A Guide to Giving Up
How to quit anxiety and give up your life to get it back
When I lend a listening ear to the problems of the people I care for it’s clear that most of the anxiety, stress, and overload they experience is the yoke of their own self imposed standards and life choices. The call is coming from inside the house and it’s spooky indeed.
I often relate that I too used to be type A, used to have the accompanying anxiety, and used to exhibit OCD… until I quit. My father modeled OCD for me growing up and I caught it for a while until one day I decided to quit. It really was as simple as choosing that I wasn’t going to serve dictatorial compulsions anymore. That wasn’t going to be my life and that was that but giving up low grade chronic anxiety proved to be more a process of renewing the mind.
Let’s talk about some beliefs and behaviors which cause an inflammation of anxiety in life. Here’s how to quit anxiety and give up your life to get it back.
(Give up) Fighting against reality
I often witness anxiety due to fighting against reality and wishing that circumstances were other than they are. It’s always a waste of emotional resources.
A student came to me recently short circuiting about an upcoming exam and all the ways she would inevitably fall short and wishing she could be released from the obligation. I told her that the exam was happening. That she should accept that fact and that I was sure she could do it and do it well but that the first step was acceptance.
See if she thinks she’s getting out of it that means she’s nurturing that hope rather than accepting and preparing for what’s to come. Accept the truth of what is happening in your life right now.
(Give up) Trying to control others or your immediate circumstances
Much inner turmoil is created by wishing other people were different and trying to control them in one way or another. But if you’re a Christian you should know that no amount of external coaxing, coercion, or dictates can change someone. If anything it only causes that person to harden their heart against you. Wisdom says that the only person you have control over is you and that if you want to change the world you have to start with yourself.
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. Matthew 7:3-5
Now if I want breakthrough in a situation with another person I pray about it and put it in God’s hands first. Changing hearts is not a power that I hold but I know someone who does.
(Give up) Clinging to your life
Another problem that I see in those around me is the desperate curation of so called “my life”. I should have a boyfriend or husband already, I should have this promotion, I should have a baby by now, etc. When you’re so absorbed with yourself and the way your life isn’t how you want it to be you’re less concerned with how you can make other peoples lives better for them. It’s better for you (and everyone around you) when you go through life asking how you can doula others. This includes those you loathe!
And have you ever thought that maybe it’s not actually your life?!
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20
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Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. Matthew 16:24
Stop clinging to “your” life! It’s giving desperate and daughters of the King aren’t desperate. We’re favored.
(Give up) Inviting the vampire in
I’ll keep this short but be honest with yourself. How have you invited in the things that are sucking the life out of you? Did you marry that man when deep down you knew it wasn’t right? Did your unbridled tongue or actions cause a cascade of unfortunate events in your life? Did you disobey your conscience and then blame God for the consequences? Did you surround yourself with fools and expect the fruit of wisdom? Are you sure it’s not your own sloth, pride, or vices plaguing you? Perhaps you need to revoke access to those demons who walked through doors you or your parents opened…
The vampire can be evicted and peace restored but first he must be seen for what he is.
(Give up) Believing what you think
Have you ever considered that it’s a terrible idea to believe everything that you think or to assume that the thoughts you have are yours? Humans are frequency transceivers — we’re constantly receiving and emitting thought frequencies to and from our minds. Living in the world means we’re constantly receiving worldly and often demonic frequencies but being “not of the world” means that we have the Holy Spirit to filter out all the garbage. It means that we’re aware of spiritual warfare and the need to take every thought captive because we wrestle not against flesh and blood.
For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 2 Corinthians 10:3-5
Sometimes anxiety is the state of someone who allows any ole homeless reprobate thought to take up residence in their mind without resistance. It’s the state of someone who is passive and doesn’t take authority over their mind with The Truth.
(Give up) Comparison and seeking the approval of man
I recently read Delivered From the Elements of the World by Peter Leithart. In the following passage he eloquently suggests that the human instinct to strive and grasp for power and position is the result of living kata sarka meaning according to the flesh. Those who live according to the spirit have peace by fact that their power and position are secured — though not by their own efforts.
