Ben Matthew | Anxiety, Faith, Fear, and Finding Peace in Christ

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm here with Ben Matthew today, Dr. Ben Matthew. And he is a professor of clinical counseling at Columbia International University. And today we're going to be talking a little bit about Christians and anxiety. And so since I know nothing about the human mind, I needed to have someone on who does. And so I'm glad to welcome Ben back to the show, man. It's good to have you back. It's great to be with you again, James. I so appreciate these conversations we can have. Well, dude, let's just dive in. I mean, there's, so Christians and anxiety is kind of a big wide-ranging topic. And even as I've started looking at it from a biblical perspective, you know, the English translations use anxious. They use worry. They use fear. They use all these different terms that would be things that would be associated with anxiety. But then there's also sort of a psychological definition of this, you know, a counseling sort of understanding of what anxiety is. So maybe the best way to start would be just to scope that out a little bit. When you think about anxiety, how do you think about it? Yeah, yeah. I so appreciate the engagement you're trying to consider from a biblical standpoint, I think is sometimes what clouds the issue for a lot of Christians, right? They see that word anxiety, whether it's in the Gospels or in Paul's writings, and they're like, oh, I'm Christian. I guess I shouldn't have any of this. And part of my concern then is that when you have someone who's already anxious and they're being told either through their Bible reading or their pastor or Christian friends, don't be anxious, you can kind of guess what that creates. If anything, just more anxiety. Yeah, additional anxiety, right. On top of the anxiety they already have. So I think this is a really important discussion, both, yeah, theologically, biblically speaking, but also how to consider. So one of the things I often do with people I'm working either in private practice or as I'm training my students as they're becoming clinicians, is really help individuals kind of think through what is, if I can use the word, normal anxiety and problematic anxiety, right? So recognizing, I'd be interested to hear your perspective. I was reading through, you know, one of the central passages is this Philippians 4, right? Do not be anxious for everything, but with all prayer and supplication, make a request be made known to God. A passage, that's a wonderful passage that, again, I wonder at some times if we kind of overapply it. And yet there's this other part in Philippians 2 where Paul is talking about, you know, no one has the same level of concern that I have for your well-being. And I thought it was such a great example of what I'm talking about in terms of normal anxiety. And maybe sometimes it goes a little too far. And I think he was actually trying to address both. In some contexts, from a pastoral context, Paul's like, I love you guys. And I get really concerned when you do things or you move away from the centrality of the kingdom. And I should be concerned because I love you. And I try to help clients and others understand there's things in life that should concern you. You might use the word anxiety because it encapsulates some of those emotions and feelings you have. But sometimes that's good and that's right for loved ones, right? For situations you're in. Listen, if you're standing on a bridge overlooking a gorge and you feel a little anxiety that makes you pull back, good. Like, that's appropriate anxiety. And so I want to help them kind of think through those ways in which anxiety is not this boogeyman that needs to be avoided at all costs. That in some contexts, it's actually appropriate. If that kind of makes sense, at least on that first level. It does. And I think you're right to point that out. I mean, as I recall in the beginning of Philippians, Paul is, he says even, it is right for me to be concerned about you. Right. And so I think there's a sense in which there is a right level of concern or anxiety. And that's what I'm finding when I'm looking at some of these biblical terms. There's so much overlap between these things that anxiety, I think what I'm sort of circling the drain on as I'm doing the biblical study is, anxiety becomes problematic when it reorients our attention away from the kingdom of God and God's righteousness. So in other words, when these things become the, they dominate our field of vision, we could say. I like the, the example of, you know, when you're driving down the highway, you, you know, there are mile markers on the side of the road. But for most of us, we don't pay much attention to them. We know they're there, but, and, and we know why they could be helpful and when they could be helpful. You know, your car breaks down, you want to call somebody, Hey, I'm at mile marker, whatever. But for the most part, when you're driving, you shouldn't focus on those because there are large vehicles moving at high speeds all around you. That can be problematic if you don't pay attention. Those are the things that you want to pay attention to. And I think when anxiety becomes problematic, it would be like driving down the highway and only paying attention to the mile markers. Oh yeah. And so what you end up with is this reorientation of attention to something that isn't actually ever going to help you. It's not going to help you navigate life well. And so what Jesus is saying in the gospels, what I think Paul is saying is, look, let's learn to reorient our attention to God and then respond faithfully to him in these moments, as opposed to allowing our anxieties to drive us, let's, let's put them in their proper place. Yeah. That's what I think it's going to. That's a great, I love that analogy. I'm going to, I got two teenage sons who are learning to drive. So I'm going to remind them, don't look at the mile markers. Don't yeah. Because you're absolutely right. It gets your focus off of the most important thing. And that's, that's one of the things that I try to help with. Because I almost have to, especially with Christians, unpack that a little because they feel almost guilty for having any anxiety. And I need to kind of help them understand, well, actually maybe the anxiety can be a tool. You can leverage it actually to kind of get you back onto focus. Right. Like I think of that, that story in, in, in Daniel, right. Where understandably he is witnessing some things. And I think it's in like chapter seven or so he has this, like, it says like this anxiety, like this significant troubled heart, right. In light of what he is being, what is being revealed to him. Right. Yeah. Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my kind of thing, right. Right. Right. But what I love how you're saying, James, if you keep on looking at chapters eight and forward, when he sees the son of man, right. His engagement with the, with, with who God is in light of the revelations he's given actually brings him back into center. So the anxiety is understandable. In fact, normative in light of what he's seeing. Yep. But if anything, it reorients him to be able to see this other thing, this one, this one who comes out to touch him and engage with the anxiety he's experiencing at that point. So on one level, I'm trying to give some room for people to feel anxiety because sometimes you should, and that's appropriate. Right. Yeah. No, it's interesting. I mean, you mentioned, you know, standing on the edge of a gorge and I think, you know, my wife and I got to go to the cliffs of Moher in Ireland at one point. And they tell you when you come in, they're like, Hey, don't take selfies near the edge. People fall off taking selfies near the edge. And you just think about that. And it's like, what they're really telling you is have a degree of reverence about what you're doing. Like the, there's no fence. There's no wall. There's no anything, right? And so when you're there, you should respect the danger that you're in. Yeah. Right. The potential consequences of not respecting this thing are pretty high. And so there should be a baseline level of anxiety you feel whether you're standing on the cliffs of Moher or like the Grand Canyon or something like that. Like, Hey, don't play tag near the edge. You know, you like consequences may ensue. Yeah, right. And so just have a respect for it, but let that anxiety, that sort of recognition that something bad could happen. Let's let that temper our behavior to some degree. And I think that's the real trick of it. Right. It's that to some degree. Therein lies the rub. Right. Yeah. And that's kind of the other side of it. Right. There are times when the legitimate understandable anxieties of life, relationships, work, whatever tend to then start to become more than manageable. Right. And as clinicians, we start then looking into that area because again, to your point, there's sometimes where I think it's right and appropriate. I like the way that you said it. You should have a healthy respect

Severity, consistency, and time. Severity, consistency, and time. So when it comes to severity, generally I'm looking to see, how is this really kind of impacting your emotional health, right? Is it really deep and profound, prolonged, in terms of how you're constantly thinking and anxious and really engaging with you? Consistency is, is it negatively affecting kind of across your life? Are you feeling this anxiety significantly at work, at home, at church, your buddies on the softball field? Or are you only feeling it when you're at work? Well, in that case, it might just be work that's causing you the anxiety. But when you go home, you don't have any. That's a little more situational than consistent, right? And then we look for essentially time. How long has this been going on? Is this just been in light of a particular thing? A lot of times when I work with clients who are struggling with some of these issues, they're not able to identify like a particular issue, person, situation, but it's just been going on for a while and I just can't shake it. I don't know why it's here, but it's just here. When I start seeing those, and those are kind of what we call the diagnostic criteria for things like generalized anxiety disorder or other anxiety-related disorders, like agoraphobia or social impairment. We start ticking off, okay, this is more than just normal anxiety. This is now getting into what we refer to as clinical levels of anxiety. I want to give space for the normal, but when it starts going really severe and consistent across your life and it's been going on for some time, there may be something else that we need to start engaging with accordingly. When you think about, so the experience of anxiety. So I know what it feels like to have a point of anxiety, right? You know, I don't know, I've seen my daughter get hurt on the lacrosse field, right? And so you're like, oh man, right? And everything starts to run through your head like how bad is it? How long will she be out? Is this gonna, you know, require surgeries? Like, you know, your head just goes there real quick. But then you reel yourself back in, right? And so, yeah, in theory. So when people describe their anxiety to you, in addition to those sort of severity, consistency, and time, how do they describe the experience of it? Is it almost like a script that just won't stop running in their head? Like, is it a, you know, an ongoing set of stories that like goes to the worst case scenario? Like, what would they describe? And the ways that I try to pull this out, because sometimes they don't even have the vocabulary, the lexicon to be able to describe it. So more often than not, where I usually start is physiological, in terms of what are the sensations of your body that you're starting to experience? Sweating, tight chest, sweaty palms. That could be specific to something like what we refer to as a panic disorder, or it could be more generalized. But there's almost always some type of physiological reaction to the anxiety. I usually start there, because it's one of those areas that people can at least articulate to some degree because we're hopefully aware of what's happening physiologically. I then transition that to some more affectional realities, in terms of, okay, when you have those heart palpitations, when your hands are sweating, what are you feeling? Not so much thinking at this moment, because again, that's kind of like another level of engagement, but