Last year, my wife, Krista, and I sat in LAX waiting to board a plane for a much-needed vacation to Hawaii. I was physically present but emotionally stranded. I felt isolated and alone on an imaginary island of “what if” scenarios surrounded by the shark-infested waters of my circling fears. Mentally, I was still sixty miles to the south, back at home, grinding over all the recent changes in my life. Though I was looking forward to our vacation—sleeping in, taking long walks with Krista, checking out new surf spots on Kauai—I was anything but anchored in the present. At the rate I was going, I’d need six months to unwind.
I pulled out my cell phone and called a close friend, a mentor who had helped me navigate the emotional storms and challenges I’d been through in the past few years. My head was in a literal fog from all the pressure I felt inside. (When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I call it “foggy head.”) And the previous two months had been marked by emotional exhaustion and increasing levels of anxiety as my heart reacted to change going on in both my inner and outer worlds. I had just completed a new book and was emotionally spent. The book’s completion took six weeks longer than anticipated. And then edits.And more edits. On top of that, the church where I served was going through layoffs and its third reorganization in three years. I saw good friends lose their jobs. I was also initiating the start of a new nonprofit organization designed to minister to the spiritual development and creative vision of artists in the church. My fear of failure was screaming at me like a wild monkey in the trees (the only inhabitants of my island except me).
Nobody was putting pressure on me but me. The convergence of exhaustion, grief, change, and new risks made me feel as if my heart was being lobbed into a tree chipper. It was everything I could do to duck from the ear-splitting screams of my fears and all the monkey crap they were hurling my way. Exhausted, I was on the verge of messing up a really good Hawaiian vacation. I was headed to the islands, an oasis of palm trees and white sandy beaches, but that’s not what my heart needed most. I was longing for peace. Longing for rest. Longing for a sense of wholeness that, at this moment, seemed completely out of reach for how disintegrated I felt.
Milan, my friend, and I talked. He encouraged me to let go of “the need to know.”
So much of my anxiety was tied to my need to know how everything was going to turn out. Would I still have a job at church when I returned at the end of the summer? With all the departmental changes going on, would I have the same position? Should I jump ship and throw myself full-time into this new nonprofit? What if the nonprofit failed and I was out of both jobs? What if? What if? What if?
The sharks were circling and the monkeys reaching for another handful.
All I had to do was let go, but letting go meant grasping the invisible, intangible concepts of faith, trust, and hope. Easier said than done.
Whose Are You?
“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity,” wrote Thomas Merton, the late Trappist monk and spiritual writer. “It is the fruit of unanswered questions.”
My anxiety was the fruit of unanswered questions about my future and the refusal to trust in the goodness of God, who has proven his faithfulness and unconditional love throughout my life.
Practical considerations aside, I was asking an entirely wrong set of questions. Much like the fear-filled Peter looking at the wind and crashing waves after Jesus asked him to step out of the boat, I had taken my eyes off what was really true about my life. I wanted answers to the unknown future instead of trusting that the most important questions had already been answered. Like Peter, I was sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss of my worries and uncertainties. I was looking at Joey instead of Jesus. I was staring at the invisible wind of my imaginary fears, all of them illusions masking the truth of what was real in my life.
If you were to do a preflight checklist of my life, you’d probably ask, “What in the heck are you so worried about?” The most important questions—Does God love me? Does God accept me? Does my life have a clear purpose? Do I have a meaningful relationship with my wife and kids? Do I have deep, lasting friendships?—had already been answered. All I needed to do now was live from the center of these truths. Sounds good on paper, but for me, this is really hard to do at times.
Our hearts bear the marks of brokenness that reflect the brokenness Christ bore on the cross on our behalf. The truth of our existence is that we are more broken than bulletproof. Our hearts and lives are not always what they appear. We are far more content with the shallow facades of appearances than with a vibrant life pocked with the scars of authentic human struggle. And beneath the brokenness, there is something deeper inside of us. Something truer about ourselves than we ever imagined. Deep inside the very core of our heart is a longing. An incessant longing that won’t go away. It’s a longing that demands an answer. Left unanswered, the longing accesses what is readily available in our heart, in most cases our brokenness, to get our attention. In my case, the longing buried itself deep inside my heart and tried to speak to me through my anxiety.
My anxiety, the very thing I thought was destroying me, was this masked longing trying to get my attention in order to free me. But the road to freedom can be a very circuitous route. It often takes many laps around the same issue or problem before we begin to formulate the real question our heart is asking.
