Unload Your Anxiety

“Casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.” 1 Peter 5:7 (ESV)

Anxiety has the potential to cause us to lose perspective. When we are anxious, butterflies become helicopters. When we are anxious, grasshoppers become giants. Anxiety demands emotional fuel that depletes our passion and distorts our vision. The confetti of anxiety is applied with the spray paint of unrealistic expectations, overcommitment, and lack of margin. Where do you go when you are drowning in the liquid of anxiety?

Our tendency is to subdue our anxiety by covering up our pain with a cascade of calories or sprinting into the fast lane of excessive busyness. We seek to divert the pain by suppressing our current reality with the blanket of escape. There is a much better option! God’s way is always the best way!

God did not create you to be a wagon of worry. Unload your anxiety. Choose to run to God in prayer. Decide to unpack the heavy load you are bearing. Release your regrets. Dump your doubts and disappointments. Cry out to God in prayer in brokenness and humility and acknowledge your desperate need to cast all your anxiety on Him. God cares for you and cares about every intricate detail of your life. He intimately knows the burdens you are bearing and the concerns you are carrying.

Write on a sheet of paper or type on your computer or cell phone a list of the specific items consuming your emotional energy. It helps me to see in print what is generating anxiety in my life. Once I bring these items into the light, they lose their bite. Then I unload each item out of the cargo area of my life and place them at the feet of Jesus in prayer.

What do you need to unload? What do you need to release? As Dr. Johnny Hunt says, “Anything over your head is beneath His feet.”

Following Jesus Every Day,

Stephen Trammell