Your peace is more important than your to-do list
And why I genuinely love panic attacks… at least the mini ones
Do you guys get body pain when you stress?
This started happening to me about ten years ago. I would get this feeling in my throat like I was gonna cry, even though I wasn’t sad— it’s like a tightening. I noticed it came not only when I was stressing about something, but when I was just overwhelmed in general, even with good feelings.
This great Catholic therapist I saw several years after this started happening told me my throat thing was a “mini panic attack.” This is one of the most helpful insights a therapist has ever given to me.1
It not only helped define what my heart and mind were doing in order to create this terrible feeling in my throat, but it also gave me the answer.2
It goes like this:
Cas, you are panicking. Panic is irrational. Panic is what animals do when they a predator comes running at them. Panic is thoughtless reaction.
So here is the solution to the problem: your beliefs have derailed. You think you are trusting God about this or that, but your body is calling B.S. It’s time to address the things you already know you are stressing about.
And if that sounds too simplistic or heavy handed to you, please see the note below for more on this.3
Through the last ten years of dealing with my “old friends” (as Mr. Bennett from Pride and Prejudice called his wife’s twitchy nerves), my experience with these tiny, annoying attacks has ebbed and flowed.4 Sometimes I go very long stretches without encountering them and vice versa. It used to really center in my throat but now it does other things. Sometimes the middle of my torso will feel nervy and off. Right now it has morphed to right side upper chest tightness. During corona it manifested as a heart flutter. Fun stuff.
Believe it or not, I have actually grown to appreciate these mini panic attacks. Not in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way, but in an instructive way. Pain is an excellent teacher. Whenever I feel my body shifting into “Let’s take all our worry out on Cas’s body” mode, I know I need to reorient myself. I know I need change. And because that therapist exposed this stress pain for what it actually is, I am able to know definitively where to start dealing with it: at the place in my heart where I am not trusting God. I am very, very grateful for my mini panic attacks and I mean that.
So as I was feeling the chest tightness whilst dropping the kids off at their respective schools this morning, I had an epiphany about my panicky pain and what I’m supposed to do with it.
I had just finished reading a fellow Substacker’s post about God tenderly feeding and providing rest for worn out Elijah in 1 Kings 19 when he panic-fled from murderous Queen Jezebel. She writes:
We see here how God cares for our spirits THROUGH our bodies, the importance of honoring our bodies’ many needs, the holy work of caring for our feeble bodies.
(Emphasis hers)
So it hit me while I was driving home with both pain in my chest and visions of God caring for Elijah in my head, that we as the children of The Lord of Peace— Yahweh Shalom— have the right to reach out for that Shalom whenever the waters start to close over us.5
No. Not the right: the DUTY.
God’s heart towards the holistic nature of our health (body, mind, soul) is best seen in His command to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.6 The fact that Sabbath rest is grouped in with the Ten Commandments shows us that as least as far as God is concerned, intentionally taking time out of our lives to rest and reorient our hearts towards Him is just as important as not killing other people or stealing their partners. Think about that.
Just like all the other Ten Commandments, there is personal responsibility in our enacting the mandate to rest. What I mean by this is if you kill someone, for instance, you have no one to blame but yourself. You broke the command to not kill and you will experience major consequences because of it. You are personally responsible for your actions towards others: this is the heart behind 6 of the 10 commandments.
But then when it comes to, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy,” we somehow think we have no part to play in making that Sabbath rest happen in our lives. All of a sudden we are victims of life’s demands. We expect God to make it easy for us to remember that Sabbath and if it’s not easy, we give up. Funny, that logic doesn’t work very well when we start talking about the other 9 commandments… “it wasn’t easy NOT to steal so I just went ahead and stole…” Yeah, that doesn’t track.
Remember when Jesus said, “The Sabbath is for man, not man for the Sabbath?” In one sentence Jesus takes the Sabbath out of the cold realm of a religious command (which is where the Pharisees wanted it) and brings it down to the practical ground level of the heart behind it: that we humans are very much OK with destroying ourselves with ceaseless work and our joyful, loving God does not want that for His people.7 Put bluntly, refusing to take God up on His offer of Sabbath rest means you are sinning not only against God’s command, but against yourself. And sinning against yourself is still sin, because your body (and all that goes with it) is not only God’s creation that He owns, but His temple.8
You are responsible for your actions towards others and your are responsible for your actions towards yourself.
Yes, the Sabbath is a call to set aside time to worship God. But when the Pharisees took that too far— when they took our humanity out of it— Jesus called them out on it. The Sabbath is a dance between God and man. Between “right worship” (I can hear the Reform people at my church hyperventilating over this point so there you go, my intense lovelies), and right living.
If we belong to this God of peace and healing and rest, then why do we think we are doing Him any favors by showing the world just how broken and stressed out we can become in His service? By assuming we need to hold the world up on our shoulders all the time, we call Him a liar and we rip what little faith we have left into shreds.
“Rest because God said so” actually takes a fair bit of humility.9 We can’t rest until we humble ourselves in front of our God who provides. Rest flies in the face of human pride because it requires us to boldly step down from all the things *we* think we need to do. When we do this we prove (mostly to ourselves) that we were never the ones holding our lives up in the first place, and this is a good thing.10
What’s beautiful about the Sabbath command is God knows our rest and peace is complete while we are with Him and ONLY while we are with Him. So he mandated it, the same way some couples mandate a weekly or monthly date night. Consistent date nights are not a bummer or a burden and God demanding we take an ever-loving break and be with Him at the expense of getting other things done is not a bummer or burden either.
So anyway, here’s the point. And I’m sorry for how crazy this post feels but that’s kinda where I’m at right now.
