Fear & Anxiety
My anxiety is high most days and I am seeing a therapist and taking medication for it. Part of me wonders whether that means my faith is not enough. Does it?
“I cried unto the LORD with my voice; with my voice unto the LORD did I make my supplication. I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble. When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then thou knewest my path. In the way wherein I walked have they privily laid a snare for me.”
David wrote this from a cave while running for his life, and he describes his spirit as overwhelmed within him. What he does next is significant: he pours out his complaint and declares his trouble before God, and says that when his spirit was overwhelmed, God knew his path. Being overwhelmed is not presented as a lapse in his relationship with God. It is the condition in which the relationship is being conducted.
“And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.”
Jesus answers criticism about the company he keeps by saying that those who are well do not need a physician, but those who are sick do. Luke, who records this, was himself a doctor by trade, and Paul refers to him that way. Nothing in the Gospels treats the use of ordinary means for healing as a shortfall of faith. The image assumes physicians exist and that needing one is not a moral failure.
A path forward
Keep the treatment and keep the prayer. Ask God for help through the therapy and the medication rather than instead of them, and tell your therapist that your faith matters to you.
Find one person at church who can hold this with you honestly. Anxiety that has to be hidden on Sundays gets heavier, not lighter.
Watch for all-or-nothing thinking about progress. A high anxiety day after a good week is a fluctuation, not a relapse, and treating it as failure makes the next day worse.
Closing verse
“He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”
- Psalm 147:3
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