Advice for the Anxious

During my usual reading time today I encountered the same Psalm in two different books. Hmmm... Maybe God has something for me to learn here.

The first book is one I have referenced before: Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest by Ed Welch. His belief is that 'worriers should be experts in a handful of passages,' and Psalm 27 is one of them. It starts with this famous opening:

The Lord is my strength and my salvation -
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life -
of whom shall I be afraid?

Welch, in commenting on this portion of the Psalm, writes the following:

"Let's say you are playing Who Wants to be a Millionaire and you are stumped by a math question. One of your lifelines is The Math Whiz, so you have no worries." That makes sense. He continues, "Perhaps you are lost in the Australian Outback, but your traveling companion is Crocodile Dundee. Even if you don't know him, his name brings calm." Again, that seems reasonable. Then he comes back to the point: "When you are afraid, you call out to the Lord who is light, deliverance, and strength. Even better, he is 'my light,' 'my salvation,' and 'my stronghold,' and all is well."

All these words bring comfort: strength is preferable to weakness, salvation is better than bondage, and stronghold sounds like a safe place of stable protection. Welch states that this Psalm is "thoroughly God-centered. The focus is not so much on my deliverance but my Deliverer. Only when I know more of God will my faith grow."

He then offers a point of practical theology. When we still feel anxious, we should pray, but with the right priority and focus: "When we pray we usually jump right in with requests. The homework: to postpone them until you have remembered the character of God." That's great advice.

The second book today was.... oh wait, maybe I should l split this into two parts - and get two days of posts out of this. Brilliant!

In the meantime, I'm going off to play "Who Wants to be a Non-Worrier?" Care to join me? We have some great lifelines available to us. :-)