For most of my adult life, I’ve been a master of anxiety. I’m working to become a master of peace.
Without realizing it, I became a student of anxiety as a child. I grew up in a home with a mom who learned anxiety in a post–World War II midwestern orphanage. From ages four to fourteen, she, together with her older brother and sister, learned the ways of worry. And growing up, I sat at her feet. Am I blaming my mother for my worries? No; I’m no victim. I’m simply telling my story.
We all have our reasons for wrestling with worry or anxiety. But our reasons are not insurmountable. As followers of the Prince of Peace, we can place ourselves at his feet to learn to live in his way of peace. We can learn peace for our hearts and minds, peace in our relationships (as far as it depends on us), peace in our vocational life, and peace in our perspective about the future. This peace is not dependent on things going the way we like. It does not require that everything happen the way we prefer. The way of peace that Jesus leads us into is a way that begins from within us in relationship with him. It does not require peaceful circumstances to survive.
So this book is not a theoretical research project. It isn’t a message I’m preparing for others. Writing this book has been a necessary personal quest. Anxiety has, at times, diminished me, hindered me, even paralyzed me—it really has. I’m writing as a fellow student and not a master. I have been on a journey to discover the way of peace.
Anxiety has been on the rise for a while. A study by the National Institutes of Health indicates that anxiety steadily increased in the adult population from 2008 to 2018. In that same time frame, anxiety doubled among eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old young adults.1 But in the first year of the pandemic, the World Health Organization measured a 25 percent increase in anxiety and depression worldwide.2
We all had different experiences of anxiety during the global pandemic. My first was sitting on a plane in Delhi, India, in the early morning hours of a mid-February Saturday in 2020. Covid-19 was just beginning to hit our news feeds, but it felt mostly an “out there” issue for me at the time.
As our scheduled departure time came and went, I noticed flight attendants conferencing in the first-class galley. After more than an hour delay, the flight purser announced that there was a passenger with flu-like symptoms whom they were assessing, who needed to be deplaned before we could depart. Anxiety!
We were told that if we brought that passenger with us back to the States, the whole plane load of us would be quarantined for two weeks; the first cruise ship had recently been quarantined in Japan with
