invites us into the story of life itself.

Stuart McAllister is global support specialist at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Romans 1:20.

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In the last few centuries the cacophony of voices suggesting Christianity (and religion in general) is a tale on par with the tooth fairy continues to deepen. The story may well have beautiful components, some add charitably, but the story functions as a psychological crutch to comfort us through the uglier realities of real life. Often couched in the objection is the notion that time has moved forward such that we have outgrown the superstition, and along with it, the need to explain life and comfort ourselves with archaic religious myth. And though by equating Christianity with “myth” critics mean to suggest that religion is fanciful and untrue, the comparison between Christianity and the genre of myth is absolutely fascinating. In fact, it is a comparison C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton found altogether relevant and revelatory.

A scholar of ancient and medieval literature, Lewis came to recognize the great Greek, Roman, and Nordic myths as being a genre of narrative that wrestled as fiercely as the human heart can wrestle with its yearning to know the gods. In this, he reasoned that what we glean from the myth is not truth but reality, for myths concern themselves with questions of ultimate reality and theological inquiry. Through the story of Sisyphus, for instance, we ask profoundly, does life have meaning? As he endlessly rolls the great rock up the hill, only to have it tumble down the hill before he reaches the top, we ask: Do the gods hate us? Are they indifferent? Do they care? Is life worth living in acknowledgment of their presence? Is life worth living at all? The genre of myth has concerned itself with the great and impenetrable questions of life, questions that every worldview must answer. As G.K. Chesterton comments in Everlasting Man, “Myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth.”

The modern mind argues that Jesus is just one more attempt at explaining what we merely wish were true. While I know where such a statement is usually going (and disagree), perhaps it is also right. There are elements in myth that we do want to believe—namely, that the gods do reveal themselves to us, that heavenly mysteries can be known on some real level, and that life really is saturated with purpose and meaning. Such qualities undeniably reach the deepest thirsts and longings of humankind; they are things many of us want to be true. But Christianity takes this one step further. It would argue that these are actually the stories that we knew on some real level had to be true. The want is an indication of something beyond the myth. For God has set eternity in our hearts; yet we cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Within the great myths, life is lived under that which is bigger than us and that which is beyond us. There is an understanding that there is something to which we must bow, that there is someone present, someone who walks beside us. There is an awareness that our own stories are inhabited beside, maybe even within, stories of the transcendent and of the ultimate. In the myths created by humanity, we reveal what has been engraved deeply on our hearts by the divine: that reality is not always clear like glass but it is sometimes thick like blood, that God somehow had to show up, and that in some way death and suffering was certain. There is darkness, to be sure; but so there is light, and the darkness does not master it. And we were right. What humanity has somehow always known has, in fact, happened. For in the Christian story, God did reveal himself, stepping into the depths of human reality as one of us. God stepped through the unseen and came to dwell within the seen. Said Lewis, “Myth became Fact.”

In the oldest Christian creed, Christians profess to believe in God the Father and Jesus Christ his only Son “who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” What humanity has longed for most has happened: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Reaching into time and touching real history, Jesus came to us; he came to the Cross. But it did not master him.

“This is the marriage of heaven and earth,” writes Lewis. “Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact, claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.”(1) There is a great light shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not mastered it. He is the one who was, and is, and is to come.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 67.

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