if you could put to words some of the things you're feeling at this moment, Oh, just distress and real anxiety and panic and worry. And I start helping them work out a vocabulary of it, which then for me kind of gives some clarity and to help them think, okay, what is it that you're feeling anxious and physically attuned to at this moment? Well, my daughter had this huge accident on the lacrosse field, or I was on this bridge, or my work situation. And then they can start articulating, okay, what are the issues that are sort of having it? I generally go that direction because well, I think it gives them some space to understand that there are physiological, there are affectional, emotional, as well as cognitive. And as we know, we're holistic beings, right? All of this comes into play. And those are usually the times I can give them some help to kind of verbalize, give some vocabulary to what it is that they're dealing with. That like you, I may have at a moment when my kid gets hurt or a situation, but when it gets beyond that, these are things that happen sometimes without any prompt. Yeah. Often in times when they're literally just sitting in their office doing nothing and all of a sudden the physical symptoms manifest and the affectional things. And then as you were saying, the script starts going into their head, whether it is a situation or some other realities. And there's nothing, I'm not in any imminent danger, you know, here in my office, unless some of my books start flying off the shelves or something like that. But generally speaking, it's unknown as to why I'm consistently, persistently having this feeling that's affecting my work, it's affecting my relationships, it's affecting my spiritual life, my ministry, my service, like all these areas start coming into play. So I try to use that kind of holistic lens to give them some understanding of what's going on at that point. You know, I mean, I assume, you know, just like you're saying that the mind body connection, I think we've sometimes sort of, I'll just say like demonized problems of the mind in a way that we probably shouldn't have because it's all connected. It's all, you know, it's all chemical processes and, you know, to some degree that that is kind of what it is, right? Our brains are part of our body. It's not like it's some sort of ethereal mess in there. It's, it's an actual physical structure. And so you have these, these physical structures that are interacting. So how do you get at cause and effect in that whole relationship, right? Is it a physical cause that's creating these sort of bad feelings and thoughts to come in? Or is it bad feelings and thoughts that are cycling through and creating a physiological response? Like, do you have to parse that out? Do you, do you even try? Like, it seems so chicken and egg to me. Let me ask you a serious question. 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Which came first, the chicken or the egg? And I'm like, yes, no, maybe. I don't know what the answer is. And to the degree, it's an understandable question that some of my clients have. Some of my students in our graduate program are trying to think, like, how do I help my clients understand the brain physiology, those chemical reactions, and how that affects them? Or is it more cognitive, like their thoughts are causing their physiological? It's a good question, and the answer is honestly, yes. Does your brain chemistry affect your emotional, cognitive realities? Yes. And does your cognitive, emotional realities affect what we often refer to as the neuroplasticity of the brain? Yes. We have clear evidence that it can go both ways, that it's not a singular highway, but it's a bipolar highway in that sense. Both are affecting each other. Because then that gets into the treatment modalities, right? And so at what point, if it is more cognitive, do we just deal with the cognitive? Or if it's more physiological brain chemistry, do we just do medicine? And the research is overwhelming that it's not an either or. In a lot of ways, it should be a both and. Anxiety is one of these disorders that probably has some of the most significant and longitudinal studies connected with it. Meaning, we have a lot of people who struggle with anxiety and have gone through therapy and medication management, and we've been studying this a long time. That's kind of the unicorn in social science studies. If you can get both depth and consistency over a long time, you know, the whole reliability and validity kind of content. And what we found in the research is that there probably is a physiological aspect. And so something like medication management, which I know is a big debate in itself, but it can be helpful, but it's not, if I could,

All pun intended, it's not the magic pill, right? You go into dealing with anxiety and think, if I just take this pill, it'll solve all my problems. That's actually not the way it's designed to be. It can help to some degree, but it's not intended to do everything. On the other hand, does therapy work? Absolutely. We've got tons of research that supports that. But sometimes people are at a physiological level that they can't access the therapy in meaningful ways. And so what if we use a medication management to get them to a level that can then help them engage with the therapy? And we're kind of using all the tools available to us to help people in the kingdom, right? To the degree that I look at both those opportunities, these are the common graces of God. And to the degree that we can use them faithfully, I'll use anything I can in that sense to help people. Yeah, I mean, it's always been strange. I mean, I'd go to the doctor if I had a broken arm, and they would treat me and they'd probably give me some pain meds or something like that, you know? And so I don't, I understand the hang-up on some of this, but I do think we've been very quick to identify anxiety, particularly crippling kinds of anxiety, as a sin problem. And I think we've sort of strayed into the realm of Job's friends, where we're really just giving extremely bad advice at the moment, right? If you're struggling with this, you've obviously sinned. And it's like, well, obviously is a rough word. Like, maybe we should explore it, right? There's obviously