home | contact

Message from Pastor Marty

Are you anxious?

By Pastor Peter Marty

It is hard to agree on exactly what makes contemporary American life so different from times past. Romanticizing the past never does much for me. I start to yawn when a person rolls out those predictable words: “Everybody used to work hard. There were no slackers. Unshakable moral standards were honored. Litter didn’t exist. Everybody prayed. Etc.” We all know this is more nostalgia and wishful thinking than true reality.

One difference between past and present culture that seems fair to claim, though, is this: In earlier times, work was (in general) more physically demanding and less anxiety producing. If the sheep needed shearing, or the stove wood needed chopping, or the hay needed bundling, one knew when the day’s work was complete. In contrast, the complexity of modern life rarely allows us to know when things are actually “done.” Open-ended obligations keep rolling in. Extensive task lists of unconnected varieties accumulate. The personal and professional lives of individuals merge. Countless demands and opportunities from outside the household summon.

Those who use e-mail know that it never quits. I can check my inbox at midnight, and clear away, reply to, or store all the unchecked messages I did not get to earlier in the day. By 7 a.m., there are 20 new messages waiting to be read and dealt with. Our cell phones ring at any moment of the day. Reminders from all quarters inform us of what we “should be doing.” You can plug the particulars of your life into any of these sentences. This much is true: The modern condition is to be chronically anxious, and often through no fault that is solely our own.

What makes this anxiety so perplexing to solve is a quirk of the human mind. We can’t quite remember all things… and yet we can’t quite forget them either. (This reminds me of a witty piece of nonsensical advice given to Augustana College graduates last weekend during the commencement address: “Since you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, I suggest you do!”) Who can possibly remember everything they are supposed to do in a given week? Between job and personal life, friends and self, “shoulds” and “want-tos,” there is no way to keep track without a calendar. If you prize sanity or relationships, you do not hold everything you are supposed to remember inside your head.

Yet, by some perverse and mean trick of the brain, we can’t quite forget either. Even if we keep a meticulous datebook, our brain keeps reminding us of things we haven’t done, or things we should have done. We suddenly recall promises we have not kept, or people we said we’d “get back to.” Most frustratingly, our minds alert us to these things at very inopportune times. Like in the middle of another conversation. Or while driving in tense traffic. Or at 2 a.m.

When this foible of the human brain awakens me at 2 a.m., I turn to a scrap of paper on the bedside stand to write down reminding words in the pitch dark. Reading the chicken-scratch in the morning is hopeless. So usually I just grab my cell phone with its lighted keypad and leave a message on my office voicemail. Susan loves to be jolted out of a deep dream in order to hear her husband whispering on a cell phone in the dark. “Who are you talking to?” she mutters. When I say “myself,” she assumes it’s all part of her dream and falls right back asleep.

Jesus offers beautiful words when he pleads with us to end our anxiousness (Matthew 6:25-34). It’s poetry worth coming back to time and again. But have you ever noticed that after his long set of admonitions about releasing worry, his last thought remains so thoroughly candid? “Each day has enough trouble of its own,” he says. In other words, each of us will have a substantial load of concerns every day. Anxiety-producing realities will not disappear. The way we handle them is what distinguishes whether we have a life… or not.

Peter W. Marty, senior pastor,

  ::