So do not worry, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
If this is true, then it is entirely possible not to be anxious. We just have to not choose it.
You see, anxiety causes something to swirl around our head that we are being told time and time again to reject. Something the leader of the free world calls "fake news". What happens is that we either foresee a negative event by asking ourselves "What if...?" or something negative actually happens. Our imagination creates the scenario in our mind, normally making it worse than it actually is. We then react to this imagined scenario playing out in our head as if it was real, which then triggers us to create another imagined scenario and accept it as if it was real, and so on.
The more we spiral, the more we are reacting to a situation which does not exist now and probably never will, and the less we are reacting to the truth.
Before our anxiety takes us captive, we need to remember two critical Bible verses:
To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’
John 8:31-32 NIVUK
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
John 8:44 NIVUK
In the same chapter in John, Jesus said both that the truth would set us free, and that the devil is the father of lies. Both of these were stated in relation to His teaching and whether or not the Jews could accept it, and why. However, there are principles here that we can also apply to our thoughts, as Paul said to the Philippians:
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.
Philippians 4:8 NIVUK
When we worry about imagined situations that aren't happening, and probably never will, then we are thinking about negative scenarios we have invented. That is, complete fictions. Lies. Not things that are true. And the easiest way to defeat them is to replace fiction with fact; fantasy with reality; lies with the truth.
Before you find yourself spiralling out of control, ask yourself this question when you start imagining things: Is this real? Is it actually happening?
Is it true?
We are in the middle of a huge public health crisis. Imagine if, in the middle of this crisis, the government announced it was cancelling all funding for healthcare and instead spending billions on finding the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot, or defending ourselves against a zombie apocalypse. There would be a massive outcry! When we imagine scenarios in our head that are not real and worry over them, we are spending our energy and time fighting enemies that don't exist, monsters that only exist in our head, figments of our own imagination.
Reality at the moment is strange enough. There is no need at all to make it worse. We cannot allow one single calorie of our energy to be consumed fighting enemies that don't exist when we have a real enemy to fight. So before we go any further, we must believe this crucial truth, that we can choose not to be anxious and that the truth is a key weapon in defeating it. Having seen that anxiety is a choice, we will see in our next post that ANXIETY IS AN OBSESSION.
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