Trust, Anxiety, and Fear, O My
With a growing list of frightening things in life lately, anxiety and how to provide spiritual leadership during this time has been very much in my mind. Recently, the Alban Institute web site quoted Peter Steinke from his book Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times:
Anxiety represses human functioning by decreasing our capacity to learn, replacing our curiosity with a demand for certainty, and stiffening our positions over and against one another.
Anxiety is also contagious. It connects people. Let one or two people unleash their anxiety and it won’t be long before it has a ripple effect on the congregation.
Finally, anxiety has a reactive effect. People oversimplify, become indecisive and unable to react. (Alban Institute Source)
I would add another aspect of anxiety. In the midst of anxiety we find it very hard to trust one another.
On one level we can see trust as a casualty of fear and anxiety. We wonder who we can trust and even if we can trust anyone. We over-analyze people’s words and actions seeking some ulterior motive, we withhold information, ideas and reactions because we fear how those things can be used to hurt us.
I see this at work in global politics, within our society, and within the church. I will say it clearly: in our church we have a Crisis of Trust.
As I think more about the idea of trust being a casualty of anxiety, I find myself wondering if it might also be true that distrust is the source for anxiety. As our childlike trust is injured and bruised we find ourselves being more afraid. Do the weeds of anxiety grow more vigorously in the seed-bed of not trusting?
This change of perspective offers a way of response. Fear does not dissipate when you focus on it. Anxiety thrives on the attention we devote to it. That’s why we find ourselves more afraid the more media attention is devoted to something. I do have a choice about trust though. It might be a hard choice, but I can choose the way of forgiveness and trust even when my trust has been betrayed. That is what Jesus came to show us on the cross and through the resurrection. God comes to our sin and chooses to invite us to receive forgiveness and to try again to be faithful and faith-filled.
In the church and in life we need a renewed commitment to trust.
With a renewed commitment to trust one another we become available in new ways to practice compassion and forgiveness to one another, to our neighbors and to ourselves. Living care with grace is a frightening and risky thing. That is part of what Jesus on the cross teaches us, but as we live into being followers of Christ we must walk the same path of love and grace he walked. It might not feel safe, but it is the way of eternal and abundant life.
As we choose the way of trusting one another we also open up the Divine creativity which is part of being created in the Image of God as well as a sign of the Holy Spirit’s fruitfulness at work through us. Expressing life with creativity risks judgment and criticism both from others and from ourselves. In the changing world around us, we the Church need to be seeking new and creative ways to reach out to others with the invitation to come to Jesus.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I think to some extent everyone has anxiety, some people just know how to deal with it in a way that they never realize that they have a problem.