There was a time when everyone of us just started out in this world. We were young and helpless, and the world was a confusing place: there was this space of language that we could enter into and communicate with our neighbors; there were good tasting food and bad tasting food, and sometimes the bad tasting ones end up tasting good; we met friends of the same age that we were free to help or hurt in a terrifyingly infinite number of ways and mixtures of those ways; people disagreed with each other about what was the right thing to do, and told us to do this or that, or asked us why we should do this or that before we were able to think through all the scenarios or accept their definitions; people (sadly, sometimes our parents) shamed us for not knowing something or being able to do something, such as math or what a certain word meant, and somehow shamed us with no room for grace out of their good intentions; there were these mysterious concepts called “fashion” and “respect” and “moral” and “decency” that everyone talked about matter-of-factly but could never explain what they mean or why it should mean what they mean.

The whole world was already there, and it hit us like a brick, or emotionlessly and uncaringly pushed us along like a moving wall (or several moving walls pushing us in one direction and another the next moment) from childhood to adulthood, all while we were still figuring out the world itself. And the wall constantly hurt us. There was that anxious question nagging at the back of our heads: “When will I finally get a steady hold on the world? When can I start to make things better for myself and do what I want or finally be free of everyone else’s nagging?” Or maybe it is just an anxious feeling about something, but we don’t know exactly what, and the fact that we don’t know what exactly is causing the anxiety or don’t even have a framework to understand that very anxiety terrifies us one step further. It is the anxiety of all anxieties, the primordial anxiety. That kind of anxiety is angst. We experienced round one since infancy. Then we experienced round two when the hormones kicked in during our adolescence. We thought it would end when we became adults, but that was round three. And maybe we experience a round four in the form of a middle-age crisis. Our whole life is one of angst. How should we deal with this angst?

First, we must not give angst all the power. Yes, angst did come to us as a first experience, even an all-embracing experience that is there in every single corner of life. That does not mean that angst therefore controls every aspect of our lives. Jesus talks about the finitude of angst or all the things that can cause us angst:

Matt. 6:34   “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Jesus cut angst down to the length of “today.” Do not inflate angst to something bigger than today, to today and tomorrow, to “this month,” or even to eternity. Do not make angst into some kind of all-powerful god that has the ultimate say.

Second, let God be God:

Phil. 4:6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

Let God kill angst for you. Let angst bring you closer to the only person that can solve it. Then you will have not wasted that angst.