I remember when I was doing my Honours year at Uni and struggling to deal with some fairly serious anxiety, my mother directed me to that well-worn Bible verse about stress and the like: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God" (Philippians 4:6). People would always quote that one at me, and it so often felt like a rebuke rather than an encouragement. I would feel like I was disobeying God by being anxious, yet had no idea exactly how to stop being anxious. I felt much like I had done when I was taken into Casualty at Warragul Hospital one Christmas Eve to deal with the (stress-related) stomach problems I was having and the fairly communication-inept doctor, finding that my stomach muscles were very tense, said, "Relax! Why are you not relaxing!" Great. Really helpful. Thanks guys.
What my mother said, though, that transformed my thinking was that giving thanks was the secret to overcoming anxiety. It wasn't about attempting to pretend that everything was fine, or simply not worrying - you gave thanks as the basis for not worrying. You didn't worry because you shifted your focus from what was wrong to what was good; or, better still, you shifted your focus to the goodness of the God that you were trusting in to solve your problems. Or, to steal the words of a song: "Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full into his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace."
Like I said, that transformed my thinking. Yet how quickly we forget. It's all too easy to focus on the problems not the reasons for thanksgiving, or to have one anxious prayer answered, only to jump straight into another one without pause to thank the one who answered that prayer. And it gets to a point where we think, strangely, that it was our anxiety that solved the problems, not the fact that, in amongst all the anxiety, we found the presence of mind to pray.
My mother reminded herself of that verse this week, and told me about it. I'm very glad, because it reminded me too. And I found myself being calm and even joyful during a week that very easily could have gone the other way. All the same circumstances that, this time last year, made me a nervous wreck, this week were no problem. And why? Not because I pretended it was fine, that's for sure, but because I stopped at the end of each day to give thanks for what had gone well - quite a lot, when I thought about it. And the result of all that was a day, today, that was filled with reasons for thanksgiving - amazing how they increase the more we think about them.
So here's a little post to say thanks, publicly, to the one who got me through - more than that, who gave me a week that I can truly give thanks for.
