Sunday Night Fever: The Worst Scriptures for Curing Anxiety... and yet

I call it my Sunday Night Fever-- that feeling of angst that begins to settle in to the base of your throat and works itself deep into your belly. You may even get a little hot or queasy. Sometimes you aren't even able to pinpoint exactly what triggered it. Performance anxiety over the coming week? Feeling trapped in a job you can't decide if you love or hate depending on the mood of your students, administration, and hormones? Fear of a hurdle you are going to be facing in the next few days? Whatever the reason, it falls on you like a thick, suffocating blanket of anxiety. It isn't always cerebral, but it is very, very real.

When this happens to me each week, I lock myself in my room, open up my Bible, and begin to read. You'd think all the previous posts about God's peace would encourage me, but, to be honest, the novelty of peace wore off a few days ago (I think the decline began with the popcorn incident and it's been a rapid descent ever since). And so I went to the scriptures to scrounge up some encouragement for tomorrow morning and for some peace tonight. Unfortunately, I have been reading the scriptures straight through for the past year. This month I'm on Jeremiah. NOT a very uplifting book. Why, oh why didn't I appreciate the Psalms more when I was there? Now the legalist in me is making it very difficult for me to move on to another book before I finish the fifty-some-odd chapters of Jeremiah. But even if I wanted to skip ahead, I'd only land in Lamentations. Not exactly trading up. And after that, it's straight downhill from there.... Disgruntled Ezekiel, Apocalyptic Daniel, Whore-Marrying Hosea, then the poor, abused Joel, Amos, & Obediah. Next comes disobedient, water-logged Jonah, Micah, Nahum, and Habakkuk and all those other prophets declaring doom and gloom on Israel. And how many sermons have you even heard on Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, or Malachi? If they are preached from, it's because the pastor found the ONE verse in the whole thing that has any sort of positive spin.

And yet, perhaps the point here is to help us feel like Israel did-- Desperate for a Messiah. So sick of famine, darkness, and sword that we are watching the horizon for our coming King. And he would enter with a bang, wouldn't he? We say that the birth of Jesus is "calm...bright...silent," but you can't muddle through the last half of the Old Testament and tell me the birth of Christ was anything less than the long-awaited, magnificent arrival of the King and the ushering in of His kingdom.

And looking back, all those prophets do actually hint toward this. They certainly don't edit their despairing news to Israel, but in the last moment, they sweep in with verses like:

• For I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you a hope and a future (Jer. 29:11). Notice that the plans are to come and not yet fully realized, but the direction is always toward the Messiah.
• I will deliver this people from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. Where, O death, are your plagues? Where, O grave, is your destruction? (Hosea 13:14). It may be in the future tense ("will"), but it's a promise that would come full circle through Christ's defeat of death on the cross and arrive centuries later in Paul's letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:55 Where, O Death, where is your sting?).

And my personal favorite from the prophets:

• The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing (Zeph. 3:17).

So tomorrow, my circumstances will not have changed. Pressures, mistakes, and expectations will be lurking around each corner. But if I've learned nothing from the prophets, I've learned this: 

We live in expectation of our Messiah. We look beyond this week to the horizon where the kingdom will be fully realized and we will be face-to-face with our long-awaited King. And where will our crowns be that we are earning through our labors for the kingdom this week? Where else but cast at the feet of Jesus where they belong.