We have already been given the permission to rest that we ache for, just like we already know murder and theft is wrong.
God gave the concept of Sabbath to us in the Ten Commandments, He gave it to us in Jesus taking away all our death and shame on the cross, and He gives it to us in every moment He is with us, every promise of “all things will work together for good”, all 365 “fear nots” in the Bible,” and every “in the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.”
And it’s our responsibility to grab ahold of it. If I steal from my neighbor, I am guilty of sin. If I grind myself into powder in the sight of a God who has mandated my rest, I am also guilty of sin, just towards myself this time.
My chest feels tight (or insert your own stress symptoms here) because I have used worldly demands as an excuse to forego the purpose of my life, which is to fall headlong into the loving care and provision of God, and I know it. When this apostate-esque heart state is heaped on top of raising the kids and doing all the house stuff, it’s simply awful. It’s striving, you guys: doing something in your own strength and then wondering why you feel like crap at the end of it.
Well, I’ve decided it’s time to reorient.
I’m gonna address this stress and faithless striving before God, just as my tutors—the mini panic attacks— have taught me. I’m going to stare my own weary spirit in the eyes and demand she collapse into the rest created for her before the foundation of the world. I’m going to demand my birthright as an adopted daughter of God Himself by speaking Sabbath rest over my internal enemies. I’m going to take personal responsibility for my end of the command to rest and I’m going to choose stillness, in the same sense of the word that Psalm 46:10 does:
Be still and know that I am God, I will be exalted among the nations…
The Hebrew meaning for the word “still” there is, “To sink, relax, let drop.” Gesenius’s Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon specifically translates this exact usage as, “Leave off your own attempts and know that I am God.” Whew. I don’t know about you, but that phrase hits some kind of conviction bullseye in my soul.
How can you reorient yourself around your strong Abba Father today?
Is there something you can let drop right this moment that you shouldn’t be carrying around in the first place?
Can our bravery lead us to the parts of our hearts that are strained to the point of breaking so we can convince them the exact thing they long to do— to sink, relax, let drop— is afforded them right now by the work of our wonderful God for us?11
It is our right, it is our duty and it is God’s literal command to do this exact thing.
We have a lot of work to do, ladies. But not the type you think. We need to do the hardest thing in the world: we need to choose rest while living on cursed ground. If you’re a SAHM like me, we need to choose rest while we stay home to raise kids despite inflation messing our budgets up. We need to choose rest by faith because that’s the only place we’ll ever find it, but thankfully that means it will only ever be one belief reorienting shift away.
The Ten Commandments tell us to not murder our neighbor, and they also tell us it is not our fate to die by the sword of workaholism, no matter how noble our reasoning is for doing so.
The Ten Commandments tell us not to steal from others, and they also tell us God does not want us to steal rest from our bodies and spirits.
If we don’t murder, and we don’t steal because He told us not to, may we also claim our due peace and rest by the same obedient logic.
Our work in this world is to rest.
Why? Because He said so. That should be enough reason to do so.
So much more helpful than what this young, male, new-agey “Christian” therapist said to me one time about my frustration with my kids. This man didn’t have children and he goes, “Whenever you feel like you want to explode at your kids just count to ten and breathe.” Sure, buddy. Nice of you to speak into something so inadequately that it’s like that old Jim Gaffigan joke about how “easy” yoga is: “Simply take the ball of your foot and place it on the small of your back.”
This may not be everyone’s answer, but it is definitely mine.
I believe in treating people who struggle with gentleness and understanding. But when we are talking about struggling with anxiety, things change for me. This is a bigger conversation than this blog post can afford, but especially as Christians, we need to treat anxiety a little more aggressively than other mental maladies. We need to call anxiety what it is: faithlessness. Anxiety is future oriented. It is irrational fear about things that haven’t happened yet and may never happen. This mean it is completely based on beliefs and false ones at that. The sooner those of us who struggle with anxiety can admit the problem is our lack of trust in God, the sooner we can heal from it.
“Mr. Bennett, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.”
“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.”
YAHWEH-SHALOM [yah-way-shah-lohm]: "The Lord Our Peace" (Judges 6:24) – the name given by Gideon to the altar he built after the Angel of the Lord assured him he would not die as he thought he would after seeing Him. SOURCE.
When I talk about Sabbath rest, I am not just talking about the day once a week when we should rest and seek God, but a state of mind wherein one is filled with enough trust in God’s way of handling things that there is no longer a need to stress and strive after them. I believe, just like Jesus said in John 16:33, that we have the opportunity to live in Sabbath rest at all times if we only let ourselves sink into that deep trust in God.
“Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” Also “It is vain for you to rise up early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat— for He grants sleep to those he loves.” Psalm 127:2. I love how he says it’s vain to do this. Meaning you are wasting your time and energy because God is already planning on providing for you. Striving is a waste of time.
See 1 Peter 5:6-7
“Our rest is a weapon against the oppression of man’s obsession to control things.” -Josh Garrels
Isaiah 26:3-4: You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for in YAH, the Lord is everlasting strength. NKJV
I finally had a chance to finish reading this today love (yes, I see the irony). I feel like it's good timing in light of my break down last night and your rough morning today. Thank you for the inspiration to value and honor God's commanded rest to His worship, my health, and the health of all those that I interact with.
The fact that Sabbath rest is grouped in with the Ten Commandments shows us that as least as far as God is concerned, intentionally taking time out of our lives to rest and reorient our hearts towards Him is just as important as not killing other people or stealing their partners. Think about that. - whew, what an absolute word! And thank you so much for the shout out! ♥️