Round about 4:30 am I wake up. I do not need to get ready for work. Nor am I one of those fitness wack jobs that likes to get a tight 90 minutes of cardio in ere the sun rises. Neither do I need to let my dog out; not to be bothered by the winter chill, he is quite content to pee on our curtains. I wake up because I am anxious
I am not an obsessive or compulsive individual by nature. Nor am I an anxious person. But I tend to be obsessive and compulsive about my anxieties. I keep them in a neat little trophy case in my mind and I take them out and polish them with handling. You probably have the same trophies in your case: paying off debt, making sure the kids are learning what they are supposed to, praying they turn out not to be sociopaths or deviants, wondering what on earth is the purpose of me – the usuals. Thus I chum myself upon the waters.
Now, anxiety in the Christian life is as prohibited as alcohol in the 1920s, but that doesn’t mean each one isn’t moonshining the stuff in a bathtub. And we drink our own booze as much as we sell it to others. All of this despite verses like Phillipians 4: 6-8:
The Lord is at hand, do not be anxious for anything but in everything with prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace that passes understanding will guard your heart and your minds in Christ Jesus.
You can find this on mugs, t-shirts and other paraphernalia found at your local thrift store which means it’s about as ubiquitous and banal as browser ads. But given that the good Lord saw fit to put these words in his letter to humans, perhaps it needs another look. It’s like that shy girl in high school that was artsy with the big glasses and frazzled hair, but then when you started hanging out with her you realize she was radical and a stone cold hottie when she took her glasses off and put her hair up. So I spent some time with the verses and, let me tell you, they are spiritually smoking, or whatever. I’m having a hard time closing out that metaphor.
There are three words that are worth looking at in greek: anxiety, peace and guard. Not because I’m like one of those guys with their beards and their Calvinism who like to impress people with their taming of the greek language, but the words are better in greek, trust me. It will make more sense in a minute if you just let me get on with it.
Merimnao is the Greek word for anxiety and it means to be pulled apart in different directions; to literally “go to pieces’.” That is a way better word than anxius which comes from the Latin meaning “to choke,” though one can certainly sympathize. Don’t you feel like you are coming to pieces when anxiety hits? The anxious minds prognosticates a million uncertain futures and chronicles your doom in all of them. It’s like one of those choose-your-own- adventure stories where each scenario ends up with you falling down a mine shaft. When we are anxious we come to pieces and God tells us not to do that.
Ok, great, don’t come to pieces, easier said than done. Got any helpful tips on how to do that exactly?
Yup! Now this is where the beauty of the Greek comes home to roost and in a second you are going to be sorry you made fun of me for it. Eirene is the Greek word for peace. It’s where we get the old lady name Irene, maybe even the same old lady with the aforementioned mug with the aforementioned verse on it. But more than that it means “to join together into a whole.” For those keeping score at home this is literally the opposite of anxiety. To be a whole person is to be at peace; to be an anxious person is to be in pieces. I was going to try to do something with the homonyms “piece” and “peace” but I couldn’t think of anything unmuddled, so there are the parts of something witty, assemble it.
That was all very interesting to me and if you are a normal human it should be to you as well. But it is not necessarily helping us out of the anxiety, more just describing the water we are drowning in and what it looks like to not be drowning. In greek. But what is peace supposed to do, exactly?
What comes into your mind when you think of peace? For me, doves, babies, gentle waves lapping a shoreline at dusk, maybe wildflowers nodding in the sneezy sunshine of summer day. All the stuff you would find on one of those blank-inside cards your grandmother sends you every year for your birthday, even when you are 40, and has two dollars in it. But that is not what the Bible has in mind for peace. To the Greek!
This peace, God says, will guard you hearts; phroureo your hearts. I’m not sure how to pronounce it, but I think it’s like asking for an Oreo while having a mouthful of Oreos. This word means “sentinel,” ready to take whatever action necessary, defensive or offensive, to guard its stead. It is the spiritual secret service. In other words, this peace is violent. Try to approach the POTUS with harmful intention and you will find the true meaning of peace. This is the same manner in which peace guards our hearts; it is not there to parley, it doesn’t bargain, it is not interested in what your intentions were: you will be turned back or taken down. Such is the peace of God.
God means very much for us to be whole, to be one, and to do this he has given us a sentinel to guard our hearts with extreme prejudice against whatever will pull it apart. As the verse instructs, the means to activate this sentinel is to pray with thanksgiving. The reason why we pray is that there is a lot of ground we cannot cover. When I am laying awake in my bed stroking my anxiety, I cannot physically be anywhere else, doing anything else. I am not omnipresent. The closest I can get is to dismember myself and spread my remains among the vast surface area of my anxieties, which is to say, to come to pieces. God, however, is omnipresent and more capable than myself at effecting change.
Since the Lord is at hand, right next to me, and omnipresent, and infinitely capable to boot, I can ask him to work on my behalf over my anxieties and in place he will put a sentinel. I stay whole and happy, God gets to work, and peace will attack whatever seeks to disrupt my oneness.
Thought Butter 