Anti-anxiety Grace

There are birds at the feeders, chickadees. They flit, nervous. I watch the light in the trees, the way it falls across the walls. Across the calendar and to-do lists, and I try to remember to breathe.

John Calvin and I, we both remember the year we were four.

The year I was four, my sister was crushed under the wheels of a truck in our driveway. That is my first memory, the day Aimee was killed.

Fears have formed me.

John Calvin’s mother died the year he was four. Scholar and historian William Bouwsma describes Calvin as “a singularly anxious man.”^a Calvin buried all three babies born to him and his wife. He said he found in the Psalms “all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated.”^b The man understood fear.

Clouds have skirted in heavy from the west. The walls in the kitchen have fallen gray and silent. Joshua’s playing it quietly, up and down the piano this morning, the Music Box Dancer. A friend laid out in great detail this weekend how the economy is about to implode. Chronic illness flares. Teenagers ask big questions. I keep smoothing out calendar pages, pushing things back. How do you remember how to dance?

What is the answer to anxiety? Joshua’s playing so sure, the house lilting, tilting with happiness. That’s what Calvin wrote. “The stability of the world depends on this rejoicing of God in his works.” And again, “If on earth, such praise of God does not come to pass, … then the whole order of nature will be thrown into confusion.”^c

Our worlds reel unless we rejoice. A song of thanks steadies everything.

The answer to anxiety is the adoration of Christ.

My Bible lays open beside my gratitude journal. There are piano lessons today and already a little brother’s in tears, word-bruised by a big brother, and sisters are arguing loud over whose turn it is to make the bed, and I’ve snapped, exasperated, ugly, at a whining middle kid who doesn’t want to stomp through snow and cold to get eggs from the henhouse. Anxiety can wear anger’s mask. Fear of failing, of falling, of falling behind, it can make us fierce. Life can be messy before nine in the morning.

Joshua’s tripping on notes. The thermometer out on the tree, its mercury is sluggish and heavy. Hard frost lines windows. How to breathe and dance?

“We are cold when it comes to rejoicing in God!” wrote Calvin. “Hence, we need to exercise ourselves in it and employ all our senses in it — our feet, our hands, our arms and all the rest — that they all might serve in the worship of God and so magnify Him.”^d

That’s it. When exasperation mounts, exercise our song, employ all our senses.

I use my hand, pick up the pen, and write down a few more gifts — employ the senses to see and magnify God in that gratitude journal.

I warm. Joshua’s practicing the chorus. Exercise. Employ. Exalt.

The answer to anxiety is always to exalt Christ.

The chickadees scuttle at the feeder and fly, warmth on the wing. I watch from the window. A child presses into me and the window and we have time. There is wonder. Everything absorbs into thanksgiving.

Calvin said that. “If we compare a hawk with the residue of the whole world, it is nothing. And yet if so small a portion of God’s work ought to ravish us and amaze us, what ought all his works do when we come to the full numbering of them?”^e

Ravish and amaze? Did Calvin number too? Come to the full numbering, the one thousand, the endless numbering of the infinite grace of God? My pen is on the counter.

Joshua’s playing perfect joy now, the Music Box Dancer, finding all the right notes, exercising all this exaltation. And I’m thinking no one sees me in the kitchen spinning around, exercising feet and hands and arms and all the rest, smiling happiness anyways.

Dancing brave and unafraid anyways.

Holy Father, John Calvin said that the stability of the world depends on the rejoicing in Your works. Doesn’t my world also stabilize when I rejoice in Your works? I’m echoing Calvin today: “What ought all Your works do when we come to the full numbering of them?” I too might dance. Cause me to remember it today, Lord: adore Christ to combat anxiety.