More abstractly, we can infer a profound and profoundly clever inversion in Paul’s theology of flesh and Spirit. Flesh is weak; Paul himself preached to the Galatians in “weakness of flesh” (Gal 4:13). But the works that flesh produces are all expressions of strength. We have been toying with that paradox throughout this book: Weak flesh compensates for weakness by displays of strength; fearful flesh deflects fear by acts of bravado, by exhibitions of the libido dominandi. Flesh becomes rebellious flesh when it rebels against creatureliness and seeks to be as God. Flesh is sinful flesh, we can say, because it refuses to accept its own fleshliness. The Spirit permits flesh to be flesh, and in that sense those who are ek tou pneumatos (from the spirit) are more fleshly than those who walk kata sarka (according the the flesh). In the Spirit, people who are in flesh can boast of their weakness, their afflictions, their wounds, because those who are in the Spirit know that their power is not from flesh but from God. Mimicking the faith of Abraham, those who walk by the Spirit look to the God who raises the dead and speaks of things that are not as though they were. Like Solomon in Ecclesiastes, those who walk by the Spirit rejoice in a world of vapor, exult in their wispy weakness, where every achievement is temporary and every life ends in death. The Spirit came so human beings can become comfortable in our own flesh.
This suggests that the institutional patterns of the church are, in a sense, more weak and beggarly than the elements (the law and ordinances) were. When Christians started meeting to break bread from house to house, they could look up the hill and see the impressive temple complex, gleaming on the Temple Mount, apparently immovable for all eternity. It took an act of faith to say that the temple was childish and the little gatherings of disciples were mature. It took an act of spiritual bravado to say that the little gatherings of disciples were the thing of which the temple was only a shadowy figure. But that was the bravado of the early church. They claimed that the base metals of the old world had, by the spiritual alchemy of Easter and Pentecost, been translated into the gold of the new. All the elements were still there, but they had been altered beyond recognition. We see this pattern of thought everywhere in Paul’s letters: the patterns of stoicheic life are not lost but transposed into a new key. Early Jewish Christians continued to worship in the temple, but the sanctity of the temple was packing up and moving elsewhere. The only holy space that Paul acknowledges is the holy space of human beings and human communities, those that are consecrated as temples by the indwelling Spirit of Jesus.
p. 226
Amidst our worldly efforts to promote ourselves in the eyes of men do we ever stop and wonder what position God created us to fill and that perhaps it is a more humble one than we imagined for ourselves (maybe it’s greater but you’re sabotaging it?) Self imposed striving and grasping and the turmoil and chaos which often accompany are not the MO of God and indicate the need for surrender and spiritual reorientation.
C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:
Progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
(Give up) Identifying with Martha
Two thousand years later Christian women still identify primarily with Martha and the radical implications of Galatians 3:28-29 remain misunderstood. Being the disciple of a prophet and sitting at the feet of one such as Jesus would’ve been considered a man’s space. Martha’s from every corner of the internet extol the righteousness of women returning to the kitchen, making babies, and abdicating “men’s spaces” and there is nothing wrong with these things, in truth they are good, but the problem arises when these become works by which women grasp for approval, status, and salvation. Grasping for salvation by works belies a lack of faith that you’ve already obtained that which you seek. The kingdom of God is within you. Mary understood that simply BEing with Jesus was greater than anything she could do for Him — for what could she truly offer God other than her devotion?
The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. Acts 17:24-25
Women across the world are tackling their lives from a fleshly place influenced by productivity culture and, as Peter Leithart discuss in depth in his book, the stoicheia tou kosmou meaning elements of the world. The elements of the world are the elementary principles of laws and ordinances mixed with the doctrines and commandments of men which, self imposed, lead to self defeat and bondage.
For women operating from the flesh, under these elementary principals, can look like performing from an inner place of masculinity (DOing) rather than embodying femininity (BEing) resulting in stress, depletion, and dis-ease. As Jesus’ bride you’re called to embody spiritual femininity. This means resting in the peace, protection, provision, and love of your husband, especially when you are “worried about many things.”
Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. Luke 10:41-42
In this life you can lose everything. The dwelling you’ve just cleaned top to bottom will be a mess in three hours, the job you worked your whole life for snatched away, even your husband, children, and health are not yours (see Job) and can be lost. Everything you build in this life is temporary.
Unless the Lord builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it;
Unless the Lord guards the city,
The watchman stays awake in vain. Psalm 127:1
There is only one eternal thing that if aspired to won’t be taken away from us. This is who Mary prioritized. May we be women who choose that better thing. Amen.