Anxiety; In Every Situation 

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  

Philippians 4: 6-7

Anxiety is the same for every person. At its core, anxiety is the feeling of uneasiness, a worry of the unknown. However, anxiety can manifest differently in each person, as we are all created differently, and it makes sense that we would all deal differently as well.

I can’t speak for you, but I’ve noticed that I myself tend to deal with anxiety in a worldly way.

We can google just about any situation and have an answer pop up within seconds. While this may give us a momentary relief or answer, how are we to know this is an answer that is indeed intended for us? Will it help for the better, or send us into a spiral of thoughts that could potentially cause us more harm than good?

Somewhere between our 3rd and 4th kiddo being born, I gained many anxious thoughts all at once. I had a fear that I would leave my kids before they were ready to be without a mother.

There was an outburst of Triple E (A mosquito virus) in Michigan at the time. And I, who had never really lived life in fear, feared everything about this virus. I feared sending my kids outside to play without being slathered in bug spray, I feared going from the house to the car, and I feared a mosquito would fly into the car while packing up children from an evening at the pool.

My kids caught my fear. They’d scream bloody murder if a mosquito had entered the car, the whole way home. I was creating chaos from my anxiety.

And it didn’t end there. This fear trickled into a fear of other diseases and/or cancers from the environment around us. Within a year of Triple E came Covid, and Covid left me home with the internet, and the internet when we are spiraling is a dangerous place to live.

Covid symptoms became cancer symptoms and I’d head to the doctor to get checked out. If you get checked out at the doctor you’re most likely getting an x-ray, and x-rays have radiation and radiation causes cancer but you’re now stuck in a spiral of “symptoms” and getting your symptoms answered, and even when the answer comes back fine, you look for the one thing that can link it to something else, and getting checked again. It was bad…

Somewhere in there, I’d trained my brain to keep digging. There was most definitely something wrong, and I needed to find it before the proverbial shoe dropped on its own. I needed to beat it.

I also knew my behavior wasn’t right.

So I purchased two books that were meant to help teach one to control their thoughts. Capture thought spirals. In a way, these books helped me out a lot, and in another way, they began a whole other spiral of “I’ve become so consumed by the above that I’m affecting my brain now too,” which created a spiral of how to help that as well.

I kept trying to fix myself.

I’d become so anxious about the things we have no control over in life, that I tried to control it all. And to this day I don’t even know what the “ALL of it”  is that I was trying to control…. The health and well-being of my family? Preserving our life? It seemed to be at that time the whole world was losing theirs.  

To this day I’m still recovering from all of these spirals. I’d love to say I’m over going to the doctor when something doesn’t feel right, but that’s not true. I’m trying. 

I definitely don’t Google things anymore, I have my husband google them for me; he is, in a sense, my nurse. He tells me whether or not I should get it checked out. That one thing has helped protect my brain from the rabbit holes of the internet.

The biggest switch was that I stopped trying to fix myself. With my husband now checking the internet (baby steps), it freed time up in which I started taking it to God in prayer. In the verses at the top of this article, the Lord tells us exactly how to handle our anxiety. Reading parts of it below let each section soak in a bit.

But in every situation…

By prayer and petition…

With thanksgiving…

Present your request to God…

And the peace of God…

God’s peace transcends all understanding because it is not of this world. It is of God. The peace we try to obtain on our own is worldly peace, which is a big ‘ol lie. Worldly peace causes us more anxiety. God’s peace is a known feeling, it’s familiar to us because it’s given to us in His Love.

So when I feel anxiety coming on from a spiral, I pause.

I break down Philippians 4:6-7 like I did just a second ago, above.

I turn it over to God…

This is not our home, we have our answer.
Nothing in this life is permanent.
Life in Christ Jesus is permanent.  

And…it slowly calms me. It brings peace to my mind and draws me closer to God. 

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