The Other Cheek is running “tasters” from books you might like to read these holidays. Nikki Florence Thompson’s “Fight, Flight and Faith is her story of being a Christian living with anxiety. Musician Nathan Tasker says of Thompson’s story in a foreword “God must love her very much to entrust her with this life story, in all its devastating grief that she so tenderly carries and so generously shares.”
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‘Why all the shoulds, Nikki?’ he said on almost a sigh, a shrug in his voice. ‘Why should you be better by now. What do you think?’ He sipped his coffee again and waited.
‘Well, because I’m a Christian, of course!’ I burst out quickly on top of his words, as if it were the most self-evident thing in the world.
I talked on, quoting the Bible at the Wise Man like missiles I sent across the space between us. I knew he was a believer himself; he often spoke at churches and had even written a book that included discussion of Jesus’ approach to busyness and stress. I’d read it, but perhaps I’d forgotten the message it contained, or not understood it. I thought he’d be on my side. I filed through all the passages I knew about anxiety and worry, everything I could think of, and hurled them into the air across the room at him, like scrunched up pieces of paper, tests I’d failed, and attempted with the force of them to stop the rocking of his chair in its tracks. Do not worry, trust in God, perfect love drives out fear; each another mark against me, evidence of my always erring, of my need for urgent repair, of my fear and lack of faith.
‘Can a Christian not feel unpleasant emotions?’ he answered, this time a little more animated, as he warmed up to his topic. ‘Do you think the disciples never felt fear? The prophets never experienced nerves?’
He began to quote the Bible back at me, less aggressively than I had done, but no less solidly. Actually, he told me stories, one of the best languages I know for conveying truth. He told me about all the failed heroes, stumbling disciples and used-by-God messes that populated the pages of my favourite, but not uncomplicated, book. His words were engaging and
catching as he took his time to catalogue the high maintenance, dysfunctional, up and down crowd of God’s people. There was Paul, evangelist to the gentiles, who stumbled often as he spoke, bold on the page, but not in person, who once required a blinding light to take off his blinkers and get his attention. There was Peter, who denied his Saviour not one but three times, while he warmed his hands by a fire in his Lord’s darkest hour, but who nonetheless carried on to become the Rock. There was Moses, God’s man for the job of leading his chosen nation out of slavery, who stuttered so much that he needed his brother, Aaron, to speak for him. Then, of course, there was King David, who wrote the psalms with a poet’s high sensitivity but committed catastrophic blunders worthy of B-grade soap operas. And who afterwards sank into sorrow, into a pit of despair, perhaps even into depression.
All of these, the Wise Man told me, feared, and trembled, and fell down; but did this make them any less loved, any less cared for by God? If anything, the inverse was true. They were all, in different ways, powerfully used.
But at the same time, they experienced powerful emotions.
What were the psalms of lament but God not only permitting but giving us the very language, the building block of words, to describe the darkness of this life, the Wise Man challenged me, offered me, counselled me.
But even then, he wasn’t finished. He waited while I took a sip of water, taking it all in.
‘And what about Jesus?’ he said at last.
‘Did Jesus feel anxiety?’ I said, a little dismayed at the possible act of irreverence we were communally committing.
‘Did he? You tell me?’
‘Well, he was perfect,’ I exclaimed. ‘Yes.’
‘So…’
‘What about the tears?’ The Wise Man spoke the words across the room and this time he had the missile. It was powerful.
I hadn’t thought about the tears, or if I had, never quite like this. ‘Jesus cried when he saw Mary and Martha’s grief at losing their brother,’ I said aloud, letting the words take root inside me, picturing it. A double dose of sisterly sorrow, shared by the Saviour.
He didn’t just cry in that moment.
Jesus wept.
Loudly. Passionately. Violently.
Apparently ‘wept’ isn’t even a forceful enough word to encapsulate
Jesus’ outpouring at that moment. Translators describe it as something beyond even sobbing, something as visceral as snorting.
And again, the night before his crucifixion, in the garden, he cried, his tears mixed with blood.
‘With blood,’ the Wise Man emphasised. ‘Those were no ordinary tears.’
Jesus might not have experienced GAD [generalised anxiety disorder] or PD [panic disorder], but he definitely felt anguish, mental pain, dark emotions. He allowed himself to feel things. And he let his feelings out. In tears. In weeping. In blood. Sorrow to the point of death. Because some things are worthy of tears. Even the tears of God in flesh.
‘Do you think anxiety is sin?’ the Wise Man asked me, no longer rocking, this time leaning in close.
‘I don’t know.’
He paused. I thought. I thought about Jesus again. And about the pain. And about the tears. I thought about brokenness, and I thought about healing. I thought about the cross.
Fight,Flight and Faith is available from the Wandering Bookseller
Publisher: Ark House $24.95