things that all of us have to fix in our lives, but we shouldn't just be jumping to this conclusion and saying, this is how the world works. Right, yeah. And often with my Christian clients, particularly, who do have a significant faith perspective, and if they want to go down that road, if they're asking, is there a sin component, I said, maybe. There could be. Like you said with Job's friend, is they didn't ask if there could be, they assumed there is, right? The great thing about their friends, they just sat and wept for seven days. Like, I'm like, what a great friend to be able to do that. Unfortunately, then, after that, they opened their mouths and gave his advice. Right. They shouldn't have laughed after the seven days. And the problem is when we assume that there's some moral component, there could be. Like, clearly when Saul was anxious over David, right, that there's this anxiety that causes him to pull this spear and throw it at him. Okay, yeah, I think there's clearly some moral implications as to why he's feeling this anxiety. And that needs to be dealt with in moral constructs. But in some contexts, that's just not the case, right? And so I think we need to look at a multi-phased approach. That could be sickness, physiological, could be situational, but also could be moral sin. But like most things, it's not like these discrete categories. Oftentimes, I often talk about how with my clients, our lives are not like those TV dinners. Remember those TV dinners that had, like, the sections? Oh, yeah. I remember, like, the meat and the potatoes up here and the peas up here, and they're in these, like, nice little categories. And my OCD-like tendencies are like, this is the best meal ever. But the reality is life's not like that. Life is much more like a bowl of spaghetti, right? And when you start, like, moving something over here about your situation, sometimes that may affect your moral engagement. And sometimes when you start affecting the physiological, it might start engaging with the situational. And it's all combined rather than discrete. And so I think it's wiser for us to look at it as a multi-phased approach that may need to engage with those realities. There was an HBR article that was on leadership and decision-making that sort of come into mind while you're talking about that. They distinguish between complicated contexts and complex contexts. And they use the analogy of a complicated context is like a car. If you know what you're doing with a car, if you're an expert mechanic, you can find a cause and effect. You have to discover it. You got to look. You got to figure it out. But once you get it, it's like all those parts fit together pretty neatly. And, you know, there's only so many ways that they're going to affect one another. Complex context is like – they use the example of a rainforest. And it's like if you do one thing, there's going to be these unintended consequences that you can't predict necessarily that are going to happen as you're moving this piece. Something else is going to happen over here. And so they said instead of, you know, sort of this relatively simple cause and effect where things are discoverable, in a complex context, things really have to emerge. And you've got to, like, take the time to let the solution just kind of come to the surface so you can actually see it and understand what to do and how to do it. That's great. Yeah. And I think that speaks that much more, if not what I'm hoping to do in the counseling session, what I'm hopeful we as Christians can do as a community. It got me thinking, you know, the example of the rainforest. The church, the body of Christ, is kind of like a rainforest, right? There are these intertwined realities, complex constructs that, as Paul would later say, when one suffers, we all suffer. Right. So to the degree that if one is suffering, we all suffer. I think that's actually part of the answer, some of the response on how to help people. Sometimes it does take that time. Sometimes it does. Instead of saying, well, obviously you did this, and this is why you're having the problem, cause and effect. Maybe we just need to give some time, some space. How did Tim Keller say it? The church should be much more like the emergency room waiting room rather than the waiting room for a job interview. At a job interview, everyone's dressed to the nines and looks perfect and doesn't want to present any problems. What if the church was more like the waiting room of an emergency room where you don't care how you look, you don't care how you come across because you're just there to get help. What if our churches, our communities were much more like that where we realize, you know what, I'm struggling, but I want to struggle together. How can I take this anxiety? And again, I do think there are contexts where they may need more professional help in a clinical context to be able to kind of get them to a more functional level. But I look at my job and to some degree of putting myself out of a job, right? I don't think they should have to meet with me long-term because my hope is to get them back into whatever communities they're part of to really flourish within, to continue your analogy, the rainforest of health, because I think that's the best place that they really are going to have to deal with these issues because it's not going to be the first time nor the last time anxiety is going to come up into their life. So what if we give them encouragements, communities that can really help support in the long run as well? As you're working with clients nowadays, I mean, you know, we talk about the context of the body of Christ, right? And I think you and I probably both grew up in a context where church was a different part of our lives. I would say that at the very least. You know, I was at church Sunday mornings always. There weren't sporting events. There weren't, you know, we weren't traveling. You know, we were much more local and home. I think catechism, I grew up Lutheran, so I had Wednesday catechism for a couple of years there in junior high, right? It was just more part of my life. You know, you'd go play basketball with youth group or whatever. It was a tighter knit community and it was a social space that you occupied. Now it's, it doesn't