This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
The Bible tells me to be anxious for nothing, but I still worry,” she said. “What is wrong with me, and how can I ever fix it?”
A listener of my podcast sent this question, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind all week. The reason I keep mulling it over is not because it’s unusual but because it’s so normal. I get a similar question all the time, and I grapple with it myself. The irony is that the question isn’t really about anxiety: It’s about anxiety about anxiety. It’s not really about worry, but about worry about worrying. Why do we feel this way?
Part of the problem with a question like this is confusion with words. Anxiety is the term we use for a treatable, medical, physiological condition, in which case doctors and other experts can help. Imagine if we used the same word for clinical depression as for discouragement. This would be confusing. Anxiety can mean the medical condition or—as it seemed to mean for this listener and for most people who ask me—just general worry about what might happen next or unease about the future. This definition is more in line with what the Bible addresses and what many of us mean when we use the word for ourselves.
The reason anxiety about this kind of anxiety matters is because it shows us a misreading of the Bible that many of us have unwittingly absorbed.
And here’s why.
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