So, if anxiety is the fruit of unanswered questions, what then are the questions? When did the questions first go unanswered? Long ago, when and where were the seeds of unanswered questions first planted that are just now bearing the fruit of anxiety, doubt, and fear?
For many of us, the alienation and anxiety we experience in our lives and relationships begin far before we even know how to articulate the questions. Long before we even know we have a longing. A baby left alone a minute or so too long experiences the terrifying reality of being left alone—what do they call it?—separation anxiety? We are made for relationship, and the absence of a loving presence, a little too much and a little too long, can stamp the indelible stain of separation on our hearts for the rest of our lives. In other cases, screaming voices and fighting parents leave young children ducking for cover. A teenager’s parents get divorced and the teenager blames himself. As children, we felt conflict. Even if we lived in the best of homes, we sensed times of tension. And the questions began to form. Do I belong? Do I have a place and a voice here? Am I loved for just being me or is there another standard? Just what are the unwritten rules? Who is safe? Who can I trust?
Then we go to school. That’s where the real tension begins to build. School is a place where we are encouraged to ask questions about the three Rs, but our hearts are silently asking much more important questions. Questions that will ultimately influence who we become as adults. Do I belong? Am I loved unconditionally? Will people like me? Will people accept me for who I am? Will I be chosen? Will I make the team? School is where our hearts learn very quickly that the world is not safe. School is not all bad, of course, because it is a place of forming friendships, a place of learning and discovery. But we also learn how to form alliances, build defenses, and hunker down to avoid the shelling of taunting and teasing. Every playground has its own rules of warfare, and each is like a microcosm of warring nations.
I’m convinced that the longing in our hearts goes back to the places where we spent time as kids. Think of a classroom, a park, a playground, an athletic field, a college classroom, or the home where you grew up. Then name a time or event in connection with this place when you felt chosen or left out, when you felt loved or hated, when you felt accepted or rejected. It will take all of 1.3 seconds for that experience to flip on the radar screen of your heart. Can you see it?
Let that image stay there for a moment or two. You can name names. Describe the setting. Stay in that place long enough, and your heart will go to the movies of your memory as if it happened just a moment or two ago. You can begin to feel feelings and thoughts and emotions that you thought had long since disappeared. This is the place where the real questions of our lives were formed. This is where and when we discovered if we were chosen, loved, and accepted, or not chosen, unloved, and rejected.
One night in the grief recovery class I lead, a woman named Jennifer shared one of her earliest memories of rejection and humiliation. As a young girl, Jennifer was shy and afraid of speaking in front of others. When she was in the third grade, her teacher asked her to stand in front of class and read out loud. Standard stuff for elementary classes, but what Jennifer experienced left an ugly brand on her heart that remains to this day.
Nervous, Jennifer began to read from a book while all the other students looked on. She came upon the word island and pronounced it just as it looks, “is-land” instead of saying the word with a silent s. When the class heard her mistake, they roared with laughter. Jennifer stood silent as waves of shame and rejection hit her one after the other. The teacher did nothing. Jennifer went back to her seat alone and humiliated, the seed of rejection firmly planted in her heart.
Ever since we were children, our hearts have longed to belong. This is the longing. Whether it was our first day of kindergarten, our first tryout, or a move into a new neighborhood, our hearts wanted to feel welcomed. To be one of the gang. We have all longed to be longed for. Our hearts have always wanted to be wanted by others,but what all of us have experienced, in different ways, is rejection, like Jennifer.
Many of us can honestly look at our lives and say we’ve experienced both realities. We made the swim team, but we didn’t make the volleyball team. Our parents loved us, but we got our rear kicked at the bike rack. We were accepted to college but rejected by the sorority or fraternity we wanted. We’ve been chosen and not chosen. Loved and unloved. Accepted and rejected. Nobody gets through childhood
unscathed. I believe with all my heart that all of our worry and hand-wringing, strivings and failings, our sins, our addictions, our consummate need for approval and affirmation, our ridiculous talk about living a “balanced life” (which is code for saying that what we really want is control), all of our grasping for more, the compulsive, seemingly elusive search for happiness in a chaotic world, is rooted not in our longing for who we are but whose we are.
In the search for identity, we ask, “Who am I?” But we are asking the wrong question. The essence of spiritual identity is knowing in our heart of hearts whose we are. If we don’t know this, our lives are
filled with the fruit of unanswered questions...