feel like that to me anymore. You know, I haven't done the deep sociological analysis, I suppose, that would justify that claim. But the reality is, I think things have kind of changed. And so if we think about the body of Christ as a context and then we look at what's happened around in the world, I guess my question is, as you're working with folks, as you're teaching students, how much of that context do you address because it seems to, my guess would be that anxiety increases as you get less stability from the communities of which you're a part. Yeah. Yeah. You know, on a couple of fronts, we're always careful not to look at the generations below us and say, whoa, back in my day, we were so much better with, you know, X, Y, and Z. I'm a Gen Xer and I'm sure the baby boomers before me looked at our generation and said, you lazy Gen Xers, to which then now as a Gen Xer. They were wrong, but I mean, they probably did. Right. And so to some degree, yeah, I'm always trying to mitigate my temper. To that, though, I also say the research is compelling. Yeah. The incidences of anxiety and suicidal ideation are all going up and in particular with a younger generation in the last 10 years. If your listeners are interested, there's a really accessible book called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T. He's a moral psychologist out of New York City. He's not a Christian, but his research is compelling on a number of fronts. One of the things he highlights, and other researchers have noted this, in generations like younger millennials, Gen Z, even Gen

One, we've pulled all of our kids in. Whether it be the notion of safety, whether it be the notion of stranger danger or whatever context there is, there is significantly less engagement and allowance for unstructured free play of kids. So to put it in that context, we've essentially kind of pulled our kids in and say, we need to keep you safe from all the evils of the world. But then two, what we did, and for those of you that are listening, maybe not see, I'm holding up my smartphone. And what we did then is we put in the hands of all these kids a device that gives them full and unfettered access to content through social media and other places that significantly increased their anxiety. So we pulled them away from and we put all kinds of barriers to the outside world, but we put no barriers to the online world. And what we've seen is that because of those two activities and height makes a stunning claim where the increase in anxiety is causal to those two actions, not correlational. And for those of you that know the difference, sometimes we can make correlations between things. That doesn't necessarily mean they're connected. Height and his team are actually going the other further way and say, no, we caused this increase in anxiety because we pulled the kids away from play and we gave no boundaries online. That is compelling. The evidence is very clear. And it's across mainly Western contexts here in North America and in Europe. And we're starting to see it develop in other developing nations as well. So I say all of that because the research is forcing us as Christians, those in ministry, those of us in clinical context, we have to deal with those systemic realities that have just so pervaded the fact that most of my kids' friends, my youngest is 13, we've made a decision for all our kids, no phone till high school, no social media until 16. But far and away, the majority of their friends have a full online device that accesses everything with all social media. My kids are the weirdos in that sense. And that's not the norm. So I do think we need to work with families, with schools. How do we start mitigating some of these things that we kind of just open up? COVID kind of exacerbated all this because literally we all had to come inside. And if you're like me with four kids at home, I'm like, here's your iPad. Okay. How do you keep you busy during this time? Daddy's got to stay sane. I've got to stay sane here. And so I realized there are these forces that have kind of pushed us. I keep on thinking of that verse where Paul says, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed. We can either allow the mold to kind of continue to push us down a path that is not helpful, or what if we let the gospel kind of really transform our perspectives that really help us think, okay, how can I think about this holistically, think about it systemically and individually to help our kids and our communities really think kingdom agenda and what that really looks like. To answer your question, yeah, I think we must be thinking about both. Yeah. It's a really difficult, and I mean, I've read The Anxious Generation by Height. I left the book thinking to myself, this almost has to be also influencing older generations. So I'm with you. I don't think any one generation is superior to another. I think we all have our different issues. It's like when my wife go and look at, we think about changing jobs or something, we always say, okay, the grass is not going to be greener. The brown patches are just going to be in a different place. And so what we're trying to do is figure out, are we willing to live with the brown patches in this different place, right? Right. That's good. But I think that, you know, so that's kind of how I think about the generations. But I do look back and, you know, I've showed my kids the PSAs from when I was a kid and it's like, Hey, it's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are? It's like the parents were sitting there going, no. And there's no way for me to know where my children are. I mean, it was just sort of bedlam, but everybody survived or most of us, I suppose, survived and it was okay. But now, you know, we've got, we do have a lot more monitoring that can happen. But I think that as a parent, I think that that has a detrimental effect on me, too. Yeah, that's a great point. Right. Like I can now monitor my children when they drive or something like that. I can watch how fast they're going. I can, you know, I can see them on the phone, like where they are, whatever. Occasionally it's handy, but I really try to just leave it alone because they should have some autonomy. They shouldn't have me looking over their shoulder all