I remember my first panic attack. I was nine years old and on the way home from a Girl Scout retreat to a horse camp when we pulled the van over to let a girl throw up on the side of the road. Just one quick glance of the sick girl, and I burst into tears—shaking all over and begging my mom to get me home as quickly as possible.

My parents, with the best intentions of course, dealt with my anxious spells as if each one were in isolation and not a marker of a child with an anxiety disorder.

It wasn’t until my twenties when the prospect of moving cross-country for a professorship plunged me into such a deep season of anxiety that concerned my new husband enough to urge me to get help. It was then that I began my first of many stints in therapy for what I now know is an anxiety disorder.

My anxiety toolbox

Though experience and years of therapy, I now have a set of tools for helping to manage anxiety symptoms:

• Comforting verses of God’s tender care to quell the incessant worry
• Yoga poses when physical anxiety takes hold
• A low-dose daily mediation that reduces my struggle significantly
• Prayers of surrender when the semblance of control is driving my fear
• A chapter in One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp, entitled “how will he not also?”

It is the latter that I lean into today. Until my dear friend Hilary handed me a copy of One Thousand Gifts, I had never considered that gratitude may offer a release from fear.

Ann’s revelation: build trust with gratitude

Ann’s seminal work, One Thousand Gifts, details the powerful practice of eucharisteo, or giving thanks to God in all situations, and she dedicates the entire 8th chapter to gratitude in the face of fear.

Through a lens of her own fearful reaction to the financial problems on her family hog farm, Ann discovers that the missing link between fear and gratitude is trust.

How can we embrace trust when our human hearts tend toward fear?

In answer to that very question, Ann has a revelation one morning. She is driving past the trigger of her anxiety—the barn that houses the pigs that are bleeding her family’s finances dry. In the midst of a gratitude meditation, she passed the barn and for once, her fear was absent.

And so she concludes: “Thanks is what builds trust” (150).

Her epiphany on that snow-blanketed morning is “We can give thanks in everything because there’s a good God leading, working all things into good. It is safe to trust!”(155).

It is safe to trust.  It is healthy to trust. We cannot feel fully grateful and fully fearful in the same instance: one will supersede the other.

Gratitude for gifts in the present releases fear of the unknown

I find that much of my anxiety has its roots in control. I become fearful when I am faced with the uncontrollable, the unknown. Jesus knew that we humans project fear onto the unknown when he reminded us worry not for tomorrow (Matthew 6:34).

Ann echoes the importance of staying grateful in the moment as a way to stave off worries of future moments: “He fed us. We ate. We filled. We swept up the crumbs. So He lays us down to sleep. Trust tucks in. He has blessed today. Will He not bless again tomorrow?” (158).

Ann’s conclusion reminds me of the famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “All I have seen teaches me to trust in the Creator for all I have not seen.” Let us see His gifts.  Let us give thanks for how He cares for us on this very day, and we will build in ourselves the assurance that He will continue to care for us.

An important qualification about fear

Sadly, even in Christian circles, you will hear people blame mental health struggles solely on a lack of faith or a poor prayer life.

Ann and I know this to be a dangerous falsehood: “True, certainly, there are organic, biological causes to anxiety, and there may certainly be underlying chemical issues that warrant medication. I have filled prescriptions. This has been right. All anxiety is not spiritual”(148-49.).

Biological anxiety is a result of being born imperfect in an imperfect, fallen world. And the good news for me and other anxious types is that one day, I will leave my broken body in this broken world and live in perfect peace with our Lord.

Nevertheless, let us distinguish between the anxiety we can’t eliminate and that we can.

Friend, if you struggle with anxiety like I do, consider the power of adapting a regular practice of gratitude: “This living a lifestyle of intentional gratitude became an unintentional test in the trustworthiness of God—and in counting blessings I stumbled upon the way out of fear.” (Voskamp 151).

Meet Adelaide Mitchell

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Begin Within is a series to inspire a year-round lifestyle of gratitude that will impact not only your own life, but the lives of your neighbors as well. Gratitude is a theme we talk about often around here because it ties so closely into other missional living rhythms. Practicing gratitude reminds to keep our hearts soft and expectant and our eyes open. Therefore, the more we embrace gratitude, the easier it becomes to truly see our neighbors and where we can join what God is already doing in our neighborhoods.

If you would like to contribute to Begin Within, you can find the submission guidelines here.

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If you would like to cultivate rhythms in addition to gratitude that will empower you live on mission in your neighborhood, check out Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. This small book will help you make a big impact in your neighborhood as you learn to let missional living flow from the inside out. Get the 30-day missional living challenge free when you purchase the book.