Emphasis Preaching Journal

Intense anxiety can cripple us. Agoraphobia is a growing problem around us -- agoraphobia being an intense, irrational fear of leaving a well-defined area, such as one's home or immediate neighborhood. During a recent television program a woman told her story of having the opportunity to live in one of the most exciting cities in the world for two and a half years, but she did not experience much of the city or its sights. She suffered panic-anxiety attacks in this new place, became agoraphobic, and rarely saw anything outside her apartment building and the route to her psychiatrist. Moving back home, new drugs and therapy helped her overcome her phobias, but she regretted the lost opportunities her anxieties had cost her. Sometimes people of faith become spiritual agoraphobics. They have so much anxiety about the devil prowling around that they limit their lives to well-defined areas where they feel they will be safe from the trials and temptations of this world. It is easy to be faithful in familiar places like our church or prayer closet, but we are afraid if we stretch our faith beyond familiar boundaries that we will find nothing there. Elizabeth Achtemeier points out that as the church struggles with an ever more complicated society, it builds a bigger and bigger bureaucracy to buffer us from the world. The advice from scripture is not to avoid anxiety, but to cast it on Christ who will help us resist, stand fast, and make the best of the challenges and opportunities life brings our way.
-- Olson