Speaking in front of people can be intimidating…and dangerous.  After over 20 years of speaking to groups large and small, my heart rate still turns up a notch.  My head still starts to ache.  There might even be a little perspiration going on…

And in our context, cards are passed out to those listening so that they can give their two cents, encouraging or critical.  And no one in our community is more critical than Mr. and Mrs. No Name.  They really know how to bring it.

All of which creates a level of anxiety I have come to welcome.

Because there is this palpable energy to anxiety and fear. I receive it…internalize it…and then redirect it.  Not as anxiety again.  No one wants that reflected.  I redirect this energy as passion, purpose, joy.  If this energy is going to descend on me, best to use it for a better purpose.

Because if we hold onto our grief, to our fear, to our anxiety, it can become a toxin, not only to us, but to those around us.  If we are not intentional about what we do with this energy, we’ll simply allow it to consume us, and soon enough we’ll end up passing it on to others.

The word for “worry” and “anxious” in the ancient Greek is this: merimnao. Jesus ties it to our fear of mortality.  In particular, he uses it of anxiety over whether or not we’ll be able to sustain ourselves, concluding with this, “Can any one of you by worrying (merimnao) add a single hour to his life?”

Or to your spouse’s life?  Or to your kids’?

Worry is that thing that can paralyze us when we wonder how much time we have left.

This toxin has the ability to freeze us up, to bury us, to turn us inward to the point of being unable to perceive anything beyond ourselves.

Donald Miller, in his book “Blue Like Jazz”, put it this way, 

” …I was addicted to myself.  All I thought about was myself.  The only thing I really cared about was myself.  I had very little concept of love, altruism, or sacrifice.  I discovered that my mind was like a radio that picks up only one station, the one that plays me: K- DON, all Don, all the time.”

Fear, worry, anxiety, grief has the capacity to magnify this in us.  And then rebroadcast.

And this is where I love the other use of this word merimnao in the ancient Greek.  In a few other places, it means something completely different.  This is how one early Christian uses the word, “But God has put the body (His people) together…so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern (merimnao) for each other.”

Or again in a letter to a “body” in Philippi: “I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon…who will show genuine concern (merimnao) for your welfare.”

Notice how these early followers of Jesus understood this word.  When concern is turned too much inward, when we are too consumed with our own junk, merimnao is a poison to us.  But when turned outward toward others, it becomes a new kind of energy that has the capacity to create healing and joy.

We all have experienced this.  There is a different ethos we receive between being served at a restaurant and sharing a meal with others in our home.  One tends to bring out criticism (how long is this going to take?), the other generosity.  There is a difference between buying ourselves a pair of jeans (how will this make me look?), and buying a pair of jeans for a child in need.

Something different happens in our spirit that enriches our soil.

This is what I am trying to do with my grief and “pre-grief”, or fear.  I cannot control what I get to keep.  Merimnao, or anxiety, is that thing that happens in me when I am trying to keep and protect what, in the end, I do not have the power to keep and protect.

But I can control what I give.  I can offer merimnao, genuine concern, by stepping into the life of another, who also likely feels the same fear and anxiety I do.  And when I do this, a new energy is given…and received. Suddenly there is a joy, a peace, a Presence at work that only moments before was veiled.

This is what I can do when it feels like there is nothing I can do.