Take a moment to check in with yourself. What, if anything, are you anxious about? Perhaps you’re in a particularly calm season in your life, and everything is going well. If that’s the case, don’t take it for granted; be grateful! But surely you know what it’s like to feel the burden of unresolved conflicts, tenuous relationships, a vague sense of threat. And if you don’t, someone very close to you probably does, right now.

Anxiety is more ambiguous than fear. Whereas fear has an object — you know who or what you’re afraid of — the source of our anxiety can be nameless. We are gripped by a hazy sense of foreboding, and the feeling has a nasty tendency to spiral. Our minds can get preoccupied with everything that might go wrong. We can’t stop ruminating, digging the the hole deeper with every anxious thought.

Nor are the spirals limited to what happens inside us individually. Anxiety can throw relationships into a negative spiral as well. When I’m anxious, it’s hard for me to respond to you in loving, compassionate, and patient ways. That spreads the sense of threat to you, which strains your patience with me. Unless one of us is able to calm down, to stop the negative chatter in our head, we’ll keep setting each other off, making the problem progressively worse. That’s often what happens when conversations turn into arguments, and arguments get out of control.

In the passages we’ve been exploring recently in Philippians 4, Paul tells the Philippians not to be anxious. As I’ve said before, “Don’t worry” is not always a good way to help people calm down! But here we see Paul’s pastoral wisdom on full display. The verses we’ve examined are some of the best-known verses from Philippians, and deservedly so:

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 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. 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. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. (Phil 4:4-9, NIV)

Being persecuted by their neighbors, the believers in Philippi are understandably anxious, and that anxiety seems to be affecting their relationships. What Paul wants for them is joy and peace. He speaks of “the peace of God,” which is inseparable from the presence of “the God of peace.” And his hope is that the experience of God’s peace will allow them to be more gentle with each other and with their neighbors.

Before we leave these warm, wise words, I want us to consider their personal implications one more time. Notice that Paul counsels his anxious friends to do four things:

• Bring everything to God in prayer;
• Do so with thanksgiving;
• Notice and think about that which is good and godly;
• Imitate godly examples.

I doubt that many of us need to be reminded to “present our requests to God” when trouble looms. But let’s face it: those prayers are often stuck in the spiral of anxiety. It makes sense to cry for help when you’re being sucked down a whirlpool, but crying out doesn’t in itself stave off the panic. And this too is why it’s often not helpful to just tell a worried friend to “pray about it.” Yes, we need to pray, but we need to pray in a way that opens us to the presence of the God of peace.

We’ll delve into all four bullet points in part 2 of this post. But for the moment, ask yourself again: what are you anxious about, right now? Then consider: if or when you pray about the situation, is there any element of gratitude in your prayer? As I’ll suggest in the next post, gratitude can help offset our anxiety, and it will be harder to be grateful if we don’t have a habit of noticing the good and not just the bad.