the time. And it's just kind of, it can become something for me as a parent where it is like, if I don't know where they are, if I don't know what they're doing, then that's the script that's running in my mind too. I was going to say, right? Then it all starts producing in you that same concern of what you're thinking about with your kids. And now we have multiple generations. Right. It's like the whole thing is, you know, the whole thing is built for us to either be always in the know. Yeah. Or be anxious about not being in the know. Right, right. Yeah. You know, it's a very strange space that we're occupying here. I love your brown grass analogy because, I mean, clearly in past generations, there were concerns, right? Brown patches of a generation, the rates of teenage sexuality and teen pregnancy, the rates of drunk driving, the rates of significance were much higher in past generations than they are today with teenagers. And so on one level, you're like, oh good, we're doing better in these areas. Great. We're down teen pregnancies. We're down drunk driving. Yay, victory. Right. Yes, and what we've decreased here, we've kind of increased in other, the brown grass patches are somewhere else. Right. Because of this technology that we've kind of just imbibed in for all the good it is, right? Technology is not the problem. It's how we may be sometimes uncritically engaging with it, right? This kind of technological gluttony of sorts that, of course, I can use this app to watch every literal step of my kids without kind of considering, wait, what is that doing to my kid? Oh my goodness, what is that doing to me? And recognizing, I mean, this is stuff we've had conversations with parents at schools. The schools here in South Carolina, South Carolina, like many other states, have actually passed legislations where students are no longer able to use their phones from what they're calling bell to bell. Okay. Their phones have to be put away. And oh my, the incredible blowback that the state got, not just from students, but from parents. How will I know if my kid has an emergency? How will I get to them? How will they be able? And I'm not saying those aren't legitimate concerns in the sense that those are thoughts that go through your head. But the prevalence of those issues becoming a reality have been so exacerbated by social media and just media in general that our thought is, I need to have 24-7 access to my kids if that happens. And so all of those constructs have just been so skewed in some significant ways that, yeah, I wonder to what degree we need to kind of use the tools, the technologies, as again, a common grace of God, but be a little more discerning and recognize it's not just, maybe it's helpful for this little moment, but can we get not just a longitudinal, but a kingdom vision, which tends to then necessitates me to kind of pull them back a little. How am I actually helping my kids develop something of greater perspective? Sometimes that means I might need to be a little more willing to let go, but for something bigger, something better. Yeah. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Well, when you're coaching people, I mean, this context is really strange, different than what I think either you or I grew up with. How do you coach people with just baseline anxiety, let's say, right? Like what we've called in this episode like normal anxiety, just your everyday, run-of-the-mill, I occasionally get worried about stuff sort of anxiety.

How would you sort of coach them? And then what steps would you provide for people who are kind of struggling with anxiety on a more persistent basis, though maybe it doesn't raise to the level of clinically problematic? Yeah, yeah, no. I think for not just those that I work with, but I know for myself, those moments of anxiety that come up, I want to be able to actually let them be okay to sit in it for a moment. I think our society is so quick to remove the, my air quotes are up here, bad emotions that we miss the opportunities for what the emotion is trying to do at the moment. If I can use a corollary to something like sadness or what we often call depression, there's times you should feel sad. The question is, are you willing to let that emotion help you kind of sit in it for a moment and maybe, like the psalmist, just lament over the situation? If there's a moment that you're feeling an anxiety over a person, a situation, I can even kind of get a little philosophical. There's an ontological truth there that I don't want them to miss. Plantinga has this great way of saying it. The title of his book is Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, right? The vandalism of shalom. And there's something that I don't want to miss in those moments that if you're feeling anxious, it's because something's not the way it's supposed to be. We're in this context. We're on this side of the cross, thank God, literally, because we have a redemptive hope, but we're not quite there at the end of the story yet. Our eschatology is yet to. We believe the King is the King. Jesus Christ is Lord, and yet it's not finished. The story's not complete. And if you're feeling that, feel the feels for a moment. But the hope is, let it push you. Like when I read the Psalms, and they're in the midst of the, like my enemies surround me, strong bulls of Bashan surround me. I don't like, talk about, talk about anxiety, understandably. And yet it pushes the psalmist to look to the hills. Where does my hope come from? Let the anxiety push you to hope. But you gotta feel it to move you towards that, right? And then the hope is that there are those truths that you can rely on, right? Whether it is of people of faith, like you and myself, where we do know that the community of saints around us, the Holy Spirit within us, the word of God in front of us, the eschatological hope in front of us, like there's all these truths of our faith that can help us go beyond the anxiety, feel it, but to give us hope as well. That to me is one of the things I'm constantly trying to think through. I think for most of us, when those moments of anxiety kind of come up, if that kind of makes sense. It does. I mean, I think it's really a good word because I think my tendency is just when things get hard, you push harder, right? You don't really sit in it that often. It's like, well, just get over it, right? Do the work, you know, take those emotions and shove them down deep where they belong, right? I mean, I think that's always been sort of my go-to reaction to it. It's like, yeah, I don't have time to be anxious right now, or I don't have time to be sad, or I don't have time to be whatever. It's like, there's stuff that needs to be taken care of. There's people that need to be taken care of, so let me just do that. But I think that as I've, especially as I've raised kids, right? You kind of like- Freezing out, right? Yeah, they probably need a few minutes to just cry about this, or they need to be sad for a minute. And my wife's really good at reminding me about that. She's like, they don't have to be tough and gritty constantly. It's okay for them to feel bad occasionally. And I'm like, okay, yeah, that's fair. I wouldn't say that it's my go-to. Like, I don't love it, but I get it. I get it. So I think it's great advice. And I think it can be a both-hand, not an either-or, right? Do I want my kids to develop some grit and endurance and perseverance in the midst of whatever is making them anxious? Yeah. Like, anxiety is a great place to visit, but a terrible place to live. Yeah. So to the degree that we're helping them live in that moment, but get beyond that moment, right? That it's intended to push you so you can both feel the feels, as it were, and recognize there is something we can move towards. It's that dialectic, right? That it's kind of neither or, but as Chesterton often said, it's the tension of both-and. Yeah. I think because we bifurcated so much in our context, just letting them feel the realities of both in that moment, I think is really helpful. Now, I realize to your second part of your question, sometimes they just can't get out of this, right? They're so consumed by those thoughts and those emotions and the physiological realities of it that it's just so negatively impacting their social life, their work life, their ministry, whatever spheres they're involved in. This is where I think it's so helpful, both kind of an internal check, close people within my life, and just again, for those that are of faith perspective, the body of Christ. I need, my wife has the fancy car that has the blind spot checker on it. So if you put the thing on and if there's a car there that's in my blind spot, it'll move me back over, right? Yeah. I use that as an analogy. I need blind spot checkers in my life. I need other people because, newsflash, my blind spots I'm blind to. It's the blind spot. Yeah, yeah. I can't see them. I can't see them. Exactly. And I need other people. I need to develop relationships with other people who can speak that truth and say, dude, there's something going on here. What can we do to help support, whether it be in the community of the church, whether it is more clinical help because it is such negatively affecting all those other aspects in your life. Hopefully that work is done before the moment happens, but I would say even if it does happen, be willing to still reach out, right? I think as you kind of mentioned, sometimes our perspective is I'll just kind of stuff it down. I'll deal with it myself. My individualistic meritocracy kind of comes to the forefront. Like I will work this out myself. Yes, there's sometimes you should do that. And there's sometimes, right? Paul says in Galatians, there's times I need to carry my own, but there's other times that some of those birds are just too big. I need others. And the way I help people understand when you need others is when it's starting to significantly negatively affect all those other spheres of life. You know, it kind of brings around a question. So I've read a couple of things like Samuel Wells has a book on ethics called Improvisation. And in there he talks about the value of preparation and can't remember exactly which war he was talking about, but he says, you know, that the battles of this particular war were won and lost on the playing fields of Eaton. And Eaton was this big boarding school where the, I guess the British kids would go and they, you know, sort of learn discipline and they'd get in shape. They would do all this preparation so that by the time they're going off to war, they have a certain level of, I don't know, we could call it character and physical fitness and discipline and ability to follow orders and, you know, ability to work as a team that when they get into these crisis points, it gets a little easier. Stanley Hauerwas tends to talk about it in a similar way. Although I love his line. He talks about this in community of character. He's like, there's no ethic. There's no, you know, sort of moral framework that's going to make teenagers behave in the backseat of a car. And so like, you know, he gives a little bit more realistic portrayal of that. But when you think about anxiety, especially like the baseline level or, you know, sort of these non-clinical levels, right? How important do you think it actually is for people to sort of prepare for the moment of anxiety before the moment of anxiety actually happens? And, you know, having that sort of cadence, support structure, discipline, all those different things, like how would you counsel somebody in that range? Or is that even, does that even enter your mind? Do you know what I'm saying? Like, is that even an important thing to think about? To answer the second question, yes, it's absolutely because we want to facilitate skills and abilities that are far beyond the clinical hour that, because this is going to happen again. Life is going to happen in different situations. We want to give them skills to build so that you can be that much more ready the next time, right? When you were giving that issue with Eden and, you know, the things they were doing, there's another quote that came to mind. Roxborough, he was a headmaster of an English school and he said, our school, we want to cultivate men who would be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck. And I thought, that's the preparatory idea of that, right? So that when you're at a dance, you're a gentleman. You know how to ask a lady to engage in a social activity. And if you're at a shipwreck...

You know how to make a fire and how to lash together some sticks and create. Now, one is a little more controlled than the other. Right. But his hope is that these young boys will be ready for both. Yeah. And the time we have with them now in this school is intended to do that. I think there's something about that that I want to encourage both with my clients, with my students as they develop, most definitely with my kids, and most surely with myself, that it's in these moments where things aren't at, you know, level 10 or level 11, depending on your spinal tap reference. If you're trying to think through the kind of boring normative things, that's the place for you to start developing and growing and cultivating these characteristics that, more often than not, are both my responsibility individually and in the context of a community that's led by the truth, hopefully, of the gospel and my kingdom agenda, right? It's as one of my professors in graduate school says, God moves amongst the casseroles of life. Casseroles are not the most exciting, most glamorous meals, but God's there. And it's such an analogy for how he's in those everyday moments of life. How can we step into that perspective so that when those other realities come to play, when the strong bulls of Asia surround me, I can still look to the hills. David remembered those truths when he was probably out in the fields with a bunch of boring sheep, right? All those truths. So that when it did happen, he had something to pull from, right? He had resources that he had developed over time that he can use at the moment. That's most definitely something we need to be encouraging with individuals too. Yeah. Okay. Well, any last thoughts here, man? I mean, we're getting close to the end of the episode here. Any last thoughts on anxiety you want to share? I mean, I think we've covered a lot of ground, but any last pearls of wisdom? No, I think this is, again, such an important issue. I think a lot of your listeners, I appreciate their desire to kind of step in it, because I do think it's one of the most pressing mental health, if not just issues in culture today. Coming this side of the pandemic, we're just now starting to scratch the research in terms of the effects of what that pandemic did and the effects of it individually, societally, across the world. So I don't see this issue going away anytime soon in terms of how we kind of deal with it. So I appreciate podcasts like this and discussions where, to that degree, how can we be intentional about thinking about it now so that we can prepare and engage with this, but with the hopes of not just kind of getting over it. I'm always trying to think kingdom vision. I'm always trying to think, okay, how does this open me up to something beyond my little reality? Does God care about me? Does he love me and have a wonderful plan for my life? Yes. I want to encourage that. But his plan for our lives is actually so much bigger than us, right? That's the joy of this, that actually, when we're not the center of the story, which anxiety tends to do, anxiety tends to focus me on me. What if we use anxiety to actually help open us up to see something about me, but connected to something much bigger than me and to the degree that I want to help people see that, that that's actually where sustained joy comes from, right? I think that that's a great opportunity. So I want to recognize the real hurt and struggle of anxiety, but I want to give a much bigger vision of how God is using it for his glory and for our joy. I love that man. This is very cool. I really appreciate the conversation and the insight and just happy to have you back on the show. Ben's always a pleasure. Always a great joy, James. Thanks so much. Yep. Hey, thanks everybody for listening. I'll probably put up a couple of links in the show notes, books we've mentioned, that kind of stuff. And I'll put a link to CIU as well to Ben's page, so you can kind of see more about him. But just encourage you to, I don't know, hopefully be encouraged by this conversation and to stop thinking about anxiety as the boogeyman and just recognizing that it's one of those things that we are going to deal with in a fallen world. Sometimes it's actually not the worst thing on the planet. Other times it's probably overwhelming us a little more than it should and we need to think about it. But hopefully we've given you a little bit more of a balanced approach to anxiety and ways you can think about it. So thanks for sticking in with us to the end of the episode here and we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Have a good one, everybody. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. I'm best-selling author John Seidel, and I'm the Christian who became an alcoholic, not the other way around. Through the power of Jesus, I got sober, and now I'm sharing both my story and the stories of others just like me, along with helpful interviews from trauma, faith, and addiction recovery experts. If you're a fan of messy sanctification and powerful stories, join me on the Confessions of a Christian Alcoholic podcast on Life Audio or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Let's get radically